Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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For DeepMind, the emergence of the new headquarters is symbolic of a new chapter for the company as it turns its research heft and compute power to try to understand, among other things, the building blocks of organic life. In so doing, the company hopes to make breakthroughs in medicine and other disciplines that will significantly impact progress in a number of fields. “Our mission should be one of the most fascinating journeys in science,” Hassabis says. “We’re trying to build a cathedral to scientific endeavour.”

DeepMind’s AI has beaten chess grandmasters and Go champions. But founder and CEO Demis Hassabis now has his sights set on bigger, real-world problems that could change lives. First up: protein folding.

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My regular readers appreciate the fact that NASA is partnering with a number of commercial space businesses to permanently expand the human frontier into cis-Lunar space. While $20 billion in federal funding drives NASA’s amazing programs, the agency doesn’t get that money without strong public support. NASA has also long been supported by the National Space Society, a group founded by Werner von Braun. I’m proud to represent NSS as their Vice President of Space Development and to have chaired their International Space Development Conference this year. I’m also a huge fan of the Moon Village Association, which is helping to pave an international path for lunar settlement. The Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative, which I direct at USC, hosted both those groups in a fantastic event last year. I’m excited to note that we will bring in the Mars Society this fall. That organization, founded by Robert Zubrin, leads the push for our next step, colonizing the Red Planet. You may however, be less familiar with the small group of aspirational space visionaries already working on conquering the stars, or with Tau Zero, the foundation dedicated to achieving that most audacious goal.

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Don’t worry, this was a planned end for a tiny satellite that has been a huge success.

At 14:08 UTC on 31 July, Longjiang-2, also known as DSLWP-B, passed behind the Moon for the last time. Half an hour later, with an absence of new signals to indicate a reappearance, it was clear that the Moon had lost an orbiter and gained a new crater on its far side. According to a prediction by Daniel Estévez, the 50-centimeter-tall, 47-kilogram DSLWP-B satellite impacted at 14:20 UTC.

Not to worry—this was a planned measure to prevent potential collisions or debris for future missions. A maneuver performed 24 January lowered the periapsis of the satellite’s lunar orbit by about 500 kilometers, with orbital perturbations over time seeing the satellite impacting the Moon Wednesday after 432 days in lunar orbit.

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Seven years. 13 miles. 22 samples. ⁣ ⁣ NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover has come a long way since touching down on the Red Planet seven years ago. See for yourself: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-finds-for-mars-rover-se…er-landing

NASA’s Curiosity rover has come a long way since touching down on Mars seven years ago. It has traveled a total of 13 miles (21 kilometers) and ascended 1,207 feet (368 meters) to its current location. Along the way, Curiosity discovered Mars had the conditions to support microbial life in the ancient past, among other things.

And the rover is far from done, having just drilled its 22nd sample from the Martian surface. It has a few more years before its nuclear power system degrades enough to significantly limit operations. After that, careful budgeting of its power will allow the rover to keep studying the Red Planet.

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Physicists Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen will split a $3 million Breakthrough Prize for their theory of supergravity, which drives much of today’s physics research toward our understanding of the universe.

The Breakthrough Prize is an annual award to recognize groundbreaking science, funded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner. Though Breakthrough Prizes are awarded annually, “special” Breakthrough Prizes can be awarded any time and need not honor recent work. In fact, the researchers behind today’s award thought they’d missed the chance to win it.

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Black holes can get pretty big, but there’s a special class that is the biggest of the big, absolute yawning monster black holes. And astronomers seem to have found an absolute specimen, clocking in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.

It’s at the centre of a galaxy called Holmberg 15A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy around 700 million light-years away, which in turn sits at the centre of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster.

The object is one of the biggest black holes ever found, and the biggest found by tracking the movement of the stars around it.

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