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Feb 25, 2019

Dr. Marin’s Work on Generation Ships – Updated

Posted by in category: food

Dr. Marin and his group are creating some great simulations involving generation ships. I’ve been following the work for a while and you can learn more about the three major papers they’ve produced. The first paper uses a Monte-Carlo simulation to measure viability. The second paper uses the HERITAGE program developed for the first paper to calculate the minimum crew for a generation ship. The third paper uses the same program to calculate food production for three different methods of agriculture.


Dr. Frédéric Marin at the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg is doing some great research on the feasibility of Generation Ships. A generation ship is “a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels at sub-light speed.” He and his team have created a wide variety of research papers and projects, which includes developing their own Monte Carlo calculation program.

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Feb 25, 2019

Laser ‘drill’ sets a new world record in laser-driven electron acceleration

Posted by in category: particle physics

Combining a first laser pulse to heat up and “drill” through a plasma, and another to accelerate electrons to incredibly high energies in just tens of centimeters, scientists have nearly doubled the previous record for laser-driven particle acceleration.

The -plasma experiments, conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), are pushing toward more compact and affordable types of to power exotic, high-energy machines—like X-ray free-electron lasers and particle colliders—that could enable researchers to see more clearly at the scale of molecules, atoms, and even subatomic particles.

The new record of propelling electrons to 7.8 billion electron volts (7.8 GeV) at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center surpasses a 4.25 GeV result at BELLA announced in 2014. The latest research is detailed in the Feb. 25 edition of the journal Physical Review Letters. The record result was achieved during the summer of 2018.

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Feb 25, 2019

New microfluidics device can detect cancer cells in blood

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, computing, neuroscience

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Queensland University of Technology of Australia, have developed a device that can isolate individual cancer cells from patient blood samples. The microfluidic device works by separating the various cell types found in blood by their size. The device may one day enable rapid, cheap liquid biopsies to help detect cancer and develop targeted treatment plans. The findings are reported in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

“This new microfluidics chip lets us separate from whole or minimally-diluted blood,” said Ian Papautsky, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Bioengineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper. “While devices for detecting cancer cells circulating in the blood are becoming available, most are relatively expensive and are out of reach of many research labs or hospitals. Our is cheap, and doesn’t require much specimen preparation or dilution, making it fast and easy to use.”

The ability to successfully isolate cancer cells is a crucial step in enabling liquid biopsy where cancer could be detected through a simple blood draw. This would eliminate the discomfort and cost of tissue biopsies which use needles or surgical procedures as part of cancer diagnosis. Liquid biopsy could also be useful in tracking the efficacy of chemotherapy over the course of time, and for detecting cancer in organs difficult to access through traditional biopsy techniques, including the brain and lungs.

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Feb 25, 2019

Discovery of colon cancer pathway could lead to new targeted treatments

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food

University of Massachusetts Amherst food science researchers have pinpointed a set of enzymes involved in tumor growth that could be targeted to prevent or treat colon cancer.

“We think this is a very interesting discovery,” says Guodong Zhang, assistant professor of food science, whose study was published in the journal Cancer Research. “Our research identifies a novel therapeutic target and could help to develop novel strategies to reduce the risks of colon cancer.”

Colon cancer is the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claiming some 50,000 lives each year. Those statistics emphasize the need to discover new cellular targets that are crucial in the development of colon cancer, Zhang says.

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Feb 25, 2019

Chinese internet users turn to the blockchain to fight against government censorship

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, government, internet

Thanks to blockchain, internet users have achieved some victories in the fight against China’s strict internet censorship.

A historic moment was made on April 23. Peking University’s former student, Yue Xin, had penned a letter detailing the university’s attempts to hide sexual misconduct. The case involved a student, Gao Yan, who committed suicide in 1998 after a professor sexually assaulted and then harassed her.

The letter was blocked by Chinese social networking websites, but an anonymous user posted it on the Ethereum blockchain.

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Feb 25, 2019

Elon Musk: Mars Base Will Have “Outdoorsy, Fun Atmosphere”

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, engineering, environmental, food, space

In an interview newly published by Popular Mechanics, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared his thoughts on colonizing Mars — from how the first settlers will grow food to the friendly vibe he envisions at the first base on the Red Planet.

“For having an outdoorsy, fun atmosphere, you’d probably want to have some faceted glass dome, with a park, so you can walk around without a suit,” Musk told the magazine. “Eventually if you terraform the planet, then you can walk around without a suit. But for say, the next 100-plus years, you’ll have to have a giant pressurized glass dome.”

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Feb 25, 2019

Superintelligence as a Service is Coming and It Can Be Safe AGI

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

Drexler and the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute proposing that artificial intelligence is mainly emerging as cloud-based AI services and a 210-page paper analyzes how AI is developing today.

AI development is developing automation of many tasks and automation of AI research and development will enable acceleration of AI improvement.

Accelerated AI improvement would mean the emergence of asymptotically comprehensive, superintelligent-level AI services that—crucially—can include the service of developing new services, both narrow and broad, guided by concrete human goals and informed by strong models of human (dis)approval. The concept of comprehensive AI services (CAIS) provides a model of flexible, general intelligence in which agents are a class of service-providing products, rather than a natural or necessary engine of progress in themselves.

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Feb 25, 2019

Reconstructing meaning from bits of information

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Modern theories of semantics posit that the meaning of words can be decomposed into a unique combination of semantic features (e.g., “dog” would include “barks”). Here, we demonstrate using functional MRI (fMRI) that the brain combines bits of information into meaningful object representations. Participants receive clues of individual objects in form of three isolated semantic features, given as verbal descriptions. We use machine-learning-based neural decoding to learn a mapping between individual semantic features and BOLD activation patterns. The recorded brain patterns are best decoded using a combination of not only the three semantic features that were in fact presented as clues, but a far richer set of semantic features typically linked to the target object. We conclude that our experimental protocol allowed us to demonstrate that fragmented information is combined into a complete semantic representation of an object and to identify brain regions associated with object meaning.

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Feb 25, 2019

How chronic stress boosts cancer cell growth

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

When they looked into how various physiological factors changed in the mice that had experienced chronic stress, the researchers closed in on a hormone called epinephrine.


New research in mice explains the mechanism through which chronic stress contributes to cancer cell growth and suggests a potential therapeutic strategy.

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Feb 25, 2019

Scripps Oceanography gets research vessel to explore coastal waters

Posted by in category: futurism

The 42-foot research vessel (R/V) Bob and Beyster was underwritten by a $1.2 million philanthropic campaign.

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