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Blog – Page 9566

I know some people don’t like it but the Lunar Gateway is getting more traction.

The International Space Station partners have endorsed plans to continue the development of the Gateway, an outpost around the Moon that will act as a base to support both robots and astronauts exploring the lunar surface.

The Multilateral Coordination Board, which oversees the management of the Space Station, stressed its common hope for the Gateway to open up a cost-effective and sustainable path to the Moon and beyond.

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The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.

We’ve created OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.

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Scripps Research scientists have discovered a compound that potently and selectively kills the stem-like cells that make glioblastoma brain cancers so deadly.

In a study published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Scripps Research scientists found that the new compound, which they dubbed RIPGBM, kills stem-like cells cultured from patients’ tumors with more than 40 times the potency of the standard GBM drug . They found too that RIPGBM is highly selective, sparing other types of cells, and that it powerfully suppresses the growth of GBM tumors in a mouse model of the disease.

“Our discovery of this compound and the cellular pathways it affects offers a promising new strategy for treating glioblastoma,” says principal investigator Luke Lairson, PhD, an assistant professor of chemistry at Scripps Research.

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A 22W laser used for adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. A suite of similar lasers could be used to cloak our planet’s transit around the Sun. (credit: ESO/G. Hüdepohl)

We could use lasers to conceal the Earth from observation by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization by shining massive laser beams aimed at a specific star where aliens might be located — thus masking our planet during its transit of the Sun, suggest two astronomers at Columbia University in an open-access paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The idea comes from the NASA Kepler mission’s search method for exoplanets (planets around other stars), which looks for transits (a planet crossing in front a star) — identified by a tiny decrease in the star’s brightness.*.

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Alzheimer’s disease may soon be spotted through a simple eye test, after scientists discovered tell-tale alterations in the retina and blood vessels when dementia is present.

Currently diagnosing Alzheimer’s is tricky, requiring an expensive brain scan, a risky spinal tap or in most cases a behavioural assessment by a doctor based on symptoms.

But US scientists at the Duke Eye Centre in North Carolina, wondered if changes might also be visible in the retina, which is an extension of the brain and so could offer a window into what is happening behind the skull.

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