Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 9784

Ground control to major Jeff (Bezos).

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, just announced a new offering aimed at satellite operators.

The news: At its annual re: Invent conference in Seattle this week, the web giant unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon’s well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud.

Ground control … According to an AWS blog post, big businesses with a large number of satellites typically build and operate their own ground stations at a cost of a million dollars or more for each one. Smaller companies that can’t afford their own often end up signing inflexible, long-term contracts with third parties that own and run such stations.

Continue reading “Amazon is launching pay-as-you-go cloud computing in space” | >

Cryoablation — the destruction of cancer cells through freezing — shows early indications of effectiveness in treating women with low-risk breast cancers, according to research being presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said that over the four years of the study, there has only been one case of cancer recurrence out of 180 patients.

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Unicorns are real (though not as colorful as we like to imagine), and they lived at the same time as modern humans.

Ancient rhino species Elasmotherium sibiricum, known as the Siberian unicorn, was long thought to have died some 200,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Improved fossil dating, however, now suggests it survived until at least 39,000 years ago, likely sharing Eurasia with modern humans and Neanderthals.

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I don’t have time to find my collection of relevant maps but if I’m correct and, present day plate tectonics are going in the opposite direction than commonly understood version of Pangea then, increased global temperatures are melting ice and exacerbating movement along the main lines of separation — from the Eurasian plate (most solid) moving apart down both sides of India, along the Eastern coast of Africa and, perhaps all the way through to Antarctica, where significant ice melt has been detected underneath.

Instruments picked up the seismic waves more than 10,000 miles away—but bizarrely, nobody felt them.

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3D bioprinting continues to diversify as more and more companies and research organizations join the field, each bringing their own take on the technology to the table. French collaborative platform 3D.fab has an intriguing approach towards bioprinting that involves a freeform robot capable of directly printing on a part of the body. In the video below, the BioAssemblyBot prints what appears to be a bandage directly on an arm:

The “bandage” is actually a bio-ink made from the skin cells of a patient. When applied to the patient’s skin, it forms an autograft that will, within a couple of weeks, create new skin. The BioAssemblyBot is capable of both additive and contour 3D printing, as well as pick and place and assembly thanks to its interchangeable tools. It’s only one of 3D.fab’s bioprinting technologies; the platform has a few other bioprinters in development as well, including another skin printer.

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