Lifeboat Foundation

The only total solar eclipse of 2020 dazzled spectators in South America, and some lucked out even as overcast skies threatened to put a damper on an incredible celestial event.

The so-called Southern Cone has now been treated to two total solar eclipses in back-to-back years. But each event was unique. Both eclipses were visible in Chile and Argentina, but the 2019 total solar eclipse happened in the wintertime for the Southern Hemisphere and in the late afternoon. This meant that the sun was low on the horizon, so the sky didn’t get as dark as it did this year.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured a striking photo of GAL-CLUS-022058–38303, the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings known in the Universe.

Put a robot in a tightly-controlled environment and it can quickly surpass human performance at complex tasks, from building cars to playing table tennis. But throw these machines a curve ball and they’re in trouble—just check out this compilation of some of the world’s most advanced robots coming unstuck in the face of notoriously challenging obstacles like sand, steps, and doorways.

The reason robots tend to be so fragile is that the algorithms that control them are often manually designed. If they encounter a situation the designer didn’t think of, which is almost inevitable in the chaotic real world, then they simply don’t have the tools to react.

Continue reading “New Deep Learning Method Helps Robots Become Jacks-of-all-Trades” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=B-Osn1gMNtw

Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of artificial intelligence, calling it an “existential threat to humanity”. He is wrong, right?

Musk is heavily invested in AI research himself through his OpenAI and NeuroLink ventures, and believes that the only safe road to AI involves planning, oversight & regulation. He recently summarized this, saying:

Continue reading “Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence and OpenAI” »

A bit of everything here from hallmarks of aging to epigenetic reprogramming(which effects telomeres, gene expression, etc) and even diet.

In this talk given at Ending Age-Related Diseases 2020, Dr. Kris Verburgh of the Free University of Brussels discusses the methods by which people might lead longer, healthier lives. While some of these methods involve the use of advanced rejuvenation biotechnology techniques, others are simpler to implement and require a minimum amount of technology, such as nutrition and exercise, along with health-monitoring technology that already exists in the public space.

Continue reading “Kris Verburgh | How to Live Longer? High-Tech and Low-Tech Approaches” »

Advances in supercomputing technology during the past 20 years are one of multiple reasons that the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is confident that it can succeed in its Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) active flow control (AFC) programme.

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A new method called lattice confinement fusion could be the compact, long-lasting energy source we’ve been searching for to power deep space missions 🤯 🚀.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla speaks with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as the company prepares to roll out doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines in the US.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London have rebuilt a human thymus, an essential organ in the immune system, using human stem cells and a bioengineered scaffold. Their work is an important step towards being able to build artificial thymi which could be used as transplants.

The thymus is an organ in the chest where T lymphocytes, which play a vital role in the immune system, mature. If the thymus does not work properly or does not form during foetal development in the womb, this can lead to diseases such as severe immunodeficiency, where the body cannot fight infectious diseases or cancerous cells, or autoimmunity, where the immune system mistakenly attacks the patient’s own healthy tissue.

In their proof-of-concept study, published in Nature Communications today, the scientists rebuilt thymi using stem cells taken from patients who had to have the organ removed during surgery. When transplanted into mice, the bioengineered thymi were able to support the development of mature and functional human T lymphocytes.