Lifeboat Foundation

Computex—NVIDIA today announced the availability of NVIDIA® Isaac™, a new platform to power the next generation of autonomous machines, bringing artificial intelligence capabilities to robots for manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, construction and many other industries.

Launched at Computex 2018 by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, NVIDIA Isaac includes new hardware, software and a virtual-world robot simulator.

“AI is the most powerful technology force of our time,” said Huang. “Its first phase will enable new levels of software automation that boost productivity in many industries. Next, AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines. Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more.”

Continue reading “Isaac Launches New Era of Autonomous Machines” »

There is a history of insects’ acceptability as ingredients for Chinese medicine, as pets, and even as food. Yet in selling the idea to the general public, especially those living in big cities, there is still a way to go.

Hundreds of cockroach farmers across China are unleashing the insects’ potential in the country’s war on waste, in medicine, and deep or stir-fried.

It’s interesting to note that eastern Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are experiencing much less soil moisture during the middle of May…

Data from the first NASA satellite mission dedicated to measuring the water content of soils is now being used operationally by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to monitor global croplands and make commodity forecasts.

The Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, or SMAP, launched in 2015 and has helped map the amount of water in soils worldwide. Now, with tools developed by a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, SMAP soil moisture data are being incorporated into the Crop Explorer website of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, which reports on regional droughts, floods and crop forecasts. Crop Explorer is a clearinghouse for global agricultural growing conditions, such as soil moisture, temperature, precipitation, vegetation health and more.

Continue reading “News: SMAP, the spacecraft I once worked on, is providing relative moisture data from the Earth’s surface” »

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have developed a new way to grow mineralised materials which could regenerate hard tissues such as dental enamel and bone.

Enamel, located on the outer part of our teeth, is the hardest tissue in the body and enables our teeth to function for a large part of our lifetime despite biting forces, exposure to acidic foods and drinks and extreme temperatures. This remarkable performance results from its highly organised structure.

However, unlike other tissues of the body, enamel cannot regenerate once it is lost, which can lead to pain and tooth loss. These problems affect more than 50 per cent of the world’s population and so finding ways to recreate enamel has long been a major need in dentistry.

Continue reading “Scientists develop material that could regenerate dental enamel” »

Weight gain has often been noted as a side effect of quitting smoking, and research has well established that nicotine can function as an appetite suppressant. A new study has now uncovered a novel mechanism showing how nicotine directly activates a protein that signals a type of fat cell to start burning energy.

A few years ago, scientists discovered a new, third type of fat cell called beige fat. This important discovery revealed an entirely new metabolic target for obesity research. Along with brown fat cells, beige fat was found to rapidly burn calories and generate heat.

Now, new research from the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute has revealed a novel metabolic mechanism explaining how a protein called CHRNA2 specifically stimulates beige fat cells to burn energy. The study found that CHRNA2 receptor proteins are activated by two molecules – nicotine and acetylcholine.

Continue reading “A protein activated” »

This high-tech farm is growing crops in an entirely new way. 🌱.

Scientists from Purdue University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences report the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to develop a variety of rice producing 25–31% more grain than traditional breeding methods.

The team, led by Jian-Kang Zhu, a distinguished professor in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue and director of the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, made mutations to 13 genes associated with the plant hormone abscisic acid – known to play roles in plant stress tolerance and suppression of growth. Of several varieties created, one produced a plant that had little change in stress tolerance but produced 25% more grain in a field test in Shanghai, China, and 31% more in a field test conducted on China’s Hainan Island.

Continue reading “CRISPR-edited rice plants increase grain yield” »

The strawberry-picking robots coming to a farm near you. 🤖🍓.

Strawberry producers say labour shortages are driving them to find robotic fruit pickers instead.

But if robots kill weeds, who will spray Roundup on everything.

AI-powered weed hunters could soon reduce the need for herbicides and genetically modified crops.

How it’s done now: Current farming methods involve spraying large amounts of indiscriminate weed killer over fields full of crops that have been genetically tweaked (usually by the same company that makes the weed killer) to resist the chemicals. The pesticide and seed industry is enormous, worth $100 billion globally. Of that, herbicide sales alone account for $26 billion.

Continue reading “Weed-killing robots are threatening giant chemical companies’ business models” »