Lifeboat Foundation

In an interview with Reuters, Jaime Pereira, CEO of Aerocamaras, said “it’s the first time an animal is being rescued with a drone and the first time it has to be captured. If that’s the last option that the dogs have? Then we’re going after them.” Pereira also mentioned a possible nightmare scenario caused by the limitations of drone battery technology, and the tricky nature of the operation, which relies partly on the cooperation of the stranded canines: “What we don’t want is to run out of battery when flying over the lava,” he said. In order to carry out the mission as safely as possible, the drone operator is currently carrying out test flights to practice before sending its drones to the location near the live volcano.

Though this is likely the first time a dog has been carried to safety by a drone, operators in China guided a herd of wayward elephants home with the aid of drones. In that case, however, the drones were only used to keep track of the animals. The technology is also being trialed for first responder operations in the case of natural disasters and emergencies. Here’s hoping the novel method for extracting the otherwise inaccessible animals to safety goes off without a hitch.

In this post I outline my journey creating a dynamic NFT on the Ethereum blockchain with IPFS and discuss the possible use cases for scientific data. I do not cover algorithmic generation of static images (you should read Albert Sanchez Lafuente’s neat step-by-step for that) but instead demonstrate how I used Cytoscape.js, Anime.js and genomic feature data to dynamically generate visualizations/art at run time when NFTs are viewed from a browser. I will also not be providing an overview of Blockchain but I highly recommend reading Yifei Huang’s recent post: Why every data scientist should pay attention to crypto.

W h ile stuck home during the pandemic, I’m one of the 10 million that tried my hand at gardening on our little apartment balcony in Brooklyn. The Japanese cucumbers were a hit with our neighbors and the tomatoes were a hit with the squirrels but it was the peppers I enjoyed watching grow the most. This is what set the objective for my first NFT: create a depiction of a pepper that ripens over time.

How much of the depiction is visualization and how much is art? Well that’s in the eye of the beholder. When you spend your days scrutinizing data points, worshiping best practices and optimizing everything from memory usage to lunch orders it’s nice to take some artistic license and make something just because you like it, which is exactly what I’ve done here. The depiction is authentically generated from genomic data features but obviously this should not be viewed as any kind of serious biological analysis.

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Introduction

The Fulfillment Platform is a foundational Uber domain that enables the rapid scaling of new verticals. The platform handles billions of database transactions each day, ranging from user actions (e.g., a driver starting a trip) and system actions (e.g., creating an offer to match a trip with a driver) to periodic location updates (e.g., recalculating eligible products for a driver when their location changes). The platform handles millions of concurrent users and billions of trips per month across over ten thousand cities and billions of database transactions a day.

In the previous article, we introduced the Fulfillment domain, highlighted challenges in the previous architecture, and outlined the new architecture.

Amazon released a huge number of smart home products today, including two robots for home security, a Nest competitor, more Echo devices, and a perfect device for Covid-times connection with friends and family. Plus there’s an updated fitness tracker, a partnership with TikTok, entertainment from Sling, and more.

And yes, that includes ways to chat with Han Solo or Chewbacca from Star Wars or Woody from Toy Story on your Amazon Echo devices.

Real estate companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence in every aspect of buying, selling and home financing.

MASK Architects has designed the world’s first steel 3D printed structure of modular houses for Nivola Museum’s visitors, Tourists and Artists in Orani, city of Sardinia. Öznur Pınar Cer and Danilo Petta have Inspired from the work of “Costantino Nivola”, they have designed “Exosteel Mother Nature” modular houses which they have taken inspiration from him sculpture called the “La Madre”.

The studio is the first architecture and design studio in the world to use a steel 3D-printed “exoskeleton” construction system that supports and distributes all the functional elements of the building, using their new solution of construction technique which they called “EXOSTEEL”.

The house is composed firstly by a hollow central column inserted for one / third of its length into the ground and by various organic branches that support the three floors of the building. On each floor a perimeter frame divides and supports the facades made up of panels modeled to follow the organic shape of the house.

Only two new coronaviruses have spread globally the past 2 decades: SARS-CoV, which caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2,003 and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But that may just be the tip of the iceberg of undetected infections with related viruses emerging from bats, a new paper claims. In a preprint published yesterday researchers estimate that an average of 400,000 people are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses every year, in spillovers that never grow into detectable outbreaks.

The researchers, including Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance and Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, created a detailed map of the habitats of 23 bat species known to harbor SARS-related coronaviruses, the group to which SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 belong, and then overlaid it with data on where humans live to create a map of potential infection hot spots. They found that close to 500 million people live in areas where spillovers can occur, including northern India, Nepal, Myanmar, and most of Southeast Asia. The risk is highest in southern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and on Java and other islands in Indonesia (see map, below).

Study pinpoints Asian regions that could spark the next coronavirus pandemic.

Continue reading “SARS-like viruses may jump from animals to people hundreds of thousands of times a year” »

University of Arizona aerospace and mining engineers are mapping out a plan for harvesting the moon’s resources using autonomous robot swarms and new excavation techniques.

With scientists beginning to more seriously consider constructing bases on celestial bodies such as the moon, the idea of space mining is growing in popularity.

After all, if someone from Los Angeles was moving to New York to build a house, it would be a lot easier to buy the building materials in New York rather than buy them in Los Angeles and lug them 2,800 miles. Considering the distance between Earth and the moon is about 85 times greater, and that getting there requires defying gravity, using the moon’s existing resources is an appealing idea.