Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has officially called upon companies to submit designs for a so-called U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) for the International Space Station (ISS). This pioneering spacecraft would have the crucial mission of safely bringing the ISS back to Earth, marking the ISS’s planned retirement.

The unprecedented project comes with an estimated price tag “a little short of about $1 billion,” as reported earlier this year by Kathy Lueders, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Operations.

Although initial considerations revolved around employing Russian spaceships for this monumental task, NASA, in a strategic shift, opened the floor this month to proposals from U.S. industry. The deadline for these innovative submissions is set for November 17, following the initiation of the call for designs on September 20.

Llama 2 Long is an extension of Llama 2, an open-source AI model that Meta released in the summer.

While Meta Platforms unveiled several new AI-powered features for its popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp at its annual Meta Connect event in California this week, the most impressive innovation from the social media giant may have gone unnoticed by many.

A team of Meta researchers quietly published a paper introducing Llama 2 Long, a new AI model that can generate coherent and relevant responses to long user queries, surpassing some of the best competitors in the field.

Forward-looking: While AI has been at the forefront of most tech industry conversations this year, the new wave of generative AI is still far off the concept of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, legendary developer John Carmack believes such a technology will be shown off sometime around 2030.

Carmack, of course, is best known as the co-founder of id Software and lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He left Oculus in December last year to focus on Keen Technologies, his new AGI startup.

In an announcement video (via The Reg) revealing that Keen has hired Richard Sutton, chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Carmack said the new hire was ideally positioned to work on AGI.

In a groundbreaking clinical trial, two patients suffering from severe heart failure experienced improvements in their symptoms through an innovative procedure. The clinical trial was conducted by Heartseed, a medical venture associated with Keio University in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

The procedure involves the transplantation of “cardiomyocyte spheroids” (CM spheroids), spherical clusters of heart muscle cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This development represents a significant step forward in the treatment of heart failure using iPSCs, with plans for practical implementation set for around 2025.

Japanese venture Heartseed has found that treating heart failure with iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte spheroids could achieve sustained tissue regeneration.

Continue reading “Medical Venture’s iPSC-Based Heart Failure Treatment Breaks New Ground” »

Using their new scaffold with cryo-EM, the UCLA-led team saw the atomic structure of KRAS when it was connected to a drug being studied for lung cancer treatment. This showed that their method can help understand how drugs interact with proteins like KRAS, potentially leading to better medicines.

Castells-Graells said, “The potential applications for the new advance don’t stop with cancer drugs. ” Our modular scaffold can be assembled in any configuration to capture and hold all small protein molecules.”

The UCLA-led team’s essential improvement to cryo-EM technology represents a significant milestone in structural biology and scientific imaging. Their achievement in visualizing small therapeutic protein targets at 3 Å resolution is a testament to the power of innovation and collaboration in pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery. This breakthrough promises to revolutionize drug development and our understanding of complex biological systems, further solidifying Cryo-EM’s place as an invaluable tool in modern research.

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A faster-than-light (FTL) warp drive would arguably represent the most important invention of all time. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre gave all of us hope as he found a solution within general relativity that would cause the necessary warping of space. But after nearly 30 years of further study, what does our current understanding of physics say about the feasibility of a warp drive?

Continue reading “What’s Stopping Us From Building a Warp Drive?” »

We live in a tech-enabled world, but for organizations to advance world-changing innovations, they need skilled people who can build, install, and maintain the systems that underlie them. Finding that talent is one of the biggest ongoing problems — and opportunities — in tech.

Fusion power has long been seen as a pipe dream, but in recent years the technology has appeared to be edging closer to reality. The second demonstration of a fusion reaction that creates more power than it uses is another important marker suggesting fusion’s time may be coming.

Generating power by smashing together atoms holds considerable promise, because the fuel is abundant, required in tiny amounts, and the reactions produce little long-lived radioactive waste and no carbon emissions. The problem is that initiating fusion typically uses much more energy than the reaction generates, making a commercial fusion plant a distant dream at present.

Last December though, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made a major breakthrough when they achieved “fusion ignition” for the first time. The term refers to a fusion reaction that produces more energy than was put in and becomes self-sustaining.

By John Jeffay, ISRAEL21c

Researchers in Israel have announced a breakthrough in safely detecting landmines – using bacteria.

They’ve developed tiny pellet-sized biosensors based on E. coli. The biosensors are dispersed over the target area, where they sniff out the chemical signature of buried explosives and become luminescent.