Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon said Wednesday it expects to begin large-scale deliveries by drone in the coming months as it unveiled its newest design for its “Prime Air” fleet.

Jeff Wilke, head of Amazon’s consumer operations, told the company’s Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space conference in Las Vegas that drones would play a role in ramping up efforts to shorten delivery times for many items to just one day for Amazon Prime members.

“We’ve been hard at work building fully electric drones that can fly up to 15 miles (25 kilometers) and deliver packages under five pounds (2.3 kilos) to customers in less than 30 minutes,” Wilke said in a blog post.

Continue reading “Amazon says drone deliveries coming ‘within months’” »

CMU becomes space-faring university with payloads aboard Astrobotic lander.

Without the Higgs, the Standard Model of particle physics comes crashing down.

A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.

(ECNS) — The Chinese team that constructed the world’s first ear in a lab and grafted it onto a patient last year has made new progress by developing injectable cartilage that can be used in human tissue repair and plastic surgery.

The regeneration technique involves taking a small part of cartilage tissue from behind the ear of a patient, culturing seed cells in the lab and reproducing cells in a sufficient amount to fill a biodegradable mould made by 3D-printing.

Professor Cao Yilin, director of National Tissue Engineering Research Center, said it marks a breakthrough from previous technology as the cultured cells can be injected into a patient’s body parts like the nose and chin where they continue to develop into normal tissue, a minimally invasive treatment similar to natural growth.

Continue reading “Chinese scientists make breakthrough in injectable cartilage” »

Sorry, Planet McPlanetface: Asteroids, moons and other celestial bodies go through a strict set of international naming guidelines.

Nearby in the sky are 2 interacting galaxies: LEDA 62867 (left) and NGC 6786 (right). Millions of years from now, after a long and graceful dance, NGC 6786 will likely consume its smaller galactic partner.

A powerful “mass driver” could launch moon-mined ore into space.

Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t pretend to be a brilliant scientist — even though he’s played Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, for the past 11 years.

But on Tuesday night he attended Amazon’s brand new, premier, open-to-the-public Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space (re: MARS) conference in Las Vegas — a room filled with AI legends, astronauts, and other dignitaries — as a keynote speaker.

He delivered a gag-filled talk that somehow weaved together the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the evolution of Stark’s Iron Man suits, allusions to his own troubled history with drug addiction, the actual history of artificial intelligence and its pioneers, with a bunch of jokes using the Amazon Alexa voice and Matt Damon (including a videotaped guest appearance by Damon).

Continue reading “‘Iron Man’ actor Robert Downey Jr. has vowed to use robotics and AI to significantly clean up the Earth in the next decade” »