Lifeboat Foundation

These brightly colored robotic boats seem to have a death wish.

The brightly-colored robotic boats made by Saildrone seem to have a death wish.

Saildrone makes autonomous ocean vessels to study the environment. This summer, the Silicon Valley startup sent five of its vessels directly into the path of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. While airplanes can fly through hurricanes, the screaming winds kick up such huge waves that attempting to sail boats right into them is something best to be avoided.

Continue reading “These boat drones are designed to sail directly into the eye of a hurricane” »

Liquid-fuelled rocket engine design has largely followed a simple template since the development of the German V-2 rocket in the middle of World War 2. Propellant and oxidizer are mixed in a combustion chamber, creating a mixture of hot gases at high pressure that very much wish to leave out the back of the rocket, generating thrust.

However, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has recently completed a successful test of a different type of rocket, known as a rotating detonation engine. The engine relies on an entirely different method of combustion, with the aim to produce more thrust from less fuel. We’ll dive into how it works, and how the Japanese test bodes for the future of this technology.

The huge “dog-boned” asteroid hurling through the solar system has now been imaged in unprecedented detail.

A team of astronomers has seemingly obtained the best pictures and data to date of the peculiar asteroid, Kleopatra. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), observers from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France, captured images to help two teams of scientists answer some interesting questions.

“Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System,” says Franck Marchis, who led a study on the asteroid published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Science makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our Solar System.”

Continue reading “Astronomers take best pictures of Kleopatra’s ‘portrait’” »

The newly formed biotech start up Halo Therapeutics, spun out from the University of Bristol, has become the latest company to join the Science Creates ecosystem.

The team is targeting new treatments for coronavirus as they expand on their exciting recent breakthrough discovery, which was published in Science Magazine.

The context

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Hyperbaric oxygen therapy improved cerebral blood flow by up to 23%, alleviating vascular dysfunction and amyloid burden in elderly patients. The treatment also improved memory by 16.5%.

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.

CNN Business asked CEOs at more than a dozen major US companies — including GM, Citi, New Balance, Petco, LinkedIn and Zillow — to tell us about the lessons they’ve learned during the pandemic and what they think the future of work will look like. This is what they had to say.

Companies have two to three years to lay the groundwork for successful use of generative AI, synthetic data and orchestration platforms.

Users want more than artificial intelligence can provide at the moment but those capabilities are changing fast, according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence 2021 report. Gartner analysts described 34 types of AI technologies in the report and also noted that the AI hype cycle is more fast-paced, with an above-average number of innovations reaching mainstream adoption within two to five years.

Gartner analysts found more innovations in the innovation trigger phase of the hype cycle than usual. That means that end users are looking for specific technology capabilities that current AI tools can’t quite deliver yet. Synthetic data, orchestration platforms, composite AI, governance, human-centered AI and generative AI are all in this early phase.

“Identification of these compounds means that we are one step closer to being able to molecularly diagnose dementia,” said senior author of the study, Professor Mitsuhiro Yanagida, who leads the G0 Cell Unit at OIST.

Summary: Researchers identified 33 metabolic compounds in blood samples that differed between those with dementia and cognitively healthy older adults. 7 of the metabolites were elevated in dementia patients, while 26 were at lower levels compared to samples of those without dementia. Elevating levels of those metabolites could have a neuroprotective effect against dementia.

Source: OIST

Continue reading “Signs of Dementia Are Written in the Blood” »