Lifeboat Foundation

Unlike James Webb, the Habitable World Observatory will be serviceable by robots in space.

NASA has revealed new details about the successor to the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope. The multi-billion dollar Habitable World Observatory (HWO) will be tasked with searching for Earth-like exoplanets from space, and it is likely to launch at some point in the early 2040s. The new details came to light during this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society, as per a Science.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

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“Putting together this 3D map of the Local Bubble will help us examine superbubbles in new ways.”

Did you know that we live in a bubble? Sure, some of us do, but we’re talking about another one. An enormous 1,000-light-year-wide “superbubble” called the Local Bubble. Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have now unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that reveals the bubble’s magnetic field.

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What do snakes do when their burrows are inundated with flood water? The same thing as humans—they move.

Snakes in California have been seen swimming through the state’s flooded streets, but that’s nothing compared to South Australia.

The flooding of the Murray River in Australia has closed off roads, inundated homes and cut off communities across the country. It has also displaced local wildlife from their homes, resulting in an increase in snake encounters across the country.

Rats and mice have been the backbone of biomedical research for decades—including research to understand cancer and pioneer new treatments.

New drug compounds are tested for safety and effectiveness in animal models before being approved for clinical trials in humans.

But scientists at research institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Sloan Kettering Institute are working to develop nonmammalian alternatives that could reduce the number of rodents used in biomedical research —a positive result in its own right, and one that could also lower costs and accelerate results.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen address the long-standing question of how benign gut microbes evade the immune system. In doing so, they also reshape our understanding of how immune receptors interact with the bacterial motility protein flagellin.

The scientists identified a new type of flagellin in the human gut, termed “silent flagellin,” that binds to the immune receptor Toll-like receptor 5 without inducing a pro-inflammatory response. The findings provide a mechanism for the immune system to tolerate beneficial microbes while remaining responsive to pathogens.

The human gut is the habitat of benign, beneficial, and sometimes harmful bacteria. In order to fight off these last-mentioned pathogens, the immune system first recognizes the presence of microbial products via various receptors. One of these is Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5): it binds flagellin, the protein that makes up the bacterial flagellum, which bacteria use to swim. Once bound to flagellin, TLR5 induces a pro-inflammatory immune response.

Our laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics. But maths itself is only as dependable as the axioms it is built on, and we have to assume those axioms are true.

Free download | an introductory book about starting and building a successful career in AI.

OpenAI, la empresa creadora de ChatGPT, nació como un laboratorio pequeño sin fines de lucro, con la promesa de crear IA segura para la humanidad con espíritu de transparencia. Hoy la presión por financiación le hace tomar decisiones que le alejan de sus intenciones originales.

Microsoft’s new voice-cloning AI can simulate a speaker’s voice with remarkable accuracy — and all it needs to get started is a three-second sample of them talking.

Voice cloning 101: Voice cloning isn’t new. Google the term, and you’ll get a long list of links to websites and apps offering to train an AI to produce audio that sounds just like you. You can then use the clone to hear yourself “read” any text you like.

For a writer, this can be useful for creating an author-narrated audio version of their book without spending days in a recording studio. A voice actor, meanwhile, might clone their voice so that they can rent out the AI for projects they don’t have time to tackle themselves.