Lifeboat Foundation

Simon Waslander is the Director of Collaboration, at the CureDAO Alliance for the Acceleration of Clinical Research (https://www.curedao.org/), a community-owned platform for the precision health of the future.

CureDAO is creating an open-source platform to discover how millions of factors, like foods, drugs, and supplements affect human health, within a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), making suffering optional through the creation of a “WordPress of health data”.

Continue reading “Open-Sourcing And Accelerating Precision Health Of The Future: Progress, Potential and Possibilities Podcast episode” »

The number of accidents is massively lower than the US average.

Tesla recently released a new version of its Vehicle Safety Report, after about a year of silence, providing interesting new data.

A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” labs.

“After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. “Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.”

Continue reading “Alphabet X graduates robotic agtech firm Mineral” »

An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95 percent efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.

First-generation hybrids of crop plants often show higher performance than their parent strains, a phenomenon called hybrid vigor. But this does not persist if the hybrids are bred together for a second generation. So when farmers want to use high-performing hybrid plant varieties, they need to purchase new seed each season.

Rice, the staple crop for half the world’s population, is relatively costly to breed as a hybrid for a yield improvement of about 10 percent. This means that the benefits of rice hybrids have yet to reach many of the world’s farmers, said Gurdev Khush, adjunct professor emeritus in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Working at the International Rice Research Institute from 1967 until retiring to UC Davis in 2002, Khush led efforts to create new rice high-yield rice varieties, work for which he received the World Food Prize in 1996.

The US space agency selected 14 projects that are focused on “making the impossible possible”.

Part of the value of space exploration comes from the fact it will open new frontiers to science that we don’t yet know exist.

Continue reading “NASA considers Titan hybrid aircraft mission and other visionary space concepts” »

The study is being funded by the U.S. Army and Air Force.

Researchers at the Case Western Reserve University in the U.S. are currently working toward an experiment that will record something that has never been captured at such a resolution before; the moment of impact when a projectile traveling at 9,000 miles (14,484 km) an hour hits a wall of water, a press release said.

Research of this nature has been done earlier, but that was nearly eight decades ago. Back in the 1940s, the U.S. military conducted such studies to gauge the impact of shockwaves from underwater explosions on boats and submarines.

Continue reading “Researchers will shoot a projectile at 9,000 miles an hour for science” »

A mix of computer simulations and gamma-ray burst observations shed new light on merging neutron stars.

Astronomers trawled through archival observations of short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and detected the rapid evolution of two merging neutron stars into a superheavy neutron star, which then collapsed into a black hole.

Continue reading “Scientists detect superheavy neutron star that existed for only a fraction of a second” »

The recent announcement of Scale AI layoffs has served as a reminder that even the most promising startups and IT giants are not immune to the problems of the collapsing tech market as the artificial intelligence (AI) industry continues to grow.

Despite having a CEO heralded as “the next Zuckerberg” and a $7 billion valuation, Scale AI announced the “hardest change” – the layoff of 20 percent of its 700-person workforce on Monday in a blog post.

Modular aviation to meet vector thrust propulsion.

Node Air and JetX are teaming up to develop a new type of aircraft that combines the best of their respective technologies. This collaboration will connect Node Air’s modular transportation system with JetX ‘s Vector Thrust Propulsion.

Node Air.

Continue reading “US startups are teaming up to develop a new type of aircraft” »