Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is just going to get busier shuttling astronauts in the coming years.

NASA announced it intends to issue a sole-source modification to SpaceX’s long-term contract to send astronauts to the International Space Station. This follows an agency call for proposals back in October for more flight options to send people to space.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which is the other major system, is not quite yet ready for humans following a difficult uncrewed test flight in 2019 that never saw the spacecraft reach the ISS. Starliner has spent some time fixing computer glitches and other issues (including a valve problem that delayed an expected 2021 launch) and is now expecting a second uncrewed test flight by 2022.

Continue reading “SpaceX Tapped For 3 More Possible Commercial Crew Flights To Space” »

The Prawn Nebula is an emission nebula located 6,000 light-years from Earth. A new Hubble Space Telescope image captures a stunning view of the nebula’s vast star-forming region.

Hackers have taken $196 million from crypto trading platform Bitmart, a security firm said Saturday.

Bitmart confirmed the hack in an official statement Saturday night, calling it “a large-scale security breach” and writing that hackers withdrew about $150 million in assets. However, blockchain security and data analytics firm Peckshield estimates that the loss is closer to $200 million.

Continue reading “Hackers take $196 million from crypto exchange Bitmart, security firm says” »

After evaluating more than 12,000 applications, we’ll introduce our 2021 astronaut candidates live at a ceremony at Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

After completing training, these women and men could be eligible for a variety of flight assignments including missions on and around the Moon under Artemis.

Continue reading “NASA Announces 2021 Class of Astronaut Candidates” »

Bitcoin Vs Gold: Peter Schiff Vs Anthony Scaramucci.

Peter Shiff makes several points about gold:

Continue reading “Debate: Bitcoin vs Gold with Anthony Scaramucci and Peter Schiff” »

British engineering company White Motorcycle Concepts (WMC) has unveiled its revolutionary new electric hybrid scooter – the WMC300FR. The new hybrid three-wheeled scooter is designed especially for use as a fully operational first response vehicle that will help bring emergency services into line with new national objectives to combat the effects of climate change and cost reduction.

The electric scooter uses the same patented technology central to its all-electric WMC250EV high-speed demonstrator, with which it intends to break the world electric land speed record over the next 12 months. In the case of First Responder, however, the key objectives are not so much to achieve ultimate speed as to significantly increase range and viability while reducing CO₂ footprint and running costs for emergency service fleets. It can reduce carbon emissions by up to 50% of that of comparable conventional motorcycles and scooters.

Continue reading “WMC unveils new electric hybrid scooter designed for first responders” »

Tue, Dec 21 at 5 PM PST.

Avi Loeb, Professor of Science at Harvard University – Extraterrestrial Life: Are We the Sharpest Cookies in the Jar?

As we age, our muscles gradually become smaller, weaker and less able to heal after injury. In a new study, UPMC and University of Pittsburgh researchers pinpoint an important mediator of youthfulness in mouse muscle, a discovery that could advance muscle regeneration therapies for older people.

Published today in Nature Aging, the study demonstrates that circulating shuttles called extracellular vesicles, or EVs, deliver genetic instructions for the longevity protein known as Klotho to muscle cells. Loss of muscle function and impaired muscle repair in old mice may be driven by aged EVs, which carry fewer copies of these instructions than those in young animals.

The findings are an important advance in understanding why the capacity for muscles to regenerate dwindles with age.

To handle this, people have trained neural networks on regions where we have more complete weather data. Once trained, the system could be fed partial data and infer what the rest was likely to be. For example, the trained system can create a likely weather radar map using things like satellite cloud images and data on lightning strikes.

This is exactly the sort of thing that neural networks do well with: recognizing patterns and inferring correlations.

What drew the Rigetti team’s attention is the fact that neural networks also map well onto quantum processors. In a typical neural network, a layer of “neurons” performs operations before forwarding its results to the next layer. The network “learns” by altering the strength of the connections among units in different layers. On a quantum processor, each qubit can perform the equivalent of an operation. The qubits also share connections among themselves, and the strength of the connection can be adjusted. So, it’s possible to implement and train a neural network on a quantum processor.