Lifeboat Foundation

Earthlings 800 years from now can breathe a little easier.

A fresh assessment of a distantly risky asteroid brings good news: it’s even less of a threat than astronomers had feared.

The chances of an asteroid dubbed 1950 DA crashing into Earth were always tiny and long in the future: As of 2015, scientists had calculated that the object had a 1 in 8,000 chance of impacting Earth in the year 2880. But a new analysis released on Tuesday (March 29) knocks the asteroid out of the top spot of NASA’s list of known asteroids that are most potentially hazardous to Earth.

Scientists at Northwestern Medicine are using new advances in CRISPR gene-editing technology to uncover new biology that could lead to longer-lasting treatments and new therapeutic strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.

Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins—and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2—hijack the body’s cells to replicate and spread across systems?

Six out of seven, done.

The James Webb Space Telescope has almost completed its preparations in space before collecting its first scientific observations this summer, NASA reveals.

A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts safely landed in Kazakhstan after leaving the International Space Station aboard the same capsule despite heightened antagonism between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine.

#Space #RussianCosmonauts #USastronaut #News #Reuters.

Continue reading “U.S. & Russian crew return to Earth from ISS” »

We promise this isn’t an April Fools’ Day post.

Mojo Vision said it has created a new prototype of its Mojo Lens augmented reality contact lenses. This smart contact lens will bring “invisible computing” to life, the company believes.

The Mojo Lens prototype is a critical milestone for the company in its development, testing, and validation process, and is an innovation positioned at the intersection of smartphones, augmented reality/virtual reality, smart wearables, and health tech.

The prototype includes numerous new hardware features and technologies embedded directly into the lens — advancing its display, communications, eye tracking, and power system.

Further study of newly-sequenced portions of the genome could also help scientists better understand how humans evolved particular traits, such as the bigger brains that sent them down a genetically distinct path from their great ape ancestors.

“The things that make our frontal cortex bigger come from the genes that map in these repetitive regions,” said Evan Eichler, a professor in the department of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine and also part of the research collaborative.

Advances in genomic sequencing technology could drive a renaissance of medical breakthroughs, the researchers say.

No E3 this year, but we’ll get another Summer Game Fest.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, has been completely canceled for 2022. The event was originally going to be held in person this year but was shifted to an online showcase over COVID-19 concerns. That online showcase has now been canceled.

The study found that if such a system were put in place nationwide, 94 percent of human operator hours may be affected, which could account for as many as 500,000 jobs.

In a situation where automation is restricted only to Sun Belt states, as rough weather poses a challenge to automation, about 10 percent of worker operator hours will be affected. If automation is deployed nationwide only during the spring and summer months, about half the nation’s trucking hours could go driverless.

“I think the most surprising thing there was that everyone we spoke to basically said ‘yeah, this can be done,’” Vaishnav said.