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Jun 28, 2021

China turns on world’s second-biggest hydropower dam

Posted by in categories: energy, government

Plans call for the 289-meter-tall (954-foot-tall) Baihetan Dam to have 16 generating units with a capacity of 1 million kilowatts each. That will make it second in size after the Three Gorges Dam, opened in 2003 on the Yangtze, with 22.5 million kilowatts of generating capacity.


BEIJING (AP) — The first two generating units of the world’s second-biggest hydroelectric dam were officially turned on Monday in southwestern China, the government announced.

The Baihetan Dam on the Jinsha River, a tributary of the Yangtze, is part of Chinese efforts to curb surging fossil fuel demand by building more hydropower capacity at a time when dams have fallen out of favor in other countries due to environmental complaints.

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Jun 28, 2021

Statins Used to Lower Cholesterol Linked to Doubled Risk of Developing Dementia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience

If concerned, speak to your physician.


In patients with mild cognitive impairment, taking lipophilic statins more than doubles their risk of developing dementia compared to those who do not take statins. According to research presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 2021 Annual Meeting, positron emission tomography (PET) scans of lipophilic statin users revealed a highly significant decline in metabolism in the area of the brain that is first impacted by Alzheimer’s disease.

Statins are medications used to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke. They are the most commonly used drugs in the developed world, and nearly 50 percent of Americans over age 75 use a statin. Different types of statins are available based on a patient’s health needs, including hydrophilic statins that focus on the liver and lipophilic statins that are distributed to tissues throughout the body.

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Jun 28, 2021

Tesla Model S Plaid Defeats Cars Built To Win Pikes Peak — “Nobody would expect us to be faster than that.”

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Electric motors have a lot of power and it is instant on-demand.


When Tesla unveiled its new Plaid Model S earlier this month, it took the world by storm, fueling dreams of speed, racing, and fun. In the sense of a grand finale to Tesla’s event, another event was talked about in the weeks following. That event was the annual race to the summit of Pikes Peak. Also known as “The Race to the Clouds,” the entire track winds through 156 turns over 12.42 miles as it reaches the summit of Pikes Peak.

Continue reading “Tesla Model S Plaid Defeats Cars Built To Win Pikes Peak — ‘Nobody would expect us to be faster than that.’” »

Jun 28, 2021

Researchers engineer cells to destroy malignant tumor cells but leave the rest alone

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a promising new cancer immunotherapy that uses cancer-killing cells genetically engineered outside the body to find and destroy malignant tumors.

The modified “natural killer” can differentiate between and that are often intermingled in and around tumors, destroying only the targeted cells.

The natural killer cells’ ability to distinguish the , even from healthy cells that bear similar markers, brings new promise to this branch of immunotherapy, say members of the research team behind a paper published in the current issue of the journal iScience, newly posted on the PubMed database.

Jun 28, 2021

Jan Wörner KeyNote Speech to the 2021 Space Renaissance Congress

Posted by in categories: government, space travel

The speech sent by **Jan Wörner — former Director General of ESA -** for the Inaugural Opening Session of the 2021 Space Renaissance Congress.

Jan couldn’t present live, however he kindly sent us his speech, that we are nonored and proud to publish and add to the Acta of the Congress.

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Jun 28, 2021

Supermoon calendar 2021 and 2022: Dates, times, and how to see one

Posted by in category: space

Supermoons typically occur once or twice a year when the Moon is full and at its closest point to the Earth. Don’t miss the opportunity to see the next one.

Jun 28, 2021

Is Intelligent Life As Uncommon As ‘Rare Earth’ First Proposed?

Posted by in category: alien life

Twenty years after the publication of their game-changing book “Rare Earth,” Ward and Brownlee argue that planets like Earth are likely as rare as ever.

Jun 27, 2021

Gottlieb says parts of U.S. could see “very dense outbreaks” as Delta variant spreads

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Washington — As the U.S. continues to navigate its way through the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said areas of the country could experience “very dense outbreaks” with the concerning Delta variant continuing to circulate.

“It’s going to be hyper-regionalized, where there are certain pockets of the country [where] we can have very dense outbreaks,” Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

The most vulnerable areas continue to be those with low vaccination rates and low rates of immunity from prior infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many southern states have vaccination rates that lag behind the national average.

Jun 27, 2021

How AI Is Taking Over Our Gadgets

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

The challenges of making AI work at the edge—that is, making it reliable enough to do its job and then justifying the additional complexity and expense of putting it in our devices—are monumental. Existing AI can be inflexible, easily fooled, unreliable and biased. In the cloud, it can be trained on the fly to get better—think about how Alexa improves over time. When it’s in a device, it must come pre-trained, and be updated periodically. Yet the improvements in chip technology in recent years have made it possible for real breakthroughs in how we experience AI, and the commercial demand for this sort of functionality is high.


AI is moving from data centers to devices, making everything from phones to tractors faster and more private. These newfound smarts also come with pitfalls.

Jun 27, 2021

Monitoring war destruction from space using machine learning

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, satellites

Satellite imagery is becoming ubiquitous. Research has demonstrated that artificial intelligence applied to satellite imagery holds promise for automated detection of war-related building destruction. While these results are promising, monitoring in real-world applications requires high precision, especially when destruction is sparse and detecting destroyed buildings is equivalent to looking for a needle in a haystack. We demonstrate that exploiting the persistent nature of building destruction can substantially improve the training of automated destruction monitoring. We also propose an additional machine-learning stage that leverages images of surrounding areas and multiple successive images of the same area, which further improves detection significantly. This will allow real-world applications, and we illustrate this in the context of the Syrian civil war.

Existing data on building destruction in conflict zones rely on eyewitness reports or manual detection, which makes it generally scarce, incomplete, and potentially biased. This lack of reliable data imposes severe limitations for media reporting, humanitarian relief efforts, human-rights monitoring, reconstruction initiatives, and academic studies of violent conflict. This article introduces an automated method of measuring destruction in high-resolution satellite images using deep-learning techniques combined with label augmentation and spatial and temporal smoothing, which exploit the underlying spatial and temporal structure of destruction. As a proof of concept, we apply this method to the Syrian civil war and reconstruct the evolution of damage in major cities across the country. Our approach allows generating destruction data with unprecedented scope, resolution, and frequency—and makes use of the ever-higher frequency at which satellite imagery becomes available.