Lifeboat Foundation

The sun’s first rays burst over the Earth’s horizon during an orbital sunrise as the International Space Station orbited above the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia.

Two veteran International Space Station residents will have a Change of Command ceremony on Tuesday before the Expedition 63 crew returns to Earth the following day. Meanwhile, the Russian portion of the crew has temporarily sealed a leak on the orbiting lab.

Commander Chris Cassidy of NASA will hand over control of the space station to cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov on Tuesday. The duo will be joined by the rest of their crewmates for the traditional event live on NASA TV starting at 4:15 p.m. EDT.

Continue reading “Crews Change Command on Tuesday; Leak Temporarily Sealed” »

Facebook on Monday unveiled software based on machine learning which the company said was the first to be able to translate from any of 100 languages without relying on English.

The open-source artificial intelligence software was created to help the massive social network deliver content better in 160 languages to its more than two billion users around the world.

“This milestone is a culmination of years of Facebook AI’s foundational work in machine translation,” research assistant Angela Fan said in a blog post.

A 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck off the Alaska Peninsula, triggering a tsunami warning in the region that has since been downgraded to an advisory. CBS Los Angeles has the latest.

The authors present an edge-centric model of brain connectivity. Edge networks are stable across datasets, and their structure can be modulated by sensory input. When clustered, edge networks yield pervasively overlapping functional modules.

U.S. and Italian engineers have demonstrated the first nanophotonic platform capable of manipulating polarized light 1 trillion times per second.

“Polarized light can be used to encode bits of information, and we’ve shown it’s possible to modulate such light at terahertz frequencies,” said Rice University’s Alessandro Alabastri, co-corresponding author of a study published this week in Nature Photonics.

“This could potentially be used in wireless communications,” said Alabastri, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “The higher the operating frequency of a signal, the faster it can transmit data. One terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz, which is about 25 times higher than the operating frequencies of commercially available optical polarization switches.”

In this vision of the future, commercial tourists can hop on board a craft and explore suborbital space.

The technology will be integrated into NASA’s lunar landers and be used by astronauts for “any activity” they need to carry out.

In a new experiment, a team of French scientists created a levitating fluid that allows a tiny boat to float both on top of it — and another below it, seemingly flipping gravity on its head.

“That was a fun experiment,” Emmanuel Fort, professor at ESPCI Paris and co-author of a paper about the project published today in the journal Nature, told The New York Times. “Everything worked well. And I’m still amazed by the results.”

Portable sequencing is making it possible for biologists to perform DNA analysis anywhere in the world. How is this technology reshaping the way they work?

Thanks to nanopore technology, scientists can now collect samples and sequence them anywhere. It is the concept of backpacking applied to scientific research.

Continue reading “Portable Sequencing Is Reshaping Genetics Research” »