Lifeboat Foundation

Arrokoth is weird — it is also proving revelatory.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 60 new Starlink internet satellites into orbit Monday (Feb. 17), but missed a landmark booster landing at sea.

The announcement by the university came within three months of receiving official recognition from the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, California to offer yoga-based higher education programmes in November 2019.

VAYU would facilitate collaborative research, credit transfers and joint programmes with multiple premier universities across the world.

“As Swami Vivekananda said education is the manifestation of perfection already in man, VAYU aims at providing man-making and nation-building education by promoting an all-round personality development in students of generation next,” Nagendra said in a statement to PTI.

A dark web ties the universe together. Now, we can see it.

They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers.

Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. At least, that’s the upshot of one of the first studies of the subject, whose preliminary results were released in January.

Buy recommendations peddled by robo-analysts, which supposedly mimic what traditional equity research departments do but faster and at lower costs, outperform those of their flesh-and-blood counterparts over the long run, according to Indiana University professors.

It has taken until the second decade of the 21st century, but the U.S. government has finally designated space to be a legitimate domain of military operations and has stood up the U.S. Space Force — that’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that the U.S. Space Force has no routine, reliable access to space.

The Space Force will operate in the near-Earth and cislunar domains like our current military operates in the domains of land, sea, and air. The Army and Marines have their land and air vehicles, the Navy has its surface ships and submarines, and the Air Force has its airplanes. But the assets being transferred to the Space Force — satellites and expendable launch vehicles — are akin to lighthouses, buoys, dirigibles, and coastal artillery because we have so far only treated space as a support service.

The U.S. Space Force must acquire responsive, routine, and reliable access to space — starting with launch systems optimize for reaching low Earth orbit (LEO). The Space Force must be equipped with a fleet of responsive, spacefaring vehicles under the operational purview of the Space Force’s equivalent of an Air Force colonel or Navy captain. Currently, the resource requirements for space launch are so large that only a three-star general of above to approve a mission; for launch to be truly operationally responsive, the required resources — and decision-making authority — must be driven down to a level comparable to what’s been required to send a B-2 Stealth Bomber or the now-retired SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft aloft.

Read more

DNA testing companies are starting to profit from selling our data on to big pharma. Perhaps they should be paying us, says science writer Laura Spinney.

Fighting a species-level threat like Covid-19 requires the best brains from disciplines as varied as chemistry, AI, sociology and psychology.