Lifeboat Foundation

A short drive south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, code-named “RAINFALL.” The remote base, in the heart of the country’s barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.

It’s a riddle of cosmic proportions: how can the universe contain stars older than itself?

That’s the conundrum now facing astronomers trying to establish the age of the universe – and its resolution could spark a scientific revolution.

At an international conference held in California last month, there was hope a resolution might be found. Instead, the latest findings only confirmed suspicions there is something fundamentally wrong with current ideas of how the universe works.

The U.S. Army has confirmed it is trying to speed up high-powered laser weapon program to develop a new system that will acquire, track, engage, and defeat unmanned aircraft system, cruise missile and rocket, artillery, and mortar threats.

The new Army’s high-powered laser weapon system is intended to provide 360º protection and simultaneously engage threats arriving from different azimuths.

The Army will adjust the current High Energy Laser Tactical Vehicle Demonstrator (HEL-TVD), a 100 kW-class laser system integrated on a Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles platform developed by Dynetics and subcontractor Lockheed Martin. Under the new directed energy strategy, the Army is leveraging progress made in that effort in order to merge the HEL-TVD with similar technologies in development by the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

SELF-RENEWAL Fluorescent markers reveal which genes are turned on as hydras’ stem cells develop into specific cell types. For instance, nerve cells light up magenta in one hydra (second from left). Another (second from right) shows gene activity behind two of the stages of development (early, green; late, red) of the animal’s stinging cells.

3,800 participants across eight countries are going to test out the vaccine.

The question of what sets humans apart from other animals is one of the oldest philosophical puzzles. A popular answer is that only humans can understand that others also have minds like their own.

But new research suggests that ravens — birds singled out by many cultures as a symbol of intelligence and wisdom — share at least some of the human ability to think abstractly about other minds, adapting their behavior by attributing their own perceptions to others.

The study, “Ravens Attribute Visual Access to Unseen Competitors,” was published Feb. 2 in Nature Communications. It found that ravens guarded caches of food against discovery in response to the sounds of other ravens if a nearby peephole was open, even if they did not see another bird. They did not show the same concern when the peephole was closed, despite the auditory cues.

Another dire warning for Windows users this week, after threat researchers at Proofpoint disclosed” a previously undocumented malware.” This one had a twist, though, this malware was not an attack in itself, it was an enabler, hiding on infected computers, establishing a proxy that other malware can then use to manage traffic to the PC and carry out their threats.

The other gaming was that computers don’t really understand words… So you ask, “Who was the sixteenth president of the United States.”? The computer doesn’t know what “sixteenth” and “president of the United States” mean. But it can go and rummage through Wikipedia-like sources and find those words and match them to a president, Abraham Lincoln and come back with “‘Who’ was Abraham Lincoln.”

But then you put anything in that’s like a pun or a joke or a riddle or sarcasm, that you can’t look up in Wikipedia, and computers are helpless. For example, in the first round, one of the final Jeopardy clues was, “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.” And the correct answer was “Chicago.” And Watson guessed “Toronto,” apparently because it was confused in the second part of that sentence, what “it” referred to. And that is a common problem with computers. (See: Why did Watson think Toronto was in the U.S.A.?)

Terry Winograd is a computer scientist at Stanford and he thought up this test of computer knowledge. The question is, “What does ‘it’ refer to in this sentence?”

In the deep of the ocean, where the sun’s rays struggle to penetrate, organisms lurk that could solve the biggest medical crisis facing humanity.

Far below the surface bacteria are engaged in warfare with each other — and to do so they make an antibiotic so strong it can destroy the toughest superbugs in our hospitals.

“But there’s a problem,” Rebecca Goss, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of St Andrews, said. “It disintegrates in sunlight.”