Lifeboat Foundation

The British government is preparing to launch its first commercial rocket from the country by 2021, and has upped its funding and partnerships with American companies to do so, reports CNBC.

The details: Lockheed Martin has already been allotted the largest chunk of UKSA’s (United Kingdom Space Agency) funding, receiving over $30 million “to develop an orbital launch site for small rockets in Melness, Scotland.” The company told CNBC, “[t]he launcher will be a flight-proven, dedicated small sat vehicle.” Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit also locked in a deal with UKSA “to launch its LauncherOne rocket from Cosmic Girl,” and plans to be the first to launch a commercial rocket from the island in the next three years.

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In Machine Learning one of the biggest problem faced by the practitioners in the process is choosing the correct set of hyper-parameters. And it takes a lot of time in tuning them accordingly, to stretch the accuracy numbers.

For instance lets take, SVC from well known library Scikit-Learn, class implements the Support Vector Machine algorithm for classification which contains more than 10 hyperparameters, now adjusting all ten to minimize the loss is very difficult just by using hit and trial. Though Scikit-Learn provides Grid Search and Random Search, but the algorithms are brute force and exhaustive, however hyperopt implements distributed asynchronous algorithm for hyperparameter optimization.

Researchers from St Petersburg’s ITMO University in Russia and Laser Zentrum Hannover in Germany have discovered a fascinating phenomenon regarding the design of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

A theoretical investigation published in the Journal of Applied Physics on July 20 2018 reveals the chambers within the Great Pyramid can “collect and concentrate electromagnetic energy.” Scientists looked at the “excitation of the pyramid’s electromagnetic dipole and quadrupole moments,” or the combinations of outgoing and incoming electromagnetic waves, to determine its capacity for electromagnetic focus. Using numerical simulations to deduce their findings, the research team found that under certain conditions, the pyramid’s internal chambers and the area under its base (where the third, unfinished chamber is located) can concentrate this energy.

Modern physics has provided unprecedented insight into the secrets of the pyramids, which were constructed around 2560 BC. For instance, cosmic ray-based imaging (also known as muon tomography) has been used to see further into the depths of these ancient structures, illuminating a previously unknown “large void” that humans haven’t encountered in several millennia.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover the Great Pyramid of Giza’s Design Can Concentrate Electromagnetic Energy” »

When we think of wind turbines, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the typical Sim City-esque type – 3 blades, gigantic, and wired into the municipal power grid. In truth, the world of wind power generation is far more varied indeed – as [Vittorio]’s vertical-axis wind turbine shows us.

So what exactly is a vertical-axis wind turbine, you ask? Well, rather than the typical setup with blades rotating about a horizontal axis, as in typical utility turbines or a classic electric fan you might use to cool off on a sunny day, instead a vertical axis is used. This necessitates a very different blade design due to the orientation of the rotational axis relative to the flow, so such turbines can be quite visually striking to those unfamiliar with such designs.

Continue reading “Looking at Wind Turbines From a Different Angle” »

Evolutionary theory predicts that reproduction entails costs that detract from somatic maintenance, accelerating biological aging. Despite support from studies in human and non-human animals, mechanisms linking ‘costs of reproduction’ (CoR) to aging are poorly understood. Human pregnancy is characterized by major alterations in metabolic regulation, oxidative stress, and immune cell proliferation. We hypothesized that these adaptations could accelerate blood-derived cellular aging. To test this hypothesis, we examined gravidity in relation to telomere length (TL, n = 821) and DNA-methylation age (DNAmAge, n = 397) in a cohort of young (20–22 year-old) Filipino women. Age-corrected TL and accelerated DNAmAge both predict age-related morbidity and mortality, and provide markers of mitotic and non-mitotic cellular aging, respectively. Consistent with theoretical predictions, TL decreased (p = 0.031) and DNAmAge increased (p = 0.007) with gravidity, a relationship that was not contingent upon resource availability. Neither biomarker was associated with subsequent fertility (both p 0.3), broadly consistent with a causal effect of gravidity on cellular aging. Our findings provide evidence that reproduction in women carries costs in the form of accelerated aging through two independent cellular pathways.

The question today is, do you think Replika is really cool artificial intelligence and you cannot wait to use it or is it a creepy, invasive, soul stealing app that is going too far?

Replika.ai Cool artificial intelligence that you cannot wait to use or a creepy, invasive, soul sucking way to degrade your humanity.

Researchers put a nuclear fuel container through an epic journey to see how safely it could travel.

Health workers may need armed escorts to do their work.

One of the biggest challenges for astronomers searching for habitable exoplanets is trying to match up newly discovered worlds with the increasingly long list of criteria that we believe are required for life to take root. A planet may be at a reasonable distance from its host star, but if that star is too young or too old, or just the wrong type, life as we know it would have a hard time there. Now, researchers are reporting the existence of several new planets that appear to meet all the requirements.

The research, which was conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, focuses on planets that are at a safe distance from their host star, but that are also getting enough UV light to trigger the chemical reactions that serve as the foundation for life to exist.

The researchers involved with the study used data from previous experiments that demonstrated the conditions under which the building blocks of life may have formed. Chemicals produced as a result of carbon-rich meteorites slamming into the early Earth are thought to have been a precursor for life, but the scientists still needed to account for the role that the sun played.

Continue reading “Astronomers develop formula for finding habitable planets” »