Science fiction is powerful because it brings the future to life. Using a methodology called SciFi D.I., we can leverage science fiction to look 10 to 15 years into the future to redefine what’s possible today. When we can clearly imagine what the future might be like, we can begin to see a path to it.
Giant lasers may indeed launch fleets of spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, given breakthroughs in the science behind extraordinarily thin, incredibly reflective sails that can catch this laser light, a new study finds.
Hadley Wickham is the most important developer for the programming language R. Wes McKinney is among the most important developers for programming language Python. The two languages, which are free to use, are often seen as competitors in the world of data science. Wickham and McKinney don’t think the rivalry is necessary. In fact, they think that by working together, they can make each other’s languages more useful for their millions of users.
Last month, McKinney announced the founding of Ursa Labs, an innovation group intended to improve data-science tools. McKinney will partner with RStudio—Wickham’s employer, which maintains the most popular user interface for R—on the project. The main goals of Ursa Labs are to make it easier for data scientists working in different programming languages to collaborate, and avoid redundant work by developers across languages. In addition to improving R and Python, the group hopes its work will also improve the user experience in other open-source programming languages like Java and Julia.
R and Python are essential tools for data scientists working at tech platforms like Google and Facebook, researchers, academic researchers, and data journalists (Quartz is a big user of both). A common problem for coders is that it’s hard to collaborate with colleagues who use one of the other languages. Ursa Labs will try to make sharing data and code with someone using another data science language easier, by creating new standards that work in all of them. Developers call this an improvement to “interoperability.” Wickham and McKinney have already worked together to create a file format that can used in both Python and R.
Continue reading “R and Python are joining forces, in the crossover event of the year” »
The breakthrough is in its mobile joints that accurately mimic human kinetics.
Toyota has been working on humanoid robots for a while. It recently unveiled the THR-3 that’s built to test specific joints and movements by putting together a full body that can be controlled by a human operator. The robot can mimic a variety of human movements in real time. Apr.23.2018
If you’re like most people, the first biological cell you ever saw was flat: a diagram in a book, or maybe a microscope image on a slide if you were lucky. Same goes for scientists. It’s hard enough to zoom in on something so small, much less capture a 3D image of the thing. As a result, it’s easy to imagine that there are a multitude of two-dimensional discs filling your blood vessels and fighting your infections. That’s why this new development is so eye-opening. Researchers have made an imaging breakthrough that lets them capture 3D footage of cells doing their thing inside the body — and it may look nothing like what you imagined.
The video below depicts the inner ear of a zebrafish — you know, that little inch-and-a-half (4-centimeter) striped thing you see in pet store fish tanks? Suffice it to say, the objects in this footage are very, very small. Here, a fiery yellow immune cell rolls on through gobbling up bright-blue particles of sugar.
Continue reading “Watch the First-Ever HD Footage of a Cell Moving Through the Body” »
Today, we have an interview with Dr. Nichola Conlon, one of the speakers at the Undoing Aging 2018 Conference in Berlin, hosted by the Forever Healthy Foundation and SENS Research Foundation.
Introducing Nuchido
Dr. Conlon is the CEO of Nuchido, a new company that is set to launch later this year and was encouraged in part by four recent breakthroughs in biogerontology, which each showed rejuvenation in mammals [1–9]. These studies, which were all published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showed that rejuvenation of aged animals was possible via different mechanisms of action.
An engineer in California has an invention that she hopes will someday help people with damaged lungs breathe easier.
Stanford University’s Annelise Baron has developed a synthetic version of something called lung surfactant. Lung surfactant coats the tiny air sacs in the lung. Without it, every breath would be a struggle, like blowing up millions of little balloons. With surfactant, breathing is as easy as blowing soap bubbles.
Scientists inferred the existence of lung surfactant in the 1950s, and then Dr. Mary Ellen Avery showed that premature infants were unable to make surfactant, explaining the often fatal respiratory distress syndrome they suffered from.
Continue reading “Experimental Lung Treatment Could Make Breathing Easier” »
Rough translation: Blue Origin doesn’t give a damn about SpaceX’s media circus. It’s not trying to outdo competitors with each subsequent project — the company is working on just two rockets (New Shepard and New Glenn) with hopes to launch a manned flight before the end of 2018. Blue Origin is worrying about Blue Origin. That’s it.
It’s a bit too early to tell whether Blue Origin’s strategy is any better than SpaceX’s, or vice versa. Competition is a powerful force for innovation. But with the commercial space industry quickly growing (and SpaceX threatening to monopolize it), it’s easy enough to keep innovating in an effort to one-up the competition, losing sight of the main goal in the process.
One way to judge who wins? Whoever sends humans farther than they’ve ever gone. In that sense, the companies are striving for the same goal in the long term, and those that keep their eyes on the prize might fare best. In her interview with Engadget, Blue Origin’s Dietrich said that the company’s vision of millions of people living and working in space meant that they “are applauding all launch operators that are building new and more capable systems.”
A Danish company is aiming to build smaller, safe nuclear reactors based on thorium and molten salt, after securing funding in its first pre-seed investment round.
Copenhagen-based Seaborg Technologies, which is developing thorium-based Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), has received funding from an investment coalition led by Danish innovation incubator PreSeed Ventures.
The company hopes the funding will accelerate development of its CUBE (Compact Used fuel BurnEr) reactor concept.
