Lifeboat Foundation

Company Awarded AFRL Contract to Investigate the Delivery of Five-to-Ten-Ton Capacity Containers Anywhere in the World in 90 Minutes

LOUISVILLE, Colo. – October 3, 2024 – Sierra Space, a leading commercial space company and defense-tech prime that is Building a Platform in Space to Benefit Life on Earth® and protect economic freedom in the Orbital Age®, announced today that it has been awarded a competitive, firm-fixed-price contract for the Rocket Experimentation for Global Agile Logistics (REGAL) program by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). This new contract aims to revolutionize logistics and materiel returns from space, placing Sierra Space at the forefront of defense and space logistics innovation.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled its Sierra Space Ghost decelerator – a revolutionary logistics spacecraft designed for rapid payload return from Earth orbit – and shared the results of successful beta flight testing. The REGAL contract will support efforts to conceptually design and scale this new breakthrough technology, with the goal of landing critical supplies anywhere on the planet within 90 minutes.

Researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School have identified interleukin-11 (IL11) as a key factor in the ageing process. Elevated IL11 levels lead to fat accumulation and muscle loss—two major indicators of ageing. Inhibiting IL11 could enhance healthy lifespans.

Ageing populations pose significant health and economic challenges globally. Even a one-year increase in life expectancy could be valued at $38 trillion.

In a study published in Nature, the team demonstrated that anti-IL11 therapy not only counters the harmful effects of ageing but also increases lifespan by up to 25% in preclinical models. The therapy shifts metabolism from generating harmful white fat to beneficial brown fat, which helps burn calories and maintain body temperature.

Organizations are losing between $94 — $186 billion annually to vulnerable or insecure APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and automated abuse by bots. That’s according to The Economic Impact of API and Bot Attacks report from Imperva, a Thales company. The report highlights that these security threats account for up to 11.8% of global cyber events and losses, emphasizing the escalating risks they pose to businesses worldwide.

Drawing on a comprehensive study conducted by the Marsh McLennan Cyber Risk Intelligence Center, the report analyzes over 161,000 unique cybersecurity incidents. The findings demonstrate a concerning trend: the threats posed by vulnerable or insecure APIs and automated abuse by bots are increasingly interconnected and prevalent. Imperva warns that failing to address security risks associated with these threats could lead to substantial financial and reputational damage.

“This research underscores that successful water investments hinge not just on addressing immediate water needs, but also on strengthening the governmental and societal frameworks that facilitate private sector engagement,” said Dr. Pamela Green.

What steps can be taken to address global water shortages and security? This is what a recent study published in Global Environmental Change hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the readiness levels of economies around the world and if private investments could help alleviate the concerns regarding water security and safety worldwide. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public understand the severity of global water security and what steps can be taken to mitigate those risks and concerns.

For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis comparing at-risk regions across the globe to available fiscal resources that can be used to address and alleviate risks and concerns to water scarcity.

Continue reading “Addressing Water Insecurity: A Call for Innovative Economic Strategies” »

The dockworkers striking up and down the East Coast are, culturally and geographically, a world apart from the Hollywood actors and writers who staged a four-month walkout last year. But their protests share a common core principle: They don’t want bots taking their jobs.

It’s a fight you can expect to see playing out a lot more as advanced automation and AI creep into virtually every workforce.

Here’s the deal: The East Coast port strike is getting a lot of attention for its potential disruption to the economy — which is precisely the point. Longshore work can be grueling, and the people working at ports are vital to getting all of the stuff we want to buy onto store shelves. No dockworkers means no bananas (or whatever), which means no profits for the companies that produce and ship them.

Artificial intelligence start-ups are making revenues more quickly than previous waves of software companies, according to new data that suggests that the transformative technology is also generating strong businesses at an unprecedented rate.

According to an analysis of payments information from fintech group Stripe, top AI groups are reaching millions of dollars in sales within a year — far faster in a start-up’s life cycle than comparable non-AI tech groups.

The findings come as investors raise questions about the economic benefits of generative AI and likely returns on Big Tech’s projected trillion-dollar investment in computing infrastructure to support the technology over the coming year.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on global public health and the economy. Although vaccines and antivirals have provided effective protection and treatment, the development of new small molecule-based antiviral candidates is imperative to improve clinical outcomes against SARS-CoV-2. In this study, we identified UNI418, a dual PIKfyve and PIP5K1C inhibitor, as a new chemical agent that inhibits SARS-CoV-2 entry into host cells. UNI418 inhibited the proteolytic activation of cathepsins, which is regulated by PIKfyve, resulting in the inhibition of cathepsin L-dependent proteolytic cleavage of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into its mature form, a critical step for viral endosomal escape. We also demonstrated that UNI418 prevented ACE2-mediated endocytosis of the virus via PIP5K1C inhibition. Our results identified PIKfyve and PIP5K1C as potential antiviral targets and UNI418 as a putative therapeutic compound against SARS-CoV-2.

Despite the ongoing threat posed by new viruses following the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which led to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, new antiviral drugs continue to be developed to effectively block viral entry into the human body.

Professor Kyungjae Myung and his research team in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, affiliated with the IBS Center for Genomic Integrity, has discovered UNI418, a compound that effectively prevents the penetration of the coronavirus. This compound works by regulating dielectric homeostasis, thereby inhibiting the virus’s entry into human cells.

A small-N comparative analysis of six different areas of applied artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that the next period of development will require a merging of narrow-AI and strong-AI approaches. This will be necessary as programmers seek to move beyond developing narrowly defined tools to developing software agents capable of acting independently in complex environments. The present stage of artificial intelligence development is propitious for this because of the exponential increases in computer power and in available data streams over the last 25 years, and because of better understanding of the complex logic of intelligence. Applied areas chosen for examination were heart pacemakers, socialist economic planning, computer-based trading, self-driving automobiles, surveillance and sousveillance and artificial intelligence in medicine.

AI may equal human intelligence without matching the true nature of our experiences.

By Christof Koch

A future where the thinking capabilities of computers approach our own is quickly coming into view. We feel ever more powerful machine-learning (ML) algorithms breathing down our necks. Rapid progress in coming decades will bring about machines with human-level intelligence capable of speech and reasoning, with a myriad of contributions to economics, politics and, inevitably, warcraft. The birth of true artificial intelligence will profoundly affect humankind’s future, including whether it has one.