Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers may have one less (satellite) constellation to worry about.

Late Friday, OneWeb announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a New York court. In a statement, the company said it had been in “advanced negotiations” since the beginning of the year to raise a new round of funding needed to complete its broadband satellite constellation. The company said it was close to completing that deal, but “the financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19” kept it from closing the deal.

OneWeb had just started large-scale deployment of its constellation, with Soyuz launches in early February and again March 21 each placing 34 satellites into orbit. Future launches are now on hold—launch services provider Arianespace was the largest single unsecured creditor identified in OneWeb’s bankruptcy, at $238 million—and may never resume, depending on who buys the company’s assets in a planned sale and their intentions for them.

Dr. Duc Vuong, World’s #1 Weight Loss Surgeon, Author of 13 books, explains how coronavirus kills its victims.

Talk with Dr. V Live at https://www.facebook.com/doctorvuong

Continue reading “HOW COVID-19 KILLS--I’m a Surgeon--And Why We Can’t Save You” »

The Army has a message for its retirees: Uncle Sam wants you to help fight the novel coronavirus.

A message sent by Defense Finance and Accounting Services, which processes and dispenses retiree pay, asked troops who had previously served in specific health care specialties to consider “re-joining the team” to address the current pandemic crisis. It’s signed by Lt. Gen. Thomas Seamands, deputy chief of staff for U.S. Army Personnel, G-1.

“We need to hear from you STAT!” reads the message, obtained by Military.com.

The space renaissance newsletter: WE’RE ALMOST EIGHT BILLIONS: NOTHING CAN STOP US!

Why are governments useful in times of big crisis? Because they can recover the economy, printing currency, supporting stock markets after catastrophic events, such as pandemics.

Senolitics can be one of the first for one of the causes of ageing. One of the agents that have shown a senolytic effect is fisetin.

Because of the availability and safety of fisetin, we decided to conduct our experiments of this drug in a person with autoimmune thyroiditis. It is noteworthy that, unlike most trials, we focus not on chronic inflammation but on immune function.

For this test, we need your financial help.

Continue reading “Clinical trials of Fisetin in a person with autoimmune thyroiditis” »

Hong Kong’s government announced in late February that it would be giving every resident over the age of 18 a cash payout of 10,000 Hong Kong dollars, part of a package of measures aimed at reducing the financial blow to the territory from the COVID-19 outbreak and months of anti-government protests. At the time, the city’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan told CNBC the move could boost Hong Kong’s economy by around 1%.

The U.S. should follow Hong Kong’s lead and give a cash handout to its citizens amid the coronavirus pandemic, a strategist told CNBC Friday.

“This is not a financial crisis,” Andrew Freris, CEO of Ecognosis Advisory, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection.” “It is a crisis about the real economy.”

Continue reading “US should give citizens $1,000 a month to limit coronavirus impact on economy, strategist says” »

The Federal Reserve swept into action on Sunday in a new bid to save the U.S. economy from the fallout of the coronavirus, cutting its benchmark interest rate by a full percentage point to near zero and promising to boost its bond holdings by at least $700 billion.

The central bank also announced several other actions, including letting banks borrow from the discount window for as long as 90 days and reducing reserve requirement ratios to zero percent. In addition, the Fed united with five other central banks to ensure dollars are available around the world via swap lines.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at 6:30 p.m. Washington time to discuss the actions.

Coronavirus’s economic danger is exponentially greater than its health risks to the public. If the virus does directly affect your life, it is most likely to be through stopping you going to work, forcing your employer to make you redundant, or bankrupting your business.

The trillions of dollars wiped from financial markets this week will be just the beginning, if our governments do not step in. And if President Trump continues to stumble in his handling of the situation, it may well affect his chances of re-election. Joe Biden in particular has identified Covid-19 as a weakness for Trump, promising “steady, reassuring” leadership during America’s hour of need.

Continue reading “Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency” »

The scientific revolution was ushered in at the beginning of the 17th century with the development of two of the most important inventions in history — the telescope and the microscope. With the telescope, Galileo turned his attention skyward, and advances in optics led Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek toward the first use of the compound microscope as a scientific instrument, circa 1665. Today, we are witnessing an information technology-era revolution in microscopy, supercharged by deep learning algorithms that have propelled artificial intelligence to transform industry after industry.

One of the major breakthroughs in deep learning came in 2012, when the performance superiority of a deep convolutional neural network combined with GPUs for image classification was revealed by Hinton and colleagues [1] for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). In AI’s current innovation and implementation phase, deep learning algorithms are propelling nearly all computer vision-intensive applications, including autonomous vehicles (transportation, military), facial recognition (retail, IT, communications, finance), biomedical imaging (healthcare), autonomous weapons and targeting systems (military), and automation and robotics (military, manufacturing, heavy industry, retail).

It should come as no surprise that the field of microscopy would ripe for transformation by artificial intelligence-aided image processing, analysis and interpretation. In biological research, microscopy generates prodigious amounts of image data; a single experiment with a transmission electron microscope can generate a data set containing over 100 terabytes worth of images [2]. The myriad of instruments and image processing techniques available today can resolve structures ranging in size across nearly 10 orders of magnitude, from single molecules to entire organisms, and capture spatial (3D) as well as temporal (4D) dynamics on time scales of femtoseconds to seconds.