Lifeboat Foundation

Talk about comets or asteroids coming anywhere near us and mind immediately goes back to what happened to dinosaurs. It just needed a space rock to end the reign of those fearsome reptiles who dominated nearly the entire foodchain. The asteroid that killed dinosaurs was just 10 kilometres across. But now a comet larger than Mars’s moons is speeding up toward the solar system.

Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is a mammoth! Remember Hale-Bopp? The comet that went around us in the year 1997? It was called a massive comet. And Bernardinelli-Bernstein is 10 times the mass of Hale-Bopp.

Also Read | NASA posts image of ‘Hand of God’, netizens are awestruck.

Similarly, the CNSA told the Chinese state-run news outlet Global Times that its Tianwen-1 space probe and Zhurong rover will pause their work and enter safe mode during the transit.

But just because the rovers aren’t getting any new instructions doesn’t mean they’re stopping altogether.

“Though our Mars missions won’t be as active these next few weeks, they’ll still let us know their state of health,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Relay Network manager, Roy Gladden, said in the NASA announcement. “Each mission has been given some homework to do until they hear from us again.”

Introduction

The Fulfillment Platform is a foundational Uber domain that enables the rapid scaling of new verticals. The platform handles billions of database transactions each day, ranging from user actions (e.g., a driver starting a trip) and system actions (e.g., creating an offer to match a trip with a driver) to periodic location updates (e.g., recalculating eligible products for a driver when their location changes). The platform handles millions of concurrent users and billions of trips per month across over ten thousand cities and billions of database transactions a day.

In the previous article, we introduced the Fulfillment domain, highlighted challenges in the previous architecture, and outlined the new architecture.

Isaac Asimov won the Hugo award for Best All-Time Series for his Foundation books, which follow a future human civilization through an apparently inevitable upheaval. The story begins amid a vast galactic empire in decline. Hari Seldon, a mathematician, develops the practice of psychohistory, a method of predicting future events using statistics.

Seldon predicts the fall of the galactic empire lasting 300,000 years. By his calculations, there’s no preventing the oncoming storm, but they can shift its trajectory. With a few small changes, humanity can reduce the period of recovery to just 1,000 years. Seldon is confident enough in his predictions that he convinces the authorities to let him create two gatherings of minds. Collections of scientists who will preserve humanity’s collected knowledge and lift future generations out of the looming dark age, known as the Foundations.

Continue reading “Predicting the end of humanity with maths: The Science of ‘Foundation’” »

Every year, a few hundred scientists in the United Kingdom try to establish new labs from scratch; globally, thousands of researchers become heads of their own labs. From the outset, it’s a chase for money and a time of intense pressure as scientists try to build research programmes while juggling teaching, fundraising, publishing and family life. Ali began her lab with just £15,000 in grants to cover equipment and experiments; Dan had £20,000. Both need to recruit PhD students, and Dan must also devise and deliver a programme of lectures.

Two researchers. Three years. One pandemic.

The firm worked with UK weather forecasters to create a model that was better at making short term predictions than existing systems.

First protein folding, now weather forecasting: London-based AI firm DeepMind is continuing its run applying deep learning to hard science problems. Working with the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, DeepMind has developed a deep-learning tool called DGMR that can accurately predict the likelihood of rain in the next 90 minutes—one of weather forecasting’s toughest challenges.

In a blind comparison with existing tools, several dozen experts judged DGMR’s forecasts to be the best across a range of factors—including its predictions of the location, extent, movement, and intensity of the rain—89% of the time. The results were published in a Nature paper today.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain” »

Some people say that the definition of genius is to take the inner workings of one or multiple systems and apply them to another domain with absolute success. One designer may just fall right into that definition with this SWATH conceptual vehicle.

“DeepGreen is offering a false or dystopian choice,” Deep Sea Conservation Coalition cofounder Matthew Gianni told The Guardian.

Dangling the possibility of widespread electric vehicle adoption by securing the resources necessary to manufacture more and better batteries is certainly tantalizing. But scientists told The Guardian that getting those metals from the seafloor — especially with machines that would cause a poorly-understood environmental impact in an area that’s nearly impossible to monitor and regulate — would come at too great a cost.

“There are some very significant questions being raised by scientists about the impacts of ocean mining,” University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Douglas McCauley told The Guardian. “How much extinction could be generated? How long will it take these extremely low-resilience systems to recover? What impact will it have on the ocean’s capacity to capture carbon?”

Lynk will start with intermittent text messages and expand from there.