The fund will launch with a $2 billion commitment, split between the Day 1 Families Fund — helping homeless families — and the Day 1 Academies Fund — creating a “network of new, non-profit, tier-one preschools in low-income communities,” Bezos said.
As CEO of Amazon, founder of rocket company Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post, Bezos is the wealthiest man in modern history, with a net worth of at least $150 billion.
Critics have long called for him to put his billions toward philanthropic efforts.
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellites tracking Typhoon Ompong (international name Super Typhoon Mangkhut) have found powerful storms surrounding the eye of the tropical cyclone days before its landfall over northern Luzon.
On September 13, the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite looked at Ompong in infrared as it was approaching the Philippines, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Rob Gutro said in a blog post.
He says this has been done successfully with mice. They have mice live twice as long. They are testing aging reversal in dogs in 2018–2019. Human treatments could be available on a general basis by 2025.
George Church is developing better and better organs using pigs. They are working to slow or reverse the aging in the organs to be used for transplant.
He says this has been done successfully with mice. They have mice live twice as long. I mean that that humans could live 160 years if that were linear.
The longest-lived vertebrate. One of the longest-lived vertebrates is this koi fish that lived 226 years.
Earlier this year, we heard how scientists from the University of California San Diego had developed a flexible ultrasound patch that allows users to see the inner structure of irregular-shaped objects. Well, now they’ve made one that measures a patient’s blood pressure from deep within the body.
The giant CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider will search for double-Higgs events.
IMAGE: MICHAEL HOCH AND MAXIMILIEN BRICE
For particle physicists eager to explore new frontiers, spotting the Higgs boson has become a bittersweet triumph. Detected in 2012 at the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the long-sought particle filled the last gap in the standard model of fundamental particles and forces. But since then, the standard model has stood up to every test, yielding no hints of new physics. Now, the Higgs itself may offer a way out of the impasse. Experimenters at the LHC, located at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, plan to hunt for collisions that produce not just one Higgs boson, but two.
A few factors were taken into consideration. These included security conditions, climatic conditions at that time of year, the existence of potential scientific partners, and what facilities were available.
And so, NASA focused its efforts in Senegal. It sent 21 teams to the country, and six to Columbia, which had less favorable climatic conditions. One team, composed of Algerian astronomers from the Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique et Géophysique, also attempted to observe the occultation in the south of Algeria.
Speaking at a Q&A session hosted for a Madrid university’s Master’s of Business Administration students, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talked for nearly an hour about the launch company’s next-generation BFR rocket, the reality of long-term life on Mars, and more, revealing a number of interesting tidbits in the process.
Almost entirely led by questions from the unusually well-informed audience, the graduate students and professors predominately kept the famous SpaceX exec more or less focused on the company’s future, delving into the reasoning behind BFR. Shotwell had only praise for the next-generation launch vehicle, which is targeting initial hop tests in late 2019 and its first full launches as early as 2021, a delay of several months from previous schedule estimates targeting hops in early 2019 and orbit by 2020.
The dust is settling on the Red Planet. Is the remaining Mars Exploration Rover about to rise and shine after three months of slumber? MER Project Manager John Callas returns with a realistic yet hopeful assessment. He also tells us what Opportunity will be asked to do after we hear from her. Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla returns with a preview of China’s next two missions to the Moon, one of which will make the first-ever farside landing. How close is the nearest black hole? We’ll get the answer as Bruce and Mat explore the night sky in this week’s What’s Up.
Researchers are paving the way to total reliance on renewable energy as they study both large- and small-scale ways to replace fossil fuels. One promising avenue is converting simple chemicals into valuable ones using renewable electricity, including processes such as carbon dioxide reduction or water splitting. But to scale these processes up for widespread use, we need to discover new electrocatalysts—substances that increase the rate of an electrochemical reaction that occurs on an electrode surface. To do so, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to new methods to accelerate the discovery process: machine learning.
Zack Ulissi, an assistant professor of chemical engineering (ChemE), and his group are using machine learning to guide electrocatalyst discovery. By hand, researchers spend hours doing routine calculations on materials that may not end up working. Ulissi’s team has created a system that automates these routine calculations, explores a large search space, and suggests new alloys that have promising properties for electrocatalysis.
“This allows us to spend our time asking science questions, like, ‘How do you predict the properties of something,’ ‘What is the thermodynamic model,’ ‘What is the model of the system,’ or ‘How do you represent the system?’” said Ulissi.
