“Sarah De Lagarde lost an arm and a leg after being run over by two trains in London. Now, she is the recipient of the world’s first AI-powered bionic arm. The arm’s software learns and improves over time, becoming better at predicting her movements the more she uses it.”

From BBC.

“The potential for our understanding of the universe has taken a giant leap forward after Frontier, a supercomputer based in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), created a simulation of the universe at a scale never before achieved.

Frontier used a software platform called the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) as part of ExaSky, a project that formed part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) $1.8 billion Exascale Computing Project — the largest software R&D initiative backed by the DOE.

Under Exasky, scientific applications were required to run up to 50 times faster than previous benchmarks, but Frontier and HACC quickly raced ahead of expectations — running almost 300 times faster than similar simulations of Saturn’s moon Titan. The DoE/HACC team had spent seven years since the first simulation enhancing the capabilities on exascale supercomputers like Frontier.

This allowed for hydrodynamic cosmology simulations, a far more computationally intensive computer model that incorporates principles like the expansion of the universe and the influence of dark matter. Previous models only incorporated measures of gravity, gas or plasma.”

From Live Science.

“Roughly 10,000 satellites are orbiting our planet right now, at speeds of up to 17,000mph (27,000km/h). Every one of these delicate contraptions is in constant free-fall and would drop straight back down to Earth were it not for the blistering speeds at which they travel. It’s their considerable sideways momentum, perfectly stabilised against the Earth’s gravitational pull downwards, that keeps satellites in orbit.

A new class of satellites is aiming to push the limits of this balancing act and plough a much more precarious, lower orbit that would skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Known as Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), spacecraft at these altitudes have to battle against the significantly greater drag from the air in the upper reaches of the atmosphere than their loftier cousins, lest they get pushed out of the sky. Should they manage it, however, such satellites might achieve something even more jaw-dropping – they could potentially fly forever…

There are some very good reasons for operating a satellite in VLEO. The first is Earth imaging – the closer you are to Earth, the higher resolution your images can be. ‘You could either have smaller cameras and gain the same quality of data, or the same camera and get a higher resolution,’ adds Newsam…

The other major application of being in VLEO is that you are closer to the ground for communications. That is particularly useful for space internet services, like SpaceX’s Starlink network, which currently beams the internet to receivers on the ground from higher orbits. By using lower satellites in VLEO, the antennas can act like mobile phone towers and beam the internet straight to your phone.”

From BBC.

“Visualizing cells after editing specific genes can help scientists learn new details about the function of those genes. But using microscopy to do this at scale can be challenging, particularly when studying thousands of genes at a time.

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with collaborators at Calico Life Sciences, have developed an approach that brings the power of microscopy imaging to genome-scale CRISPR screens in a scalable way. 

PERISCOPE — which stands for perturbation effect readout in situ via single-cell optical phenotyping — combines two technologies developed by Broad scientists: Cell Painting, which can capture images and key measures of subcellular compartments at scale, and Optical Pooled Screening, which “barcodes” cells and uses CRISPR to systematically turn off individual genes to study their function in those cells. 

The new technique lets scientists study the effects of perturbing over 20,000 genes on hundreds of image-based cellular features. Generating data with the method is more than 10 times less expensive than comparable high-dimensional approaches.”

From Broad Institute.