Lifeboat Foundation

US spies are probing whether Covid was created by a Chinese military scientist before it leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to reports.

Zhou Yusen, who worked for the People’s Liberation Army, filed a patent for a Covid vaccine before the pandemic was declared — and mysteriously died just weeks later.

Zhou, 54, worked alongside researchers at the under-fire Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab at the centre of the storm over a possible lab leak.

A new solar-powered high-altitude drone has successfully navigated a stratospheric test, opening the door to a new set of possibilities for unmanned vehicles, not least in modern warfare.

The PHASA-35 solar and battery-powered unmanned aerial system reached an altitude of 66,000 feet during a 24-hour test flight launched from New Mexico in June, British defense giant BAE Systems said in mid-July.

The stratospheric test, which comes after the system’s maiden flight back in 2020, “marks a significant milestone” in the development program started in 2018, BAE said in a press release.

Transparent and flexible displays, which have received a lot of attention in various fields including automobile displays, bio–health care, military, and fashion, are in fact known to break easily when experiencing small deformations. To solve this problem, active research is being conducted on many transparent and flexible conductive materials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, silver nanowires, and conductive polymers.

A joint research team led by Professor Kyung Cheol Choi from the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering and Dr. Yonghee Lee from the National Nano Fab Center (NNFC) announced the successful development of a water-resistant, transparent, and flexible OLED using MXene nanotechnology. The material can emit and transmit light even when exposed to water.

This research was published as a front cover story of ACS Nano under the title “Highly Air-Stable, Flexible, and Water-Resistive 2D Titanium Carbide MXene-Based RGB Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays for Transparent Free-Form Electronics.”

A rather macabre interactive map demonstrates how the area you live in would be impacted if a nuclear bomb were to hit it. Nuclear war is as big a talking point these days as it ever has been. Advert With Russia and Ukraine still at war, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made some not-so-veiled threats about nuclear weapon use.

A meteor has exploded over the Atlantic Ocean with the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s one of the ways that civilisation as we know it could end, with an asteroid impact sending the human race the way of the dinosaurs. It’s a terrifying prospect, and the film Don’t Look Up with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio really didn’t help matter with its demonstration of the paralysis and greed which could doom humanity.

The weaponization of the scientific and technological breakthroughs stemming from human genome research presents a serious global security challenge. Gene-editing pioneer and Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna often tells a story of a nightmare she once had. A colleague asked her to teach someone how her technology works. She went to meet the student and “was shocked to see Adolf Hitler, in the flesh.”

Doudna is not alone in being haunted by the power of science. Famously, having just returned home from Los Alamos in early 1945, John von Neumann awakened in panic. “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left,” he stammered while straining to speak to his wife. He surmised, however, that “it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they knew is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.”

According to biographer Ananyo Bhattacharya, von Neumann saw what was happening in Nazi Germany and the USSR and believed that “the best he could do is allow politicians to make those [ethical and security] decisions: to put his brain in their hands.” Living through a devastating world war, the Manhattan Project polymath “had no trust left in human nature.”

Similar to Interstellar, Oppenheimer (now in theaters) finds Christopher Nolan at his most abstract, with the director working overtime to ascribe a visual language to concepts just beyond our comprehension.

It wasn’t enough to simply make a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb — he needed to take us inside the extraordinary theoretical mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played in the film by Cillian Murphy) and show us the Big Bang-like birth of quantum physics and how it directly led to the creation of the atomic bomb.

RELATED: Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bombs Marked a New Geologic Age of Humans.

Ignatiev/iStock.

“It’s hard to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers,” stated the article.

Is Program Manager, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H — https://arpa-h.gov/people/ross-uhrich/), which is focused on advancing high-potential, high-impact biomedical and health research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity, accelerating better health outcomes targeting society’s most challenging health problems.

Under the ARPA-H portfolio, Dr. Uhrich is responsible for the recently launched Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO — https://arpa-h.gov/engage/programs/nitro/) program which seeks to develop new ways of helping the human body repair its own joints, with the goal of revolutionizing treatment for osteoarthritis — a common and often very painful condition where bones and cartilage break down.

Continue reading “Dr. Ross Uhrich, DMD, MBA — Program Manager, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)” »