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After years of working with the U.S. military, Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield.
Starshield is likely to further tap the company’s biggest U.S. government customer – the Pentagon – which already represents a high-value buyer of SpaceX’s launches and has shown significant interest in the capabilities of Starlink.
“While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use,” the company wrote on its website.
On its website, SpaceX said the system will have “an initial focus” on three areas: Imagery, communications and “hosted payloads” – the third of which effectively offers government customers the company’s satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform.
The company also markets Starshield as the center of an “end-to-end” offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.
SpaceX notes that Starshield uses “additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely,” building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system.
Another key feature: the “inter-satellite laser communications” links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to “partner satellites,” so as to connect other companies’ government systems.Read more...
It's a miracle!
In a trial led by Dr. Pipe, patients with haemophilia B have been cured of the disease. The one-time therapy, called Hemgenix, was approved by the FDA in November to treat patients with severe haemophilia B. It's now the most expensive drug in the world, but that doesn't seem to bother patients or their doctors.
"For all intents and purposes, this looks like a cure," says Dr. Pipe, who specializes in hematology at the University of Michigan Health System. "They don't have to think about their hemophilia anymore."
The price tag on this miracle isn't exactly cheap: $3.5 million for a one-time dose—and that's just for people who get it through insurance or government funding programs (like Medicare). But as Dr. Pipe says, some patients dosed in earlier trials more than 10 years ago are still keeping bleeds at bay, so it seems likely that this single infusion will last for a lifetime (at least). And to gene therapy experts like Nicole Paulk (who is also an assistant professor of gene therapy at UC), that expectation is reasonable. "This is super reasonable," she says. "It's a very fair. Read more...
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by organisations has more than doubled in the past five years, with companies that spend more on the technology expected to reap more financial rewards, a McKinsey study has said.
The number of companies that said they used AI in at least one business area rose to 50 per cent, from 20 per cent in 2017, according to a survey by the global consultancy. This reflects companies' growing awareness of the technology's importance to their strategy. The number peaked at 58 per cent in 2019.
The erstwhile “AI winter” has transitioned into an “AI spring” as more technology leaders at enterprises see the technology's value and have sought to successfully integrate this into their businesses. This, at a high level, is an emerging formula for getting maximum value from AI… it is paying off in the form of actual bottom-line impact at significant levels.
AI is a significant enabler in the digital transformation the world is currently experiencing as it can streamline business operations and user engagement. The global AI market is projected to surpass $1.7 trillion in 2030, up from $93.5 billion in 2021, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of more than 38 per cent, data from Grand View Research shows.Read more...
Once just a technical term within the crypto ecosystem, self-custody quickly took the main stage when FTX, a multi-billion crypto empire, went down in flames. The prolonged bear market, combined with bankruptcy announcements from once-prominent crypto exchanges, triggered a spike in crypto ownership awareness.
The domino effect of the FTX collapse was a harsh lesson reminding users of a fundamental principle in crypto: Not your keys, not your coins. Since the custody of FTX customers’ assets was on the exchange, users faced issues when they wanted to withdraw the funds they thought belonged to them.
Following the FTX fiasco, though, crypto users are now eager to take that responsibility and regain ownership of their crypto assets. Noticing the shift in interest, the crypto industry is also working hard to respond to the community’s needs.
One such solution is launched by the crypto exchange KuCoin. Available on mobile platforms and as a browser extension, KuCoin Wallet aims to combine the protection of self-custody wallets with an easy-to-use interface that exchange users would also find familiar. To ensure no one but the wallet owner has access to the private keys, KuCoin worked with Hacken for the penetration testing audit. With complete control over their crypto assets and NFTs, users can manage their portfolios across multiple blockchains.
Benefiting from the expansive KuCoin ecosystem, the self-custody KuCoin Wallet allows users to create a free decentralised account.
Cloud development is hard. It's time-consuming, it's complex, and it's not always clear what you should be doing next.
That's why Nitric exists: to make cloud development easy. We're a team of experienced cloud developers who know what it's like to wade through the documentation, get bogged down by the number of infrastructure decisions required, and spend hours on configuring and deploying your code.
So we made Nitric. We built a platform that lets you shift focus back to your product—and build with confidence that it's safe, reliable cloud software. With Nitric, you can jump straight into building your next application with familiar programming languages like JavaScript, Python, C# or Go.
We have templates for each as well as local development out-of-the-box and single command deployments to all major cloud providers. You can skip learning specific cloud services and instead build with familiar components like functions, APIs, events, queues and buckets. And when you're ready Nitric does the heavy lifting of turning these requests into concrete cloud resources—with security and scaling by default.
Our new product Nitric Deploy takes things even further with push-to-deploy from GitHub—you can build and deploy distributed applications for AWS in less than 10 minutes. We also support multiple environments and branches, so you can test new changes in isolation before moving them into production.Read more...
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