NASA is awarding nearly $50 million total in awards to small businesses and research institutions to support space technology, the agency announced May 26. The funds are part of Phase I of the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program.

The investments are spread out over 39 states and the District of Columbia, supporting 333 proposals from 257 small businesses and 41 research institutions. Each proposal team will receive $150,000 – a 20% increase over previous years’ funding. Phase I SBIR contracts are awarded to small businesses and last for six months, while Phase I STTR contracts are awarded to small businesses in partnership with a research institution and last for 13 months.

Image: Scout Autonomous Software. Photo: Scout

You may be surviving in the marketplace, but is your business really thriving and winning? In my role as a mentor, I challenge every business leader to be more open-minded as they face the challenges of change and new competitors entering their space. Most are reluctant to tip that balance between hard-won experience versus new thinking that can take them to the next level.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Newswise — Specific cellular, molecular and gene expression patterns in brain areas are linked to function, but their precise relationships remain largely unknown. New findings by scientists at the Human Brain Project (HBP) shed light on these relationships and enable a more comprehensive understanding of human brain organisation.

The HBP researchers conducted a study that targeted three levels of cortical organisation: cytoarchitecture, neurotransmitter receptor architecture and neurotransmitter receptor gene expression. The study elucidates principles of human brain organisation across the visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor functional systems, going beyond the simplified view of a ‘mosaic’ of areas forming the neocortex. The results were published in the journal NeuroImage.

Image: Credit: D. Zachlod, Julich Brain Atlas The analyzed areas: visual system (purple line), auditory (orange) and motor area (dark grey), and the somatosensory area (green line)

WTWH Media today announced that the Call for Presentations for the RoboBusiness Conference & Expo is now open. The event takes place October 19-20, 2022 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. The entry deadline for submitting speaker proposals is June 30th, 2022.

The RoboBusiness Conference & Expo has been reimagined for 2022 to better serve RoboBusiness attendees, as well as the robotics sector as a whole. The event is specifically designed to reveal the most impactful research advances, identify the most promising opportunities, illustrate the leading technical, business and investment trends, as well as highlight public and private sector robotics business development initiatives designed to support robotics innovation and sector growth.

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (6/2/2022) – Differences in behavior among people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are closely related to differences in neuroanatomy – the shape of a brain – a team of Boston College neuroscientists report today in the journal Science. This discovery could help to understand the causes of ASD, and to develop personalized interventions.

The team used artificial intelligence (AI) to study magnetic resonance imaging data from over 1,000 individuals with ASD and compared those images to AI-generated simulations of what the brains would look like if they did not have ASD.

The book “Artificial Intelligence Based Cancer Nanomedicine: Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Bioethics” gives a comprehensive explanation of the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in cancer nanomedicine. It presents 10 chapters that cover multiple dimensions of the subject. These dimensions are:

– The need of AI and ML in designing new cancer drugs

– Application of AI in cancer drug design

– AI-based drug delivery models for cancer drugs

– Diagnostic applications of AI

– Intelligent nanosensors for biomarker profiling

– Predictive models for metastatic cancer

– Cancer nanotheranostics

– Ethics of AI in medicine

Image: https://amzn.to/3N8jI9b

New Delhi, June 2 – The pandemic brought the urgent need for enterprises across the spectrum to adopt new and emerging technologies. The global banking sector has been at the forefront in investing in the latest technologies like AI/ML, advanced analytics and Metaverse.

NatWest, a major retail and commercial bank in the UK, has made strong progress over the last 4-5 years embracing technologies like private and public Cloud, RPA tools, AI/ML, Blockchain and Metaverse.

Image: https://weeklyvoice.com

It's been said that there's no business like show business. Although I have no doubt that Hollywood is in a league of its own, my experience is that there's no business like family-owned business, and there are 32.4 million family-owned businesses in the United States as validation.

Family-owned businesses are the engine of the American economy, generating 78% of new job creation and accounts for $80 million jobs, according to research by Family Enterprise USA. Studies have also shown that approximately 35% of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled. In fact, the greatest part of our country's wealth lies with family-owned businesses; contributing 54% of the private sector GDP, or $7.7 trillion dollars.

One of my first jobs after I got out of the Marine Corps was at a software company during the dot-com bubble. There, I was responsible for selling training software designed to help network engineers, software developers and database administrators pass their certification exams.

In a novel experiment, a woman with advanced pancreatic cancer saw her tumors dramatically shrink after researchers in Oregon turbocharged her own immune cells, highlighting a possible new way to someday treat a variety of cancers.

Kathy Wilkes isn't cured but said what's left of her cancer has shown no sign of growth since the one-time treatment last June.

An experimental drug restored brain synapses in two mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, raising hopes that it could help revive cognitive function in human dementia patients, Yale University researchers report June 1 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

While much research in Alzheimer’s has centered on reducing levels of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain that is a hallmark of the disease, recent studies have suggested that immune system response in the brain also plays a role in memory loss in patients.

San Francisco, May 30 – US-built supercomputer titled ‘Frontier’ on Monday dethroned Japan’s ‘Fugaku’ (developed by the Riken Institute and Fujitsu), as the world’s fastest machine with 1.1 exaflops of performance on the 59th TOP500 list published by an international conference of computer experts.

The Frontier supercomputer at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.

Image: https://weeklyvoice.com

Nowadays, every company is a cloud company in some way or another. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses of all sizes can go about building their tech stack, changing the way they approach everything from data management to product development.

However, just being on the cloud doesn’t necessarily make a firm a cloud company, says Yash Thakker, director of sales at cloud consultancy firm Searce.

Image: Yash Thakker, associate director at Searce / Photo credit: Searce

OSU astronomers have detected 116,000 new variable stars, according to a new article.

All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernova (ASAS-SN), a global network of 20 telescopes that can peer into the cosmos at a depth 50,000 times greater than the human eye, discovered these celestial bodies. The study has been run by Ohio State researchers for nearly a decade.

Now, in a paper posted on arXiv, an open-access preprint server, researchers explain how they used machine learning to find and classify variable stars, which are objects in space whose brightness changes over time, especially when seen from Earth.

Observing the variations in these stars’ properties over time can give us valuable insights into their masses, radii, temperatures, and even their chemical makeup. As a matter of fact, our sun is a variable star. According to Collin Christy, the primary author of the article and an ASAS-SN analyst at Ohio State, surveys like ASAS-SN are particularly useful for identifying systems that can expose the intricacies of stellar processes.

Image: Astronomers Detect 116,000 New Variable Stars That Change Brightness

CIOs must create flexible IT organizations if they want to implement technology services that can cope with fast-changing business demands. So says Cynthia Stoddard, CIO at Adobe, in which role she has implemented a range of techniques, including a cloud strategy, a flexible architecture and an agile IT organization.

These, she argues, have helped the IT department to build a much closer relationship to the rest of the business and to respond quickly and effectively to its requirements. The hope is that this joined-up approach will leave Adobe well-placed to deal with new business challenges in the Vaccine Economy.

The days when companies could afford to treat IT as simply the department that keeps the computers running are long gone. From business intelligence that informs long term strategy to new applications that create competitive advantage in the marketplace, technology can deliver massive value to business leaders. But the sad fact remains: executives perceive IT as an obstacle rather than an enabler for business. Why is this happening, and what can be done to change the conversation and enable digital transformation?

Scientists have taught the molecular machines that kill harmful bacteria to see their target in a new light.

The most recent version of the nanoscale drills made at Rice University works with visible light instead of ultraviolet (UV) light, which was used in previous versions. In testing on real infections, they have also been found to be effective in destroying bacteria.

Image: https://www.revyuh.com

It may be a cliché but it’s true: the last two years have been extraordinary. In just 24 months, we’ve seen a decade’s worth of transformation, much of it driven by emerging technologies, such as data analytics, AI, blockchain and Web 3.0. Meanwhile, the likes of voice recognition, neural networks and cognitive systems, all of which have been talked about since the 1980s, now have both the computing power and cost of storage required to unlock their full innovative potential.

The concept of connected cars has evolved a lot lately, and as a result, software developers across the globe have come up with mobile applications that often provide much more advanced functionality than what the car manufacturer has to offer in the first place.

In many ways, this is something that totally makes sense, as third-party app devs typically create new software, based entirely on user feedback and requests from the community.

Image: https://www.autoevolution.com

One of my dreams (and a lot of people’s dreams probably) is to be able to work remotely in a small cabin somewhere in the middle of nature and then disconnect from the world after the work is done. That will most likely remain a dream in the near future but seeing other people’s dream come true is a hobby I’ve developed lately. I also take notes so that if ever I get to live out this plan someday, I know what I want and how to get it.

Image: https://www.yankodesign.com