A terminally ill patient who opted for assisted death has undergone cryonic preservation at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. This preservation—the first of its kind—signifies an important milestone for cryonics advocates, who argue that the right to death, paradoxically, is a potential pathway to an eternal life.

On October 30, 2018, Alcor performed its 164th cryopreservation. It was an otherwise unremarkable moment for the nonprofit organization, save for the way Norman Hardy of Mountain View, California met his demise. Hardy was diagnosed with terminal metastatic prostate cancer, and it had spread to his bones and lungs. As noted in Alcor’s case summary, his “pain had been poorly managed,” so he opted for assisted death, which was legalized in California in 2016 through the End of Life Options Act (EOLOA).

Tesla is like Cholesterol …

Tesla has been steeped in chaos – and chaos is absolutely the opposite of what a complex manufacturing, distribution, and retail operation needs. Musk himself has sowed that chaos. And he relentlessly continues to sow it.

One of his recent antics was that he told employees in this email last week that the company would embark on a cost-cutting drive that would entail that “all expenses of any kind anywhere in the world, including parts, salary, travel expenses, rent, literally every payment that leaves our bank account must (be) reviewed” by the CFO, and that Musk himself would sign off on every 10th page of expenses.

The CFO and Musk will be busy reviewing and signing off on janitorial department purchases of cleaning materials and toilet paper. The hope is that this amount of work will keep Musk off Twitter, but those hopes too will be dashed.

This post was prompted by a colleague sharing with me this recent study: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6389801/

The authors found that out of 516 studies evaluating the performance of ML algorithms for the diagnostic analysis of medical images, only 31 had externally validated their algorithms.

This should concern us all.

From now till Sept. 30, the public can submit names to be stenciled on microchips that will fly on the Mars 2020 rover and receive a souvenir boarding pass.

The biggest, most expensive science experiment in the world might be losing all its dark matter. But physicists are looking on the bright side.

What an incredible design.

Oww.

What an incredible design.

Continuing from Motherboard, “In an email to Motherboard, a DARPA spokesperson said that four research teams have received allotments of the $45 million funding from the agency as a part of Insect Allies, and that all teams have now entered phase two. The teams include researchers from Penn State University, the University of Texas, and Ohio State University.”

It isn’t difficult to tell what opinion this article represents. Do we need this, or want to trust people with placing genetically modified viruses in the crops that become our grocery store produce?

WhatsApp has admitted to a major cybersecurity breach that has enabled both iPhone and Android devices to be targeted with spyware from Israel’s NSO. This is a major breach for WhatsApp, with the product’s encrypted voice calls seen as a secure alternative to standard calls.

The first direct image of the M87 Galaxy’s supermassive black hole that’s almost the size of our solar system required telescopes of unprecedented precision and sensitivity to give the human species a look into the unknown. The realization of this telescope – the Event Horizon Telescope – was a formidable challenge which required upgrading and connecting a planet-scale network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites, including volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

We gave humanity its first view of a black hole — “a one-way door out of our universe,” said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, of the image of the massive black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy M87 as it was 55 million years ago “This is a landmark in astronomy, an unprecedented scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.”

“The gates of hell, the end of space and time.” That was how black holes were described at the press conference in Brussels where the first ever photograph of one was revealed. The black hole, a super-massive object at the center of M87 shown above, really is a monster, observed Ellie Mae O’Hagan for The Guardian. “Everything unfortunate enough to get too close to it falls in and never emerges again, including light itself. It’s the point at which every physical law of the known universe collapses. Perhaps it is the closest thing there is to hell: it is an abyss, a moment of oblivion.”