A wide-ranging shipwreck survey funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is continuing after his death, and the latest discovery focuses on the Japanese battleship Hiei, which sank in the South Pacific during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942.
Japanese researchers picked up the sonar signature of the wreck off the Solomon Islands a year ago, sparking a voyage by the Research Vessel (R/V) Petrel to check out the site and get the first on-the-scene underwater views.
One of the legacies left behind by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who passed away last October, is a drone development program aimed at providing aerial intelligence for Africa’s anti-poaching efforts.
The program takes a share of the spotlight in a behind-the-scenes report about Allen’s philanthropic operation at Vulcan Inc., published last week by Inside Philanthropy.
Vulcan has been working for years on a surveillance program for elephants and other African species, including the use of autonomous aerial vehicles to patrol protected areas. Allen’s team sought a regulatory exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration three years ago to test drones such as the DJI Phantom 3and the UASUSA Tempest for conservation purposes.
The in-house drone program has advanced significantly since then. Inside Philanthropy reports Vulcan is adapting off-the-shelf equipment to create affordable drones that are optimized for anti-poaching surveillance.
It’s been a year since a squadron of underwater robots was sent out to monitor the underside of Antarctica’s Dotson Ice Shelf, and researchers report that the whole squad has survived the harsh southern winter.
Except for one unfortunate battery-powered drone, that is.
“The one that hasn’t come back, it could be any number of things,” said Jason Gobat, a senior principal oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Maybe something broke, or maybe it got stuck in the silt at the bottom of the sea.
The good news is that two other Seaglider drones are continuing to transmit data via satellite. Four free-floating EM-APEX probes have been heard from as well.
Craig Lee, another senior principal oceanographer at the UW lab, said getting useful scientific data from the robo-squadron amounts to mission success for the research project known as Ocean Robots Beneath Ice Shelves, or ORBIS.
The experiment, supported with nearly $2 million in funding from Seattle’s Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, has shown that the robots can use acoustic signals to navigate their way under the ice shelf, monitor the water that flows into and out of the ice shelf’s subsurface cavity, and keep operating for a whole year.
Stratolaunch, the Seattle-based space venture created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen seven years ago, says it’s discontinuing its programs to develop a new type of rocket engine and a new line of rockets.
The company said it would continue work on the world’s largest airplane, which is designed to serve as a flying launch pad for rockets. Last week, Stratolaunch put its 385-foot-wide, twin-fuselage plane through a high-speed taxi test that many saw as a precursor for its first test flight at Mojave Air and Space Port.
“Stratolaunch is ending the development of their family of launch vehicles and rocket engine. We are streamlining operations, focusing on the aircraft and our ability to support a demonstration launch of the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air-launch vehicle,” the company said in an emailed statement. “We are immensely proud of what we have accomplished and look forward to first flight in 2019.”
The dramatic turn of events comes three months after Allen’s death.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has racked up another round of recognition for his role on the space frontier: Next week he’ll be inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, alongside aerospace executives, pioneering skydiver Joe Kittinger and musician Kenny G.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who passed away in October, will receive a posthumous tribute as a “Flown West Legend” during the Living Legends of Aviation Awards ceremony, scheduled for Jan. 18 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif.
The star-studded event, produced as a fundraiser for the Kiddie Hawk Air Academy, honors those who have made significant contributions to aviation. Bezos is among this year’s inductees by virtue of his role in founding the Blue Origin space venture and supporting it to the tune of $1 billion a year.
It wasn’t just Seattle’s skyline that turned blue on the night of Nov. 3: Back east in the nation’s capital, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum cast a blue spotlight on the history-making SpaceShipOne rocket plane in honor of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who provided the money that helped it fly to space.
Even after death, the philanthropic initiatives from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen just keep on coming.
Today the Paul G. Allen Philanthropies and its consortium of partners unveiled the Allen Coral Atlas, a database of satellite imagery and environmental data aimed at mapping and monitoring the world’s coral reefs in unprecedented detail.
The foundation of the atlas is a global mosaic of satellite imagery, acquired starting last year by Planet’s constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. The images document coral reefs at a resolution of 4 meters (13 feet) per pixel.
Other partners — including the University of Queensland, the Carnegie Institute for Science, the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and the National Geographic Society — are analyzing and validating the images to produce maps that show reef depth and water color, and discriminate between the reefs and algae, land, rock, sand and rubble.
Seattle billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen’s death comes just as his Stratolaunch space venture is counting down to the first flight of the world’s biggest airplane — and lifting the veil on a wide range of space applications.
Now it’s up to the Stratolaunch team to make good on the high-flyingest idea from the self-described “Idea Man,” who succumbed to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 65.
Nine years after he underwent treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a potentially fatal but treatable form of cancer, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen says the disease has returned.
On Twitter and in a blog post, the 65-year-old billionaire investor, philanthropist and self-described “Idea Man” says he and his physicians are optimistic about his chances. Allen intends to stay involved with his Vulcan Inc. holding company and the research institutes that he’s founded, as well as the sports teams that he owns, the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers.
Paul Allen has made a name for himself as a co-founder of Microsoft, a supporter of artificial intelligence research and a contributor to causes such as wildlife conservation — so it only makes sense that the Seattle-area billionaire wants to use machine learning to further his philanthropic goals.
His latest contribution comes through the Seattle-based Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact, or VMLCI. “Its mission will be to apply the tools of machine learning and AI for good,” Bill Hilf, CEO of Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., said today in a tweet.
