MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Tough, space-proof ‘water bears’ would fail in Martian soil, study

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Tough, space-proof ‘water bears’ would fail in Martian soil, s

Tardigrades, the microscopic “water bears” known for surviving space vacuum, extreme radiation, and freezing temperatures, have finally found a challenge they cannot easily beat: the soil of Mars.

A new study demonstrates that while the Martian surface is naturally harmful to these tough creatures, a simple water rinse might be the key to future colonization and planetary protection.

Testing the toughest

Researchers at Penn State University determined the effects of Martian regolith—the loose mineral layer covering the planet’s bedrock—on complex multicellular organisms. While bacterial and fungal responses to simulated Martian soil have been extensively studied, its impact on animals is poorly understood.

“We know a lot about bacteria and fungi in simulated regolith, but very little about how they impact animals—even microscopic animals, like tardigrades,” stated Corien Bakermans, the study’s lead author and a microbiologist at Penn State.

A lethal environment

The researchers used two types of lab-made Martian soil simulants derived from NASA’s Curiosity rover data: MGS-1, a global simulant representing general Martian surface conditions, and OUCM-1, a composition modelled after the Rocknest Deposit in Gale Crater.

The results showed a significant decline in tardigrade activity within the MGS-1 simulant. Within two days, many specimens became inactive or died. The OUCM-1 simulant was less harsh but still significantly inhibited compared to a control group placed in standard Earth beach sand.

Microscopic analysis revealed mineral particles clustered around the tardigrades’ mouths, suggesting physical or chemical interference with their biological functions. The harshness of the untreated soil surprised the researchers, since tardigrades are famous for entering a “tun” state—a form of extreme dehydration—to survive almost any environment.

The water solution

A key breakthrough occurred when the team attempted to wash the MGS-1 simulant with water before introducing the tardigrades. The researchers found that the animals’ survival rates and vigor bounced back to levels almost the same as on Earth.

“It seems that there’s something very damaging in MGS-1 that can dissolve in water—maybe salts or some other compound,” Bakermans added.

This discovery has two important implications for future space missions. First, it suggests the Martian surface has a natural “defense mechanism” that might protect the planet from accidental contamination by Earth microbes. Second, it provides a roadmap for future colonists: if the soil can be washed, it can likely be used to grow crops and support a functioning ecosystem.

Implications for Mars colonization

The study highlights the challenges of planetary protection, the global effort to prevent biological cross-contamination between planets. If Martian soil is naturally lethal to Earth’s toughest animals, the risk of “forward contamination” might be lower than previously feared.

However, the need for water to “clean” the soil is a major logistical hurdle. Water is a precious, finite resource on Mars. While knowing that the soil can be neutralized is a major step forward, large-scale washing would require significant infrastructure.

The researchers also noted that this study focused solely on soil chemistry and did not account for Mars’ extreme temperature fluctuations or its low atmospheric pressure.

The study was published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-nativ

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure.

TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

"As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."

The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors.

Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants

Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.

"When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents."

The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers.

These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000.

"The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes."

Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch

What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town."

The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout.

This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not.

"The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity."

How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue

Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month.

Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive."

The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works.

"We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came."

From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion

Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects.

Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month.

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com