Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon Keyspaces, a scalable, highly available, and fully managed database service for Cassandra workloads, the company reported on Thursday.

“Amazon Keyspaces gives customers the ability to run Cassandra without having to worry about managing the underlying hardware, and because it’s also serverless, customers can stand up Cassandra clusters in minutes and scale their database up and down with ease based on the needs of their application,” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Databases, AWS.

Amazon Keyspaces will support the same application code, Apache 2.0 licensed drivers, and developer tools integrated into Cassandra workloads. Customers will be able to migrate on-premises Cassandra workloads to the cloud, without having to manage underlying infrastructure.

The software will also enhance scalability, availability and manageability. Amazon Keyspaces will not use servers to manage, configure or operate large Cassandra clusters. Customers will not need to manually add or remove nodes or rebalance partitions as traffic scales up or down.

Amazon Keyspaces will provide a scalable, highly available and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service. The offering will be compatible with the open-source Apache Cassandra Query Language (CQL) API.

AWS’ solution will also provide customers with single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, and will scale tables up and down automatically based on actual application traffic, with virtually unlimited throughput and storage. Amazon Keyspaces will additionally offer both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes.

Its on-demand capacity will enable customers to pay only for the actual reads and writes performed by their application. The provisioned capacity with auto scaling, customers will be able to optimize the cost of reads and writes for predictable workloads by specifying capacity per workload in advance.

The technology will enable customers with existing Cassandra tables running on-premises or on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to easily migrate those tables to Amazon Keyspaces using AWS services like Amazon EMR or open-source tools like the Cassandra Query Language Shell (cqlsh).

In addition, Amazon Keyspaces will integrate with other AWS services, so customers will be able to securely access to tables using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), monitor their tables using Amazon CloudWatch, manage their encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), automate the creation of resources with AWS CloudFormation and connect their tables to their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with AWS PrivateLink.

One of AWS’ Keyspaces’ customers, Elsevier, a global information analytics business that provides scientists and clinicians with digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, has recently integrated the solution.

“We were concerned about managing and monitoring the Cassandra infrastructure due to its complexity and time required to manage and support,” said Edward Lewis, manager of Information Technology, Elsevier. “Amazon Keyspaces is fully managed and serverless, giving us the scalability, fast performance, and reliability we need to run our applications.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 73 Availability Zones (AZs) within 23 geographic regions, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Italy, Japan, and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

NASA has announced its efforts to combat COVID-19, utilizing efforts across the nation to augment the national response, the administration reported on Friday.

“All the work being done shows how NASA is uniquely equipped to aid in the federal response to coronavirus by leveraging the ingenuity of our workforce, mobilizing investments made in the U.S. space agency to combat this disease, and working with public and private partnerships to maximize results,” said NASA administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient Jim Bridenstine.

NASA has launched NASA@WORK, an agency wide call for ideas on its internal crowdsourcing platform. The submitted ideas will recommend strategies for how the agency can leverage its expertise and capabilities to help the nation cope with the pandemic.

In addition to the NASA@WORK initiative, the agency workforce has developed ideas and worked with partners to develop responses to the health crisis within the last month, including VITAL Ventilator, Aerospace Valley Positive Pressure Helmet and Surface Decontamination System.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have designed a new high-pressure ventilator tailored specifically to treat COVID-19 patients. Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally (VITAL), has passed a critical test and now is under review for an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The solution has been designed to treat patients with mild symptoms to keep traditional ventilators available for patients with more severe COVID-19 symptoms. VITAL can be built faster and maintained more easily than a traditional ventilator.

VITAL has been manufactured with fewer parts to make it more economical to produce. It was designed to use parts currently available to potential manufacturers but not compete with the existing supply chain of currently made ventilators.

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California partnered with Antelope Valley Hospital, the City of Lancaster, Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company (TSC), Antelope Valley College and members of the Antelope Valley Task Force to solve possible shortages of critical medical equipment in the local community.

The task force has developed an oxygen helmet to treat COVID-19 patients that exhibit minor symptoms and reduce the need for those patients to use ventilators. The device will function like a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to force oxygen into a patient’s low-functioning lungs.

The Aerospace Valley Positive Pressure Helmet was successfully tested by doctors at Antelope Valley Hospital. The company has produced 500 and a request was submitted April 22 to the FDA for an emergency use authorization.

Through its Regional Economic Development Program, engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio have partnered with Ohio company Emergency Products and Research in 2015 to guide the development and production of a small, portable and economical device.

The device will decontaminate spaces, including ambulances, in under an hour and at a fraction of the cost of systems currently in use. AMBUStat has been used in police cars and other areas to kill airborne and surface particles of viruses. NASA will conduct additional research to continue to maximize the effectiveness of this device on COVID-19.

“NASA’s strength has always been our ability and passion – collective and individual – for solving problems,” Bridenstine added.

About NASA

NASA’s legacy of human space exploration, research and technology development has yielded countless innovations that prove the direct and profound impact of taxpayer investment in America’s space program on our quality of life on Earth, including improved technologies for water purification, air filtration, kidney dialysis and tele-medicine, as well as research that has led to improved vaccines, drug therapies, and mitigations for bone loss.

We can only speculate as to the breadth of transformative benefits that will come from America’s return to the Moon through NASA’s Artemis program and our efforts to put the first humans on Mars.

Battelle has announced that its team of scientists, doctors and researchers in collaboration with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center has reported that a person with a clinically complete spinal cord injury (SCI) can use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to simultaneously reanimate motor function and sense of touch by using residual touch signaling from the subject’s hand, the company released on Friday.

“The notion that clinical completeness in spinal cord injury is very often neurophysiologically ‘discomplete’ acknowledges that activity in residual neural circuitry, in this study specifically ascending sensory pathway signals, can be detected and utilized to both augment motor function but also to restore sensory perception from below the level of injury,” said Dr. Keith Tansey, Professor of Neurosurgery and Neurobiology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and Past President of the American Spinal Injury Association,

The results have analyzed years of data collected from the NeuroLifeTM program study. The participant, Ian Burkhart, suffered a spinal cord injury in 2010 when diving into the ocean, and has lived with paralysis in his hands and legs.

“When the chip was placed on the surface of Ian’s motor cortex in 2014, it was not known that the signals related to object touch could be observed because of the paralysis,” said lead author and Battelle Principal Research Scientist Patrick Ganzer. “Furthermore, Ian has a very severe SCI that should essentially block hand touch signals from even reaching the brain.

The analysis has shown that subperceptual touch prior to a spinal cord injury has affected Burkhart’s motor cortex even though there is essentially a block from the nerves in his arms and their connection back to the brain.

The subperceptual signal can be detected in the brain, rerouted via the brain-computer interface and sent back to a wearable haptic system to restore the sense of touch. “It has been amazing to see the possibilities of sensory information coming from a device that was originally created to only allow me to control my hand in a one-way direction,” said Burkhart.

Medical technologies will provide both movement and sensation back to their users and have the potential to improve independence. Battelle’s NeuroLife team will continue to work toward a take-home BCI system.

The system is aimed to assist individuals with tetraplegia and address the user needs by leveraging the knowledge gained in a five-year clinical study to provide technology options to these individuals to improve their everyday lives.

“This work represents an important milestone in the development of BCIs for restoring hand functions after SCI,” said Douglas Weber, co-investigator and Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “Ian has demonstrated that by recovering even simple touch sensations, his ability to control his hand through BCI improves dramatically.”

Tansey said the work is important for people who have a spinal cord injury, and for those who care for them. “In this proof of principle report, the authors have leveraged on a rarely appreciated aspect of spinal cord injury to provide a novel and important advancement in neurological functioning using a brain-computer interface,” Tansey added.

About Battelle

Every day, the people of Battelle apply science and technology to solving what matters most. At major technology centers and national laboratories around the world, Battelle conducts research and development, designs and manufactures products, and delivers critical services for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio since its founding in 1929, Battelle serves the national security, health and life sciences, and energy and environmental industries.