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How do you know where anything is in space? Sure, you can say, “Oh, that star, it’s the one in the middle of the Big Dipper,” but that’s not very useful in an era of incredible telescopes peeping at galaxies billions of light-years away. On January 1, 2019, scientists will adopt the newest, internationally standardized frame of reference to help locate things in space.

The third edition of the International Celestial Reference Frame, or ICRF-3, is the most up-to-date version of the International Astronomy Union’s standardized reference frame. Imagine the universe as a graph from geometry—scientists need a place to put the origin and axes.

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A devastating solar storm which could wipe out communications on Earth and fry power grids is a matter of ‘when not if’ the head of the Met Office’s Space Weather Monitoring centre has warned.

Extreme space weather has already caused widespread disruption, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million people without power in 1989 while Apollo astronauts narrowly missed being exposed to deadly radiation in 1972 and solar flares in 2003 forced the crew of the International Space Station to take cover.

The largest solar storm ever recorded, The Carrington Event in 1859, knocked out Telegraph systems and even set fire to paper in offices.

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All the evidence shows our universe emerged from a single event: an eruption commonly known as the Big Bang.

What preceded that point is a mystery.

But it has significant implications.

It’s about the fate of our universe.

We know space is expanding. We can see that in the way all the galaxies around us are moving outward. But how far can it extend? What happens next?

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking’s ‘ghosts’ may have been found” | >

This evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the company’s future massive rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR). Maezawa plans to fly on the trip as early as 2023, and he wants to take artists with him to turn the entire ride into an art project called #dearMoon. A website for the mission went live after the announcement.

“Finally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the Moon! I choose to go to the moon with artists!” Maezawa said to announce his trip at a SpaceX event.

Maezawa, who is 42, reportedly has a current net worth of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. He is also an avid art collector, and he spent $110.5 million on a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat called Untitled last year. As an artist, he wants to invite other artists to come along with him on his ride. Maezawa says he has “bought all the seats” on the BFR and will be looking for others to join him on a week-long mission around the Moon.

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On the new article by Prof Dr S. Olshansky published in JAMA, advising to focus on healthspan extension not on lifespan extension. No, I personally believe that we can still focus on lifespan extension. We could obtain indefinite healthy life extension by different methods of rejuvenation because the rejuvenation process eliminates the main reason for sickness ie the aging diseases and renders us healthy again! And also only through indefinite life extension we could close the gap of tens of years between the lifespan in different social and ethnic groups (Lens-Pechakova, Rejuvenation Res. 2014 Apr;17:239–42)

Clinicians, scientists and public health professionals should proudly “declare victory” in their efforts to extend the human lifespan to its very limits, according to University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky.

In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Olshansky writes that the focus should shift to compressing the “red zone” — the time at the end of life characterized by frailty and disease, and extending the “healthspan” — the length of time when a person is alive and healthy.

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