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Dec 19, 2016

A New Theory of Gravity Just Passed its First Test. Here’s What This Means for Physics

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Verlinde’s emergent gravity theory makes one very important implication: dark matter does not exist. His research makes sense of the behavior of gravity without the need for the existence of a dark matter particle.

Researchers from the Leiden Observatory have studied more than 33,000 galaxies to see if Verlinde’s theory checks out—and the results show that it is, in fact, more accurate at confirming the universe’s gravity distribution than Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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Dec 19, 2016

3D printing enabled ALTAIR satellite ready to launch in 2017

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, satellites

Millennium Space Systems have reached a major development milestone for their ALTAIR satellite ahead of a proposed launch in March 2017. They have announced that the first satellite has completed development and been shipped. The satellite was enabled by additive manufacturing and has now gained flight qualification.

Paul Swanson, Millennium Space’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations program manager, explained the importance of reaching this target,

This flight qualification of our ALTAIR™ spacecraft represents a key milestone in providing low-risk and very high-platform performance coupled with affordability as the company transitions to full-scale manufacturing of our ALTAIR™ product line and anticipated ALTAIR™ constellations.

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Dec 19, 2016

Scientists produce functional heart pacemaker cells

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, health, life extension

Tissue engineering and Stem cells are a large part of the rejuvenation biotechnology toolkit. Here we have yet more progress and this time the pacemaker cells are replicated for possible use in biological pacemaker therapies.

“Scientists from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University Health Network, have developed the first functional pacemaker cells from human stem cells, paving the way for alternate, biological pacemaker therapy.”

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Dec 19, 2016

New Flying Robots Take Cues From Airborne Animals

Posted by in categories: drones, engineering, robotics/AI

From navigating turbulence, to sleeping midflight, to soaring without a sound, animals’ flight adaptations are helping scientists design better flying robots.

Airborne drones and the animals they mimic are featured in 18 new studies published online Dec. 15 in the journal Interface Focus. This special issue is intended “to inspire development of new aerial robots and to show the current status of animal flight studies,” said the issue’s editor, David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University in California.

Though humans have been building flying machines since the 18th century, these new studies revealed that there is still much to be learned from looking closely at how birds, insects and bats take flight, keep themselves aloft and maneuver to safe landings. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature].

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Dec 19, 2016

Ispace, Inc.

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

According to recent studies, the Moon houses an abundance of precious minerals on its surface, and an estimated 6 billion tons of water ice at its poles. In particular, water can be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen to produce efficient rocket fuel. With a fuel station established in space, the world will witness a revolution in the space transportation system.

To achieve this, ispace is developing micro-robotic technology to provide a low-cost and frequent transportation service to and on the Moon, conduct lunar surface exploration to map, process and deliver resources to our customers in cislunar space.

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Dec 19, 2016

New construction role found for cell demolition tool

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Lysosomes originally thought to be the dust bins of the body have recently been found to have some constructive roles too.


A new role has been discovered for a well-known piece of cellular machinery, which could revolutionise the way we understand how tissue is constructed and remodelled within the body.

Lysosomes are small, enzyme-filled sacks found within cells, which break down old cell components and unwanted molecules.

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Dec 18, 2016

Japan is getting into the lunar mining business

Posted by in categories: business, space

JAXA has signed a memo of understanding with iSpace to create moon mining industry.

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Dec 18, 2016

FDA approves pink, genetically engineered pineapple from Del Monte

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

(FoxNews.com) — Food producer Del Monte has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to start selling a genetically engineered pineapple with pink flesh.

The new species Ananas comosus has been given the more consumer-friendly name of the “Rosé” and, according to The Packer, Del Monte has quietly been working on the fruit’s development since 2005.

So what makes the usually golden-colored fruit pink? The patened pineapple DNA is injected with a healthy dose of lycopene, the bright red pigment found in tomatoes and watermelons.

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Dec 18, 2016

If we made contact with aliens, how would religions react?

Posted by in category: alien life

Just one aspect of our existence, maybe not necessarily survival.


The discovery of life on another planet might seem incompatible with faith in a deity. Yet many theologians are already open to the existence of extraterrestrials, argues the writer Brandon Ambrosino.

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Dec 18, 2016

Google’s DeepMind develops creepy, ultra-realistic human speech synthesis

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI

We all become accustomed to the tone and pattern of human speech at an early age, and any deviations from what we have come to accept as “normal” are immediately recognizable. That’s why it has been so difficult to develop text-to-speech (TTS) that sounds authentically human. Google’s DeepMind AI research arm has turned its machine learning model on the problem, and the resulting “WaveNet” platform has produced some amazing (and slightly creepy) results.

Google and other companies have made huge advances in making human speech understandable by machines, but making the reply sound realistic has proven more challenging. Most TTS systems are based on so-called concatenative technologies. This relies upon a database of speech fragments that are combined to form words. This tends to sound rather uneven and has odd inflections. There is also some work being done on parametric TTS, which uses a data model to generate words, but this sounds even less natural.

DeepMind is changing the way speech synthesis is handled by directly modeling the raw waveform of human speech. The very high-level approach of WaveNet means that it can conceivably generate any kind of speech or even music. Listen above for an example of WaveNet’s voice synthesis. There’s an almost uncanny valley quality to it.

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