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The plague death toll shows no sign of slowing as official figures reveal 165 have now lost their lives in Madagascar’s ‘worst outbreak in 50 years’.

Data shows a 15 per cent jump in fatalities over three days, with scientists concerned it has reached ‘crisis’ point and 10 countries now placed on high alert.

At least 2,034 people have been struck down by a more lethal form of the ‘medieval disease’ so far in the country off the coast of Africa, according to WHO statistics.

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A group of security researchers has remotely hacked a Boeing 757 aircraft without the knowledge of the pilots, a US government official has claimed.

Robert Hickey, a Homeland Security cyber investigator, managed to take over the passenger jet on the runway at Atlantic City airport, New Jersey.

A Boeing official has said the test is unlikely to indicate a major threat to airliners, adding: ‘I’m not afraid to fly’.

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The structures were uncovered in the Harrat Khaybar region in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s and were referred to as the ‘Works of the Old Men’ by the region’s Bedouin population.

Most of them were discovered through satellite surveys and no archaeological fieldwork has yet been carried out.

Previous research has found thousands of stone structures that form geometric patterns in the Middle East.

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American troops would find themselves badly outnumbered and at risk of defeat if war suddenly broke out with North Korea.

That is the stark warning issued by Lieutenant General Jan-Marc Jouas, the former deputy commander of U.S. Forces in Korea, in a letter to Democrats this month.

Jouas cautioned that it would take days or months for reinforcements to reach the region, leaving 28,000 American troops and 490,000 South Korean soldiers to fend off 1.2million North Korean fighters.

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In June, several dozen scientists flew to Big Sky, Montana, to discuss the latest in CRISPR research. They had a lot to talk about, given that CRISPR—a tool that allows scientists to cut DNA to disable genes or insert new ones—is currently the hottest topic in biology, mentioned in the same breath as pronouncements like “changing the world” and “curing humanity of disease.”

On the second day in Big Sky, a Japanese researcher named Osamu Nureki got up to play a short movie clip. “I was sitting in the front, and I just heard this gasp from everyone behind me,” says Sam Sternberg, who worked in the CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley. It was, he says, the biggest reaction to data he’s ever seen at a conference.

Nureki’s paper was published in Nature Communications Friday, and by early morning, the video that astonished the room in Big Sky was making the rounds on science Twitter, too. I watched it, still bleary-eyed from sleep, and I jolted awake immediately.

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Well, it has been a super busy month due to the popularity of the new Kurzgesagt videos about aging, and we have seen a massive positive response from the audience to the ideas presented there.

At the time of writing, 116,000 people have liked the video so far, and a mere 963 people have disliked it, with almost 2 million total views to date. Once again, as in the previous video, the ratio of support versus opposition is massively in favor of doing something about aging.

This is most welcome, though it is not entirely unexpected. It is no surprise that the majority of people support continued health and the eradication of age-related diseases through the development of advanced medicines. If you have not seen both videos, we recommend that you take a few minutes to enjoy them today.

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As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

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