Google, Microsoft and a host of labs and start-ups are racing to turn scientific curiosities into working machines.
- By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature magazine on January 4, 2017
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NASA needs to get out of the rocket business and start doing what it’s uniquely qualified for.
- By Howard Bloom on January 4, 2017
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The International Space Station is getting on in years, and at some point in the next decade we’re going to learn the date of its shutdown. But what comes next? A new company called Axiom Space has a plan to launch a commercial space station in the next few years, which would get its start as a module attached to the ISS.
It’s easy to shrug off a plan from a company you’ve never heard of, but Axiom has some big names on board. For example, it’s led by one Mike Suffredini, who managed NASA’s ISS program for 10 years. The time is fast approaching that we need to come up with a successor to the ISS, and Axiom’s commercial station could be it.
The plan calls for the core module to be launched around 2020. There are two versions of this phase of construction; one in which the 9×5 meter module (known as Module 1) is launched in one piece, and another where it’s sent up in pieces and assembled in orbit. Assembling in space would take longer, but sending it up as a single payload would be expensive and risky. The completed Module 1 will have its own propulsion, so it will fly to the ISS after reaching orbit.
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India is going to endorse a Universal Basic Income (UBI), according to a leading advocate of the system.
The world’s largest democracy will release a report in January stating that UBI is “basically the way forward,” according to Professor Guy Standing, who has worked on universal income pilot projects in India.
If implemented, India would join Finland in providing free money to citizens.
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Despite efforts to raise public awareness about the disease, cases of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, have been on the rise in the United States for years. Now, scientists have discovered a new drug that can stop metastasis of the disease, that is, the development of melanoma cells elsewhere in the body — by as much as 90 percent.
The findings are courtesy of a new study published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. For the study, researchers injected immuno-compromised mice with human melanoma cells and exposed them to a man-made, small-molecule drug that targets a gene’s ability to produce RNA molecules (one of the major building blocks of life) and certain proteins found in melanoma tumors. Those genes typically cause the disease to spread, but when they were exposed to the compound, up to 90 percent of the cells were prevented from metastasizing.
The potential drug, known as CCG-203971, is the same as the one the researchers have been studying as a potential treatment for scleroderma, a rare and often fatal autoimmune disease that causes the hardening of skin tissue, lungs, heart, kidneys, and other organs.
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The non-nuclear weapons states must resist that pressure, and continue their historic efforts to protect humanity from the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons. And the citizens of nuclear weapons states must hold their governments accountable for their unconscionable refusal to meet their treaty obligations and negotiate the elimination of these weapons, which are the greatest threat to the security of all peoples throughout the world.
The United Nations has the opportunity to take a major step toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. It is an opportunity that must not be lost.
More than four decades ago, the nations with nuclear arsenals and the world’s non-nuclear states entered into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the nuclear states — the US, Russia, UK, France and China — pledged that if the states that did not have nuclear weapons agreed not to develop them, they would enter into good-faith negotiations toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. During the ensuing years, the three nations that did not sign the NPT — namely India, Pakistan, and Israel — developed nuclear weapons. All of the non-nuclear weapons states that signed the treaty except North Korea have kept their pledge.
Unfortunately, the nuclear powers have not kept their part of the bargain. While the US and Russia have dismantled many of their nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, they retain thousands of them, enough to destroy the world many times over.