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Blog – Page 1116

Mosses are among Earth’s great terraformers, turning barren rock into fertile soils, and now a team of scientists is proposing these non-vascular plants could do the same on Mars.

Whether we should introduce life from Earth onto our red neighbor is another question – we don’t have a great track record with this on our own planet.

But if we decide it’s worth messing with soil on Mars to create a second home for us Earthlings, ecologist Xiaoshuang Li and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a candidate that they think should do just the trick.

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NASA’s Juno orbiter has returned its latest batch of images of giant Jupiter, which are as impressive as ever.

Despite suffering from radiation damage earlier this year, its JunoCam camera—boasting just a two-megapixel resolution—continues to take and return arresting images of the planet’s cloud tops.

In recent months, Juno has been sending back images of Io, the closest of Jupiter’s large Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede) and the most volcanic world in the solar system.

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NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Chandra X-ray Observatory launch by sharing never-before-seen photos of the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe.

The Chandra X-ray observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since then, it has scoured the universe to look for X-ray emissions from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and more, according to NASA. The observatory returns data to the Chandra X-ray Center at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

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To most people, the sun is a steady, never-changing source of heat and light. But to scientists, it’s a dynamic star, constantly in flux, sending energy out into space. Experts say the sun is now in its most active period in two decades, causing potential disruptions to radio and satellite communications. John Yang speaks with Bill Murtagh of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center to learn more.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

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Worm-Derived Therapeutics For Debilitating Diseases — Dr. Andrea Choe, MD, Ph.D. — CEO, Holoclara Inc

Dr. Andrea Choe, MD, Ph.D. is the CEO and Co-Founder of Holoclara (https://www.holoclara.com/), a company focused on creating novel, safe, orally bioavailable worm-derived therapeutics with a focus on indications such as allergies and autoimmune disorders.

While pursuing her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Choe uncovered a unique pheromone language shared by roundworms that may have evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

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The behavior of the cells that make up our blood vessels is crucial to our well-being. Conditions such as inflammation, oxygen deprivation and viral infection can stress these cells and disrupt the formation of new, often pathological, blood vessels. Now a team of researchers led by Jean-Philippe Gratton, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at Université de Montréal and a specialist in vascular biology, has discovered a previously unknown pathway leading to the formation of new blood vessels, a process known as angiogenesis.

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“Compared with other traditional methods, the proposed has lower computational complexity, faster operation speed, weak influence of light, and strong ability to locate dirt,” the research group said. “The improved path planning algorithm used in this study greatly improves the efficiency of UAV inspection, saves time and resources, reduces operation and maintenance costs, and improves the corresponding operation and maintenance level of photovoltaic power generation.”

The novel approach uses mathematical morphologies for image processing, such as image enhancement, sharpening, filtering, and closing operations. It also uses image histogram equalization and edge detection, among other methods, to find the dusted spot. For path optimization, it uses an improved version of the A (A-star) algorithm.

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