Science, man.
A new survey has discovered a fear of frailty likely prevents widespread support of longevity, but if health is combined with years then it could well be a popular option.
Healthy longevity may convince people
According to the new survey, out of 1500 people 74.4% wished to live to 120 or longer if health was guaranteed, but only 57.4% wished to live that long if it wasn’t.
While development is happening everywhere, these companies are the next big things to shoot past the stratosphere.
While a lot of end-of-the-year, turn-of-the-calendar roundups try to focus on the year that was or the year ahead, the space industry is very different. Developments are planned further in advance, so some of the qualifying news that gets companies on this list isn’t scheduled to happen until 2017. The industry is small compared to cloud computing or cybersecurity, for example, but the rate of growth is tremendous. There seems to be a cultural solidarity with spacetech on account of its tightly-knit history of cooperation and the still limited number of private companies that can facilitate space flight.
Last year August, Stephen Hawking announced he had been working with Malcom Perry and Andrew Strominger on a solution to the black hole information loss problem, and they were closing in on a solution. But little was explained other than that this solution rests on a symmetry group by name of supertranslations.
Elon Musk’s vision of the Hyperloop — a lightning-fast transportation system that would shuttle passengers at speeds nearing 700-mph using low pressure tubes and air compressors — is slowly coming to fruition in the Nevada desert.
In fact, the first ever Hyperloop tubes are neatly lined up in a ditch, waiting to be assembled and then later tested by Hyperloop Technologies at a site in North Las Vegas.
Now this is something you don’t hear every day.
Or week.
Or year.
Or…
We shall see. We shall see. wink
For three decades, humans have searched for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, and yet we’ve only sampled a tiny drop of our vast cosmic ocean. If we’re ever to find a radio-hot, spacefaring civilization, we need to know where to point our telescopes.
But the answer may be simpler than we thought. According to a new study, there are roughly 150 brilliant patches of space that deserve our attention.
They’re called globular clusters, an evocative term for ancient, gravitationally-bound regions of space that can pack a whopping million stars per hundred cubic light years. Once thought to be uninhabitable, new research by Rosanne Di Stefano of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Alak Ray of the Tata Institute in Mumbai suggests that globular clusters may, in fact, be the ideal places for advanced civilizations to flourish.
In a landmark study, researchers have used gene editing system CRISPR-Cas9 to treat a model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in mice
Proof of concept for future human treatment
While safety is still a concern, the use of gene editing methods to treat disease in adult patients isn’t controversial. Altering embryos is entirely different to treating an adult, predominantly as the implications are profound and an embryo obviously cannot give permission.
NASA recently provided $10 million in funding to Ad Astra Rocket Company of Texas for further development of its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), an electromagnetic thruster capable of propelling a spaceship to Mars in just 39 days. NASA’s funding was part of the “12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership.” Ad Astra’s rocket will travel ten times faster than today’s chemical rockets while using one-tenth the amount of fuel.
The VASIMR system would cut the trip to Mars by months according to Franklin Chang Diaz, a former MIT student, NASA astronaut, and now CEO of Ad Astra.
According to Diaz, “this is like no other rocket that you may have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket. The VASIMR Rocket is not used for launching things; it is used for things already in orbit. This is called “in-space propulsion.”