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Dec 20, 2022

NASA Gives ICON $57 Million to Build a 3D Printer for Structures on the Moon

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, habitats, space travel

Austin, Texas-based 3D printing construction company ICON has gotten some pretty significant projects off the ground in recent years, from a 50-home development in Mexico to a 100-home neighborhood in Texas. This week the company won a NASA contract that will help it get an even bigger project much further off the ground—all the way to the moon, in fact.

The $57.2 million contract is intended to help ICON develop technologies for building infrastructure on the moon, like landing pads, houses, and roads. The goal is for ICON to build these lunar structures using local material—that is, moon houses built out of moon dust and moon rocks.

Dec 20, 2022

Hint of crack in standard model vanishes in LHC data

Posted by in category: particle physics

“My first impression is that the analysis is much more robust than before,” says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who is a senior member of a separate LHC experiment. It has revealed how a number of surprising subtleties had conspired to produce an apparent anomaly, she says.

Renato Quagliani, an LHCb physicist at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute (EPFL) in Lausanne, reported the results at CERN on 20 December, in a seminar that also attracted more than 700 viewers online. The LHCb collaboration also posted two preprints on the arXiv repository1,2.

LHCb first reported a tenuous discrepancy in the production of muons and electrons in 2014. When collisions of protons produced massive particles called B mesons, these quickly decayed. The most frequent decay pattern produced another type of meson, called a kaon, plus pairs of particles and their antiparticles — either an electron and a positron or a muon and an antimuon. The standard model predicted that the two types of pairs should occur with roughly the same frequency, but LHCb data suggested that the electron-positron pairs occurred more often.

Dec 20, 2022

36-year-study finds weird weather cycles on Jupiter

Posted by in category: space

Jupiter doesn’t have seasons, but it does have regular warm and cool cycles, according to 36 years of data from Voyager, Cassini, and ground-based telescopes.

Dec 20, 2022

Zeppelins Could Make A Comeback With This Solar-Powered Airship

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three


Zeppelins, the rigid airships most famously epitomized by the Hindenburg, now seem kind of retro, rather than the image of futurity they represented in the 1930s. But they could be about to make a comeback in a big way — courtesy of a new aluminum-shelled, solar-powered airship that’s being built by the U.K.-based company Varialift Airships.

According to the company’s CEO Alan Handley, the airship will be capable of making a transatlantic flight from the United Kingdom to the United States, consuming just 8% of the fuel of a regular airplane. It will be powered by a pair of solar-powered engines and two conventional jet engines.

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Dec 20, 2022

‘Hate circuit’ discovered in brain

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Love and hate light up most of the same brain regions, say researchers – but a key difference explains why hate is calculatingly cold.

Dec 20, 2022

Scientists found previously unknown genes that show humans are still evolving

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension, neuroscience

But even junk has hidden treasures. Studies found variations in these unsequenced regions were intricately involved in human health, from aging to conditions like cancer and developmental disorders like autism. In 2022, a landmark study finally resolved the genomic unknown, completely sequencing the remaining eight percent of undeciphered DNA remaining.

Now, scientists are discovering that some genetic sequences encode proteins that lack any obvious ancestors, what geneticists call orphan genes. Some of these orphan genes, the researchers surmise, arose spontaneously as we evolved, unlike others that we inherited from our primate ancestors. In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, researchers in Ireland and Greece found around 155 of these smaller versions of DNA sequences called open reading frames (or ORF) make microproteins potentially important to a healthy cell’s growth or connected to an assortment of ailments like muscular dystrophy and retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease affecting the eyes.

“This is, I think, the first study looking at the specific evolutionary origins of these small ORFs and their microproteins,” Nikolaos Vakirlis, a scientist at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center “Alexander Fleming” in Greece and first author of the paper, tells Inverse. It’s an origin, he says, that’s been mired in much question and mystery.

Dec 20, 2022

Two Yardsticks Published in Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology — Third on the Way

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

Two new yardsticks, Clinical Guidance for the Use of Dupilumab in Eosinophilic Esophagitis: and

Dec 20, 2022

Bacteria and Fungi Can ‘Walk’ across the Surface of Our Teeth

Posted by in category: futurism

Clusters of bacteria and fungi seem to be capable of complex movement, setting tooth decay in motion.

Dec 20, 2022

Green Grass Mows Down my Resurrection Arguments (Jonathan McLatchie / Michael L Brown response)

Posted by in category: futurism

@AskDrBrownVideos and @JonathanMcLatchie analyze the video response of Paulogia to Dr. Brown’s short video on evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Prof. Jonathan McLatchie Responds to Paulogia Regarding the Resurrection.

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Dec 20, 2022

What Sort of Ethics Would Aliens Practice?

Posted by in categories: biological, ethics, evolution

How ethical would aliens be?

Ethics derived from biological evolution can be harsh — parasitism, invasiveness, and survival at all costs. Ethics derived from human culture is far more benevolent. Would alien ethics be based more on biology or culture? Let’s hope the latter.

Posted on big think, direct weblink at.

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