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Apr 4, 2022

Elon Musk buys 9.2% stake in Twitter, becomes the largest shareholder

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Musk’s shareholding is more than four times the 2.25% stake held by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

According to a 13G filing published today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now owns 9.2 percent of Twitter, Bloomberg News reports. Musk purchased the stock on March 14th, according to the filing. Musk has long been a high-profile Twitter user, and he recently questioned his over 80 million followers on the platform’s commitment to free speech. Twitter’s stock price rose more than 25% in pre-market trading as a result of the announcement.

According to CNBC, Musk’s Twitter stocks were worth $2.89 billion based on Friday’s closing price. Although Musk’s shares are categorized as a passive investment, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told CNBC that the purchase “could lead to some sort of buyout.”

Apr 4, 2022

Deleting a Protein May Prevent Heart Attacks and Strokes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

Macrophages travel through our arteries, gobbling fat the way Pac-man gobbled ghosts. But fat-filled macrophages can narrow blood vessels and cause heart disease. Now, UConn Health researchers describe in Nature Cardiovascular Research how deleting a protein could prevent this and potentially prevent heart attacks and strokes in humans.

Macrophages are large white blood cells that cruise through our body as a kind of clean-up crew, clearing hazardous debris. But in people with atherosclerosis—fatty deposits and inflammation in their blood vessels— macrophages can cause trouble. They eat excess fat inside artery walls, but that fat causes them to become foamy. And foamy macrophages tend to encourage inflammation in the arteries and sometimes bust apart plaques, freeing clots that can cause heart attack, stroke, or embolisms elsewhere in the body.

Changing how macrophages express a certain protein could prevent that kind of bad behavior, reports a team of researchers from UConn Health. They found that the protein, called TRPM2, is activated by inflammation. It signals macrophages to start eating fat. Since inflammation of the blood vessels is one of the primary causes of atherosclerosis, TRPM2 gets activated quite a bit. All that TRPM2 activation pushes macrophage activity, which leads to more foamy macrophages and potentially more inflamed arteries. The way that TRPM2 activated macrophage activity was surprising, says Lixia Yue, a UConn School of Medicine cell biologist.

Apr 4, 2022

50 years ago, a Soviet spacecraft spent a critical 50 minutes on Venus

Posted by in category: space travel

Venera-8 made a photo of Venus’ surface possible.


Launched in March 1972, Venera-8 was part of the Soviet Union’s exploration of Venus — in less than an hour it revealed critical details of this seemingly inaccessible planet.

Apr 4, 2022

Eventually, our nuclear luck will run out

Posted by in category: futurism

Putin might not use nukes. But someday, someone will.

Apr 4, 2022

Fmr. Marine Elliot Ackerman: Ukraine Has a Three-to-One Advantage | Amanpour and Company

Posted by in category: ethics

Elliot Ackerman is following the crisis in Ukraine closely. The author and former U.S. marine served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and has just spent two weeks in Kyiv. Ackerman joins Walter Isaacson to discuss Russia’s new tactics and the role of moral resolve in war.

Originally aired on March 30, 2022

Continue reading “Fmr. Marine Elliot Ackerman: Ukraine Has a Three-to-One Advantage | Amanpour and Company” »

Apr 4, 2022

Events That Will Cause the End of the World

Posted by in category: space

How will it all end? By an asteroid, a science experiment gone wrong, or even a zombie invasion? Check out today’s insane new video to find out all the possible ways the world could actually come to an end!

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Apr 4, 2022

Astronomy tests the QHY 410C, a color camera without the noise

Posted by in categories: computing, space

Move aside CCDs. Consumer CMOS cameras are here to stay.


For 20 years, I have been using charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras, and I currently own the top-of-the-line SBIG STX-16803. But while studying two images I recently made using the latest QHY 410C CMOS camera, I had to wonder: Is CCD dead?

For years, I lectured about the asymptotic boundary of noise in CCD images. In a basic sense, this means that no matter how many frames you take to increase your signal-to-noise ratio for a cleaner image, you will always run into a wall of noise when you stretch your image to bring out deep shadows. But with QHY’s new CMOS camera, this troublesome wall of noise is nonexistent.

Continue reading “Astronomy tests the QHY 410C, a color camera without the noise” »

Apr 4, 2022

How a Seagen cancer drug with Nobel Prize science might also work in diabetes

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, science

Some diabetes therapies work by ramping up the body’s secretion of insulin to counteract high blood sugar levels. | Preserving insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells—rather than exhausting them—might be a better strategy in the treatment of diabetes. Following that thinking, scientists at the Karolinska Institute found a cancer drug by Seagen holds promise for the metabolic disease.

Apr 4, 2022

Musk’s SpaceX to launch artificial meat experiment to ISS next week: ‘Steak for space’

Posted by in category: space travel

AN EXPERIMENT that could pave the way for the growth of artificial steaks in space to feed future astronauts is to launch next week on the first mission to carry an all-private crew up to the International Space Station (ISS).

Apr 4, 2022

From Toilet to Tap

Posted by in category: futurism

Reverse osmosis waste system circa 2019.


Facility uses sophisticated technology to transform wastewater into clean water.