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WASHINGTON — Varda Space Industries secured a $48 million contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to test military payloads on the company’s reentry capsules.

A California-based startup focused on in-space manufacturing, Varda Space developed a factory-in-orbit spacecraft — a compact, 120-kilogram satellite engineered to produce high-value materials such as pharmaceuticals in zero-gravity conditions. The materials are returned to Earth in a capsule built with advanced thermal protection materials developed by NASA to withstand reentry.

The four-year deal with AFRL, announced on Nov. 26, leverages Varda’s W-Series reentry capsules as platforms to test payloads at hypersonic speeds. The spacecraft are built on Rocket Lab’s Photon satellite bus.

The Armenians, a population in Western Asia historically native to the Armenian Highlands, were long thought to be descendants of Phrygian settlers from the Balkans. This theory, rooted primarily in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, stemmed from his observation that Armenians serving in the Persian army were armed in a manner similar to the Phrygians. Linguists have also bolstered this theory, noting linguistic connections between the Armenian language and the Thraco-Phrygian subgroup of Indo-European languages.

But the first whole-genome study is challenging this long-held belief, revealing no significant genetic link between Armenians and the populations in the Balkan region. The study compares newly generated modern Armenian genomes and published genetic data of ancient individuals from the Armenian highlands with both modern and ancient genomes from the Balkans.

A new quantum algorithm developed by University of Georgia statisticians addresses one of the most complex challenges in single-cell analysis, signaling significant impact in both the fields of computational biology and quantum computing.

The study, “Bisection Grover’s Search Algorithm and Its Application in Analyzing CITE-seq Data,” was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association on Sept. 20.

While traditional approaches struggle to handle the immense amount of data generated from measuring both RNA and in individual cells, the new enables analysis of data from a single-cell technology known as CITE-seq. It allows for selection of the most important markers from billions of possible combinations—a task that would be formidable using classical methods.

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Advances in Neurostimulation in Aging: From Basic Science to Clinical Applications

Guest Editors Dr. Orestis Stylianou and Dr. Gianluca Susi and Associate Editors Dr. Peter Mukli and Dr. Frigyes Samuel Racz and the editorial team of GeroScience (Official Journal of the American Aging Association, published by Springer) invite submission of original research articles and review articles related to basic and clinical research focused on neurostimulation in aging.

Over the past two decades, studies have shown the potential benefits of invasive and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in addressing age-related alterations in brain function. While invasive techniques were previously dominant in small-scale clinical investigations, recent advances have significantly reduced the invasiveness of these techniques, making them safer and more accessible for research and medical applications. Transcranial current and magnetic stimulation (tCS and tMS) as well as deep brain stimulation (DBS) have shown promising results in improving various types of memory in the elderly population, including but not limited to working, episodic, associative, semantic, and procedural memory. These interventions have the potential to play a vital role in enhancing healthy brain aging and treating age-related pathological conditions affecting the central nervous system.