“Science is for everyone and space travel hopefully can be for everyone.”
The European Space Agency (ESA) named the first-ever “parastronaut” this week on Wednesday, Nov. 23, meaning the world may soon see the first disabled person go to space.
The agency, made up of 22 nations, chose former British Paralympic sprinter John McFall among 16 other new recruits for astronaut training.
We strongly believe that culture meat is an engine of change.
Have you ever tried cultivated meat before? If not, what you’re about to learn will make you want to. Let us introduce you to Believer Meats, formerly known as Future Meat Technologies.
Established in 2018, the company says, “the only difference is that it’s been grown in a lab from high-quality, non-GMO animal cells. The result is meat that doesn’t require compromising on taste, quality, or environmental impact. It’s time to enjoy meat that’s as good for you as it is for the world.”
Graphics Processing Units are not just resolution on a monitor.
The Graphics Processing Unit was first developed in the 1970s (think Pong)There are two types of GPUs, on a separate card and embedded in a CPU chip.
Today’s GPUs are so sophisticated they work in parallel to the CPU doing many tasks the CPU handles.
The term GPU gets thrown around all over the place but isn’t always used correctly. In many ways, it is a computer within a computer, and more often in recent years, it is getting big enough to need external cooling, just like the CPU. Let’s take a closer look at the Graphics Processing Unit.
It is essential to understand how lightning works so that buildings, airplanes, skyscrapers, and people can be protected more effectively.
Ever wondered why lightning zig-zags? Or how it is connected to the thundercloud ago? You might have tried looking up the many textbooks on the lightning but failed to find a definite and convincing answer.
Solarseven/iStock.
That is, until now.
The finding could have implications on drug development beyond neuroscience.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen has found that V-ATPase, an enzyme thought to be a key component of brain function, switches off randomly, even for hours at a time. This discovery has the potential to change our understanding of how our brain functions, according to a press release.
V-ATPase is an enzyme that can break down ATP molecules, the cell’s energy currency, as they pump protons across cellular membranes.
Evgenil Kovalev/iStock.
The search continues for signs of ancient alien life on the red planet.
NASA’s Perseverance mission on Mars has performed several world firsts, including the first controlled flight on another planet and the first extraction of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.
New Mars findings point to ancient alien life.
NASA / JPL-Caltech.
The flying fuel tank’s flight “was arguably aviation’s last milestone.”
Nearly 36 years ago, on December 23, 1986, pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, designer Burt Rutan, and crew chief Bruce Evans earned the Collier Trophy, aviation’s most prestigious award, according to a NASA report published in 2013.
A 25,000-mile circumnavigation of the globe.
It could actually be cheaper than other treatment options.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved a new drug Hemgenix, to be used in patients with hemophilia B, a blood clotting disorder. Since the condition is rare, it will be used only in a small group of patients worldwide.
Motortion/iStock.
Since Hemophilia patients lack enough clotting factor, so they are at risk of complications of prolonged bleeding that can also affect joints, internal organs, and the brain, an FDA document said. Treatment for such individuals constitutes intravenous infusions of clotting Factor IX to prevent bleeding episodes, which must be conducted over the patient’s lifetime.
The first blood test to diagnose inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) could be in use in as little as a year, following the discovery of a molecular signal in the blood by Queen Mary University of London researchers. The research, published today in the journal Circulation, offers hope of a quick and cheap way of diagnosing the condition.
Myocarditis is a difficult condition to diagnose. Symptoms include a temperature, fatigue, chest pain and shortness of breath, which can all be easily mistaken for other conditions. The gold standard method for diagnosis is a heart biopsy, an expensive, invasive, and risky procedure which can sometimes still miss signs of the condition. It’s estimated that one young person dies suddenly every week in the UK due to previously undiagnosed myocarditis.
Now, a team of researchers led by BHF Professor Federica Marelli-Berg at Queen Mary University of London have found that the presence of T-cells—a type of white blood cell—expressing a molecule called cMet in the blood strongly indicates that a person has myocarditis. They say that cMet-expressing T cells levels could be detected through a routine blood test that could cost less than £50 with results available within hours.
Mitigating and reversing the effects of climate change is the most important scientific challenge facing humanity. Carbon sequestration describes a range of technologies with the potential to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Most of these schemes involve storing the gas underground, however, this is not without risk, and scientists are concerned that underground storage could lead to increased seismic activity (a phenomenon known as “induced seismicity”).
Now, researchers in the US and Switzerland have studied microseismicity, the small seismic events caused by carbon injection into host rock, at the Illinois Basin Decatur Project (IBDP) in the midwestern US. In 2011–2014, the IBDP injected one million tonnes of CO2 into an underground reservoir just above a rhyolite crystalline basin. Nikita Bondarenko and Roman Makhnenko at the University of Illinois and Yury Podladchikov at the University of Lausanne have used a combination of field observations and computer simulations to show how microseismicity at the IBDP is highly dependent on the microscale structure of the host rock.
