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Sep 15, 2021

West Vancouver student video explains how we could warp to Alpha Centauri

Posted by in categories: physics, space travel

Theoretical physics video nominated for international award.

A West Vancouver student may have the keys to interstellar travel. He just needs a few votes and a whole lot of mass.

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Sep 15, 2021

WATCH: SpaceX Inspiration4 first all civilian launch! — Livestream

Posted by in category: space travel

Tune in at 5:00pm PT / 8:00pm ET on Wed. Sept 15 for SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission to space. SpaceX coverage of pre-launch activities starts at 12:45pm PT / 3:45pm ET.

Sep 15, 2021

New Microscopy Technique Reveals Activity of One Million Neurons Across the Mouse Brain

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Summary: A new technique dubbed light beads microscopy allowed researchers to generate a vivid functional movie of the near-simultaneous activity of almost a million neurons in the mouse brain.

Source: Rockefeller University.

Capturing the intricacies of the brain’s activity demands resolution, scale, and speed—the ability to visualize millions of neurons with crystal clear resolution as they actively call out from distant corners of the cortex, within a fraction of a second of one another.

Sep 15, 2021

Researchers Find Source of Strange ‘Negative’ Gravity

Posted by in category: particle physics

Circa 2017

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE


Sound has negative mass, and all around you it’s drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly.

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Sep 15, 2021

This NASA exoskeleton spacesuit designed for inter-galactic space exploration has strong Halo-inspired vibes!

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, space travel

Imagine a time where humans have set foot on most of the planets in the galaxy, with even more to explore. This exoskeleton spacesuit coincides with that ultimate dream and our unstoppable quest for space exploration!

Venturing beyond the realms of planet earth comes with its unique set of challenges. The effects of gravity being on top of the list. NASA has put a lot of time and effort into developing new-age spacesuits to counter the effects of gravity in hostile environments. 14 years to be exact, and it has cost them a whopping $420 million already. The space agency is expected to churn out another $625 million in time for the next moon mission which was earlier planned for the year 2024.

Sep 15, 2021

Humans to Mars Summit 2021 is underway: Watch it live here

Posted by in category: space travel

The 2021 Humans to Mars Summit kicks off on Monday (Sept. 13), and you can watch it live online.

Sep 15, 2021

NASA awards SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 3 other companies $146 million in contracts to make moon lander designs

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

Going to hear the SpaceX fans complaining about this but it actually makes perfect sense. SpaceX is already “deep into development” of the vehicle they plan on using for a lander therefore they don’t get as much money as a group that hasn’t started on development yet. Keep in mind that NASA is well aware that SpaceX is already using their money to develop Starship and SuperHeavy so there is no real need to ‘double-down’ on taxpayer development funding to a company that is already spending that money on that development.

One need look no further than the “race” between SpaceX and Boeing over Commercial Crew. Dragon had been in development since 2004 (and funded by NASA since 2006 or cargo and 2010 for crew) while Boeing only started development of Starliner in 2010. SpaceX took 4 years longer than planned for the Cargo version, (2006 scheduled but didn’t fly till 2010) and a full decade after that using the same basic design to fly crewed (2020) Boeing’s Starliner, even if it doesn’t fly this year is still ahead of SpaceX’s development.

It should be rather telling that SpaceX got the lowest award of all the contracts. Starship has always been the ‘outlier’ of the lander designs.

Continue reading “NASA awards SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 3 other companies $146 million in contracts to make moon lander designs” »

Sep 15, 2021

5 stories that explain today’s SpaceX Inspiration4 launch

Posted by in category: space travel

Read these five articles to understand everything about the SpaceX Inspiration4 launch today.

Sep 15, 2021

An observational and Mendelian randomisation study on vitamin D and COVID-19 risk in UK Biobank

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, energy, genetics

The discriminatory power of the UVB variable is somewhat limited in this study, because UVB radiation is low at this time of the year, particularly at the high northern latitude of UK—larger effects might be observed if variation in UVB is greater. We only used ambient UVB, and did not capture individual behavioural differences that would determine the actual level of vitamin D synthesis in the skin, such as duration and time of day spent outside, clothing, etc. It is important to note that time of year is the strongest predictor of vitD-UVB. To avoid bias control dates were assigned to follow the same distribution as case dates, which might have led to artificially diminished differences in vitD-UVB between cases and controls, however analysis relating to hospitalisation and death are not affected by this. We also conducted an analysis of the genetically-predicted vitamin D and a number of state-of-the-art MR analyses. However, the main limitation is the lack of power. Given the small number of COVID-19 patients and the relatively small percentage of variance (4.2%) explained by vitamin D-related genetic variants, this MR study was not adequately powered to detect small causal effect and negative results should be interpreted with caution. Additionally, MR studies only consider linear effects between 25-OHD levels and COVID-19 risk, which do not capture what happens at the extremes of vitamin D deficiency. Therefore, it cannot rule out the possibility that seriously ill patients (due to an underlying pathology) with extremely low vitamin D levels could be predisposed to COVID-19 infection and increased COVID-19 severity and mortality. Furthermore, 25-OHD levels are the used biomarker of vitamin D status in the study population, nevertheless, they correlate poorly with the active form of vitamin D (1,25-OH2D), which exerts the effects of vitamin D on a cellular level. Thus, this study cannot exclude effects of 1,25-OH2D on COVID-19 risk.

Another limitation of this cohort relates to the fact that not all participants have been tested for present (or past) COVID-19 infection; consequentially, taking participants who were not tested as controls could be a potential source of bias, given that misclassification of controls might be substantial due to the presence of asymptomatic infected individuals, further driving our findings to the null. This is evident from the 1:2 ratio between outpatient vs. inpatient cases. It should be acknowledged that the COVID-19 cases in UK biobank have a high rate of hospitalisation due to the very limited and targeted testing at this stage of the pandemic in the UK, so this study reflects mainly those with more severe COVID-19 and gives less information about true infection risk, or risk of milder disease. In addition, we excluded individuals with a negative COVID-19 testing result from the controls due to the risk of those being false negatives. Although there is a risk of introducing selection bias, we believe that the risk of introducing misclassification bias if we included them in the analysis could be higher22,23. Additionally, given the presence of asymptomatic infected individuals, taking participants who were not tested as controls could also be another potential source of bias. Our study assessed the effect of genetically predicted vitamin D levels on COVID-19 risk while taking into consideration of ambient UVB radiation during the pandemic. We show an indication of an inverse association between genetically predicted vitamin D levels and severe COVID-19. Findings from our study are consistent with a recent randomised controlled trial (RCT) that found protective effect of vitamin D supplementation among those hospitalised with COVID-1924. However, other clinical trials did not show an effect. For instance, a randomised trial of 240 patients showed that supplementation with a single very large dose of 200,000 IU of vitamin D3 that increased serum vitamin D levels (21–44 ng/ml) was nonetheless ineffective in decreasing the length of hospital stay or any other clinical outcomes among hospitalized patients with severe COVID-1925. It has been estimated that one SD change in standardized natural-log transformed 25-OHD levels corresponds to a change in 25-OHD levels of 29.2 nmol/l in vitamin D insufficient individuals (serum 25-OHD levels 50 nmol/l), which is comparable to the 21.2 nmol/l mean increase in 25-OHD levels conferred by taking daily 400 IU of cholecalciferol, the amount of vitamin D most often found in vitamin D supplements26. This estimation has clinical implication on the dose of vitamin D supplement for disease prevention. Given the lack of highly effective therapies against COVID-19, it is important to remain open-minded to emerging results from rigorously conducted studies of vitamin D.

In conclusion, we found no significant associations between COVID-19 risk and measured 25-OHD levels after adjusted for covariates, but this finding is limited by the fact that the vitamin D levels were measured on average 11 years before the pandemic. Ambient UVB was strongly and inversely associated with COVID-19 hospitalization and death. The main MR analysis did not show that genetically-predicted vitamin D levels were causally associated with COVID-19 risk, although MR sensitivity analyses indicated a potential causal effect. Overall, the effect of vitamin D levels on the risk or severity of COVID-19 remains controversial, further studies are needed to validate vitamin D supplementation as a means of protecting against worsened COVID-19.

Sep 15, 2021

Critical Flaws Discovered in Azure App That Microsoft Secretly Installed on Linux VMs

Posted by in categories: computing, security

“With a single packet, an attacker can become root on a remote machine by simply removing the authentication header.” ‘ Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t fix it for you. Users affected by these vulnerabilities must manually update the OMI agent to the patched versions.

Microsoft on Tuesday addressed a quartet of security flaws as part of its Patch Tuesday updates that could be abused by adversaries to target Azure cloud customers and elevate privileges as well as allow for remote takeover of vulnerable systems.

The list of flaws, collectively called OMIGOD by researchers from Wiz, affect a little-known software agent called Open Management Infrastructure that’s automatically deployed in many Azure services

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