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Nov 10, 2021

Gwynne Shotwell: Meet the Woman Behind SpaceX

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

GGwynne Shotwell: Meet the Woman Behind SpaceX: There’s a proverb that says behind every great man is a great woman. That is certainly true of SpaceX. Elon Musk may be the most recognizable face of his aerospace company. But his right-hand woman is Gwynne Shotwell.

Shotwell is the President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX. She manages the day-to-day operations and the growth of the firm. In other words – she’s in charge of selling rockets and dealing with Elon Musk.

Unlike a lot of other SpaceX employees who grew up fascinated by rockets, she wasn’t. When she was five and her neurosurgeon father gathered the family around a TV to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, she found it boring.

Nov 10, 2021

Gravitational Waves Will Soon Lift Veil On Black Holes, Says Portuguese Astrophysicist

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Of the cosmos’ four fundamental forces, gravity is the one that grasps us even before we exit the womb. From our first few minutes of life until we lose the fight to lift our heads from death’s pillow, this weakest of nature’s fundamental forces continues to elude researchers.

In the last few years, however, gravitational wave astronomy has made great strides in detecting gravitational radiation rippling through spacetime at the speed of light.

Einstein first predicted that any accelerating mass should emit gravitational radiation in the form of waves. Gravitational waves were first indirectly detected almost 20 years ago. But it was only recently, in 2,015 that the ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) detected waves from two merging stellar mass black holes over a billion light years distant in the general direction of the Southern Hemisphere’s Magellanic Clouds.

Nov 10, 2021

The World’s Largest Floating Solar Power Farm Is Now Open In Thailand

Posted by in categories: climatology, solar power, sustainability

With 145,000 panels.

The world’s largest floating solar farm has now begun operations at the Sirindhorn Dam on the Lam Dom Noi River in Thailand. The dam has a capacity of generating 45MW of power using its solar panels, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) confirmed in a press release.

The news comes after the country started advancing its carbon neutrality goals by 15 years. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Glasgow, UK, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha pledged that his country would attain carbon neutrality by 2,050 much ahead of the earlier set target date of 2,065 local media reported. The announcement is a major move considering that two-thirds of Thailand’s current power generation is sourced from natural gas.

Nov 10, 2021

Cryonics Clinics: Where People Sleep and Wake Up in the Future

Posted by in categories: cryonics, life extension

Cryogenically frozen dead people are held preserved in a clinic at Scottsdale, Arizona in the hope that maybe someday science would be advanced enough to bring them back to life. This unique cryonics clinic is run by Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and surprisingly, many people, including some famous personalities like PayPal co-founder Peter Theil, are actually spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their bodies preserved here after death.

The idea of waking up in the future sounds like a great plot for a sci-fi movie or a novel but through cryonics 0 organizations like Alcor are trying to do the same in reality. Max Moore, a futurist and the former CEO of Alcor, believes that people can be rescued from death. “Our view is that when we call someone dead it’s a bit of an arbitrary line. In fact they are in need of a rescue,” he said in an interview. What’s perhaps more surprising is that Alcor is not the only cryonics clinic preserving dead bodies for revival in the future.

Nov 10, 2021

Study finds a striking difference between neurons of humans and other mammals

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Human neurons have fewer ion channels, which might have allowed the human brain to divert energy to other neural processes.

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neuroscientists have shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals.

The researchers hypothesize that this reduction in channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently, allowing it to divert resources to other energy-intensive processes that are required to perform complex cognitive tasks.

Continue reading “Study finds a striking difference between neurons of humans and other mammals” »

Nov 10, 2021

Medieval Space Flight? A Company Is Catapulting Rockets to Cut Costs

Posted by in category: satellites

Saddle up.

Why use unsustainable rocket propellants for small satellite launches when you could just catapult them into space?

Continue reading “Medieval Space Flight? A Company Is Catapulting Rockets to Cut Costs” »

Nov 10, 2021

Dr. Björn Örvar, PhD, CSO, EVP, Co-Founder, ORF Genetics — Designing Plants To Bring Quality Of Life

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

Designing Plants To Bring Quality Of Life — Dr. Björn Örvar, Ph.D., CSO, EVP, Co-Founder, ORF Genetics (Iceland)


Dr. Björn Lárus Örvar, Ph.D. is Chief Scientific Officer, Executive VP of Business Development, and a Co-Founder of ORF Genetics (https://www.orfgenetics.com/), an innovative plant biotechnology company and a pioneer in developing and manufacturing high-quality recombinant proteins, such as growth factors, derived from barley plants.

Continue reading “Dr. Björn Örvar, PhD, CSO, EVP, Co-Founder, ORF Genetics — Designing Plants To Bring Quality Of Life” »

Nov 10, 2021

This long-lasting hydrogel could be used to replace damaged human tissues

Posted by in category: materials

More entanglements in the material help polymer chains slip without breaking.

Nov 10, 2021

For a decade or two we have been purchasing Tibetan Tsakli sets in order to prevent them being split up and sold individually by dealers and thus irrevocably lost

Posted by in category: education

We have also accumulated a very large collection of ritual objects, statues, thangkas, painting and drawings. Steve Nichols was initiated into the Kagyu tradition (Whispered Succession) although this collection (1,000’s of items) covers Bonpo and the other schools. exhibition

Nov 10, 2021

Making science serve humanity: Jennifer Doudna, PhD, says CRISPR gene-editing technology should be accessible to all

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health, science

The path that led Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and her colleagues to the development of CRISPR, the gene-editing tool that has revolutionized science and earned her a Nobel Prize, started with their deep curiosity and drive to understand how the most basic building blocks of life function.

When Doudna first decided to investigate precisely what systems bacteria use to adapt their immune systems to fight off viral infections, she had little expectation that the findings would ultimately provide the key to technology that could be used to safely alter genetic code.

“All of us [on the research team] realized that what had started as a fundamental research question was morphing into a very different kind of project; namely, one with enormous technical potential and also risks and opportunities that we had not appreciated when we started the work,” Doudna explained during a conversation with J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, chair of the AAMC Board of Directors and executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, at the opening plenary of Learn Serve Lead 2021: The Virtual Experience, on Monday, Nov. 8.