In some areas, gamers have even shown stronger capacities.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
NASA Satellite Swarm’s Expanded Mission Powers Smarter Operations
NASA continues to study how autonomy will assist future exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other worlds. As exploration continues to evolve, future spacecraft swarms will one day “see” and communicate with each other autonomously, navigating new destinations more efficiently.
The success of NASA’s Starling mission extension, called Starling 1.5+, shows greater autonomy in space missions can give spacecraft a higher degree of independence, allowing them to make decisions and coordinate actions without the constant oversight of human operators. Improving this technology opens doors to operating swarms of spacecraft farther from Earth, like at the Moon or Mars, where communications are limited, and autonomy could play a critical role.
Mars Perseverance rover data suggests presence of past microbial life
A new study co-authored by Texas A&M University geologist Dr. Michael Tice has revealed potential chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbial life in rocks examined by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
The findings, published by a large international team of scientists, focus on a region of Jezero Crater known as the Bright Angel formation—a name chosen from locations in Grand Canyon National Park because of the light-colored Martian rocks. This area in Mars’s Neretva Vallis channel contains fine-grained mudstones rich in oxidized iron (rust), phosphorus, sulfur and—most notably—organic carbon. Although organic carbon, potentially from non-living sources like meteorites, has been found on Mars before, this combination of materials could have been a rich source of energy for early microorganisms.
“When the rover entered Bright Angel and started measuring the compositions of the local rocks, the team was immediately struck by how different they were from what we had seen before,” said Tice, a geobiologist and astrobiologist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.
A more precise CRISPR platform enables large-scale gene screening in live mouse brains
Over the past few decades, biomedical researchers and neuroscientists have devised increasingly advanced techniques to study and alter neurophysiological processes. These include CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a sophisticated tool to edit specific genes in some animals, including mice, rats, zebrafish and fruit flies.
Researchers at University of California, San Francisco led by Martin Kampmann recently introduced a more precise CRISPR screening platform that can be applied directly in living tissue, enabling the screening of a larger number of genes at once. The new technique, called CRISPR screening by AAV episome sequencing (CrAAVe-seq), was introduced in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience.
“Human cell-based systems are valuable but cannot fully capture the complexity of the brain,” Biswa Ramani, co-first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Mice often remain the most effective model for many neurological diseases because their brains preserve the diversity and organization of cell types that cannot be replicated in a dish.”
Novel gene therapy for hereditary hearing loss developed at Tel Aviv University
Scientists from the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University introduced an innovative gene therapy method to treat impairments in hearing and balance caused by inner ear dysfunction. According to the researchers, “This treatment constitutes an improvement over existing strategies, demonstrating enhanced efficiency and holds promise for treating a wide range of mutations that cause hearing loss.”
The study was led by Prof. Karen Avraham, Dean of the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences, and Roni Hahn, a PhD student from the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. The study was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey Holt and Dr. Gwenaëlle Géléoc from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), the National Institutes of Health/NIDCD and the Israel Science Foundation Breakthrough Research Program. The study was featured on the cover of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Prof. Avraham explains: “The inner ear consists of two highly coordinated systems: the auditory system, which detects, processes, and transmits sound signals to the brain, and the vestibular system, which enables spatial orientation and balance. A wide range of genetic variants in DNA can affect the function of these systems, leading to sensorineural hearing loss and balance problems. Indeed, hearing loss is the most common sensory impairment worldwide, with over half of congenital cases caused by genetic factors. In this study, we aimed to investigate an effective gene therapy for these cases using an approach that has not been applied in this context before.”
The CRITICAL RoboTaxi Milestone Tesla Stock Investors CAN’T Ignore
Tesla’s upcoming robo-taxi milestone of deploying 2,000 vehicles is expected to significantly boost its margins and potentially double or triple its free cash flow, marking a critical point in the company’s expansion and growth ##
## Questions to inspire discussion.
Tesla’s Robo Taxi Strategy.
🚕 Q: What is Tesla’s approach to deploying robo taxis across the US? A: Tesla plans to seed robo taxis across multiple cities nationwide, rather than focusing on a single market, to demonstrate benefits to regional regulators, define drop-off and pickup zones, and establish presence before scaling up.
🏙️ Q: Which cities are part of Tesla’s initial robo taxi expansion plans? A: Tesla’s robo taxi expansion includes Austin, Bay Area, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and other states, with Austin and Bay Area currently offering invite-only services.
Financial Impact and Pricing.
Researchers develop the first room temperature all-solid-state hydride ion battery
Hydride ion (H-), with their low mass and high redox potential, are considered promising charge carriers for next-generation electrochemical devices. However, the lack of an efficient electrolyte with fast hydride ion conductivity, thermal stability, and electrode compatibility has hindered their practical applications.
In a study published in Nature, Prof. Chen Ping’s group from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed a novel core–shell hydride ion electrolyte, and constructed the first room temperature all-solid-state rechargeable hydride ion battery.
Using a heterojunction-inspired design, researchers synthesized a novel core–shell composite hydride, 3CeH3@BaH2, where a thin BaH2 shell encapsulates CeH3. This structure leverages the high hydride ion conductivity of CeH3 and the stability of BaH2, enabling fast hydride ion conduction at room temperature along with high thermal and electrochemical stability.