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Aug 30, 2021

Elon Musk’s ‘Mars City’ Expects to Use MOXIE That Will Produce ‘Breathable’ Oxygen for Humans!!

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI, space

NASA’s MOXIE could make breathing in Mars a reality. The space agency’s new invention can turn Martian air into oxygen, making it a game-changer for future Mars explorations.

According to Popular Mechanics’ latest report, it is impossible to breathe on Mars since its atmosphere is around 1% the density of Earth’s. Will this be beneficial for Elon Musk’s planned ‘Mars City?’. NASA’s MOXIE experiment will soon have an answer for us to thrive longer on the red planet. This weekend, the space agency hopes that the automated system could be the saving grace for humans to live on Mars if a time comes that the Earth becomes unsuitable for living.

The device called Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment could supply humans with oxygen through extracting from the atmosphere of the red planet which is composed of 96% of carbon dioxide. The process will be made possible through electrolysis which involves the device being run through an electrical current. Since the Perseverance rover’s touchdown in February, MOXIE will conduct the third oxygen-extraction procedure. Moreover, what it produces could supply enough oxygen for humans that is good for 10 to 15 minutes.

Aug 29, 2021

Physicists Create a Bizarre ‘Wigner Crystal’ Made Purely of Electrons

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

The unambiguous discovery of a Wigner crystal relied on a novel technique for probing the insides of complex materials.

Aug 29, 2021

RNA Structures Predicted with Uncanny Accuracy

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

“The network learned to find fundamental concepts that are key to molecular structure formation, but without explicitly being told to,” Townshend added. “The exciting aspect is that the algorithm has clearly recovered things that we knew were important, but it has also recovered characteristics that we didn’t know about before.”

Having shown success with proteins, the researchers turned their attention to RNA molecules. The researchers tested their algorithm in a series of “RNA Puzzles” from a longstanding competition in their field, and in every case, the tool outperformed all the other puzzle participants and did so without being designed specifically for RNA structures.

“We introduce a machine learning approach that enables identification of accurate structural models without assumptions about their defining characteristics, despite being trained with only 18 known RNA structures,” the authors of the Science article wrote. “The resulting scoring function, the Atomic Rotationally Equivariant Scorer (ARES), substantially outperforms previous methods and consistently produces the best results in community-wide blind RNA structure prediction challenges.”

Aug 29, 2021

Early-life sleep disruptions linked to irregular development of the prefrontal cortex

Posted by in category: neuroscience

The mechanism by which sleep disruption impedes neurodevelopment, however, is still not well understood. It may be that increased wakefulness due to sleep disruption increases glutamate circulation in the brain, affecting glutamatergic structures. Alternatively, decreased REM sleep may reduce “pruning”, an essential developmental process in which superfluous synapses are removed to improve signaling and organization.


The period of neurodevelopment extending from birth to roughly two years of age is one of frenetic, constant change. Neurons and synapses form, are organized, and are pruned. It is well known that sleep plays a fundamental role in these processes, and disruptions to sleep at this stage can be devastating to neurodevelopment and may be the cause of disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Understanding the relation between sleep and neurodevelopment in early life is thus essential to understanding (and perhaps preventing) developmental disorders. Building on previous work with prairie voles—a highly social animal with neurodevelopmental similarities to humans—researchers from Portland and California recently published a paper in Current Research in Neurobiology examining the effects of early life sleep disruptions (ELSD) on the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

Continue reading “Early-life sleep disruptions linked to irregular development of the prefrontal cortex” »

Aug 29, 2021

Researchers Create Scalable Quantum Chip That Works At Room Temperature

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Researchers have created a scalable quantum computing platform that has been shrunk down to the size of a penny, which would serve as the basis for a quantum computer that can achieve quantum speeds while using far fewer devices than current designs.

The team hopes their research, published in Nature Communications, will help push quantum computing forward in the constant pursuit of use in real-world applications.

Over the past few years, quantum computing has gone from science fiction to a realistic technology that may see use in the next few decades. While quantum teleportation and even quantum computer chips have been demonstrated previously, the technology is still a long way off seeing real-world use.

Aug 29, 2021

China powers ahead in hypersonic missiles race with world’s most powerful wind tunnel

Posted by in category: military

China has been building the JF-22 hypervelocity wind tunnel in Huairou, an industrial district of Beijing, since 2018. Wind tunnels are large tubes that move air around stationary objects to simulate flying, allowing researchers to learn more about how the object will fly.


The JF-22 will be capable of simulating flying conditions at about 30 times the speed of sound when it is completed in 2022.

Aug 29, 2021

Look: Virtual tour of Orion, the spacecraft carrying humans to the Moon in 2024

Posted by in category: space travel

November2021will be a big month for NASA.

The Artemis I team is gearing up to launch the spacecraft Orion to the Moon and back for an uncrewed test flight.


At the heart of NASA’s Artemis mission, which aims to land humans on the lunar surface by 2,024 is the spacecraft Orion. Here’s how engineers are preparing for its maiden voyage.

Aug 29, 2021

Scientists puzzling out secrets of Venus’ 30-year-old ‘Giant Dark Cloud’

Posted by in category: space

There are many strange things happening on Venus. Among them is a recognizable weather pattern that scientists now realize has persisted in the atmosphere for at least 30 years.

Aug 29, 2021

World’s Second-Leading Crypto Network Ethereum Splits Into Two Chains

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, cybercrime/malcode

The blockchain Ethereum saw a chain split today as a software bug affected a large quantity of full node clients.

Aug 29, 2021

Scientists Discover How Neuro-Immune Interactions Burn Deep Fat

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Pioneering mouse study offers new therapeutic avenues for reducing visceral fat stores, which have been associated with cardiovascular disease and multiple types of cancer.

Obesity has been linked to no less than 13 cancers, including the two most prevalent (breast and colorectal), as well as to cardiovascular disease, which remains a leading cause of death worldwide.

The most harmful type of obesity is caused by the excessive accumulation of so-called “deep” fat. Contrary to fat stores located directly under the skin, deep, or “visceral,” fat stores reside inside our abdominal cavity, where they envelop vital organs. In normal amounts, visceral fat supports various fundamental functions, such as reproduction. However, when it is too abundant, it produces unhealthy levels of proteins and hormones that negatively affect neighboring tissues and organs.