APT hackers use shadowpad backdoor and MS exchange bug to target building automation systems.
Is the militarization of outer space a done deal? USTRANSCOM wants a fleet of militarized Starships.
USTRANSCOM, responsible for US military logistics ponders a fleet of Starships for cargo and personnel suborbital flights.
Watch the launch from New Zealand of CAPSTONE, a new pathfinder CubeSat that will explore a unique orbit around the Moon!
The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, will be the first spacecraft to fly a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon, where the pull of gravity from Earth and the Moon interact to allow for a nearly-stable orbit. CAPSTONE’s test of this orbit will lead the way for our future Artemis lunar outpost called Gateway.
CAPSTONE is targeted to launch at 5:55 a.m. EDT (9:55 UTC) Tuesday, June 28 on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand.
Researchers have discovered that the human liver never ages beyond just three years old, no matter how old an individual is.
The liver is an amazing organ. Not only is it capable of regenerating itself to repair damage from toxins, like alcohol, but the liver apparently never ages, either.
According to new research, the liver is almost always just under three years old. The concept of liver age has been a medical conundrum for decades. Studying animal livers has yet to offer any kind of answer, so scientists with TU Dresden looked at human livers to try to discern more about our body’s filter.
An international team of scientists at TU Dresden analyzed the livers of multiple individuals between the age of 20 and 84. Every individual’s liver cells showed that they were roughly the same age. “No matter if you are 20 or 84, your liver stays on average just under three years old,” Dr. Olaf Bergmann, lead researcher on the study, explained in a release.
A new phishing attack is using Facebook Messenger chatbots to impersonate the company’s support team and steal credentials used to manage Facebook pages.
Chatbots are programs that impersonate live support people and are commonly used to provide answers to simple questions or triage customer support cases before they are handed off to a live employee.
In a new campaign discovered by TrustWave, threat actors use chatbots to steal credentials for managers of Facebook pages, commonly used by companies to provide support or promote their services.
Earthly space travelers have been trying to perfect orbital botany for a while now. Stable, sustainable off world agricultural practices are needed to make longer term exploration missions possible, and though the International Space Station (ISS) has seen a few successful low-orbit gardening endeavors, all have used some sort of soil or soil-replacing growth media.
Now, thanks to NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Watkins, that could be starting to change. According to a NASA blog published last week, Watkins has begun to harvest radishes and mizuna greens aboard the ISS — grown without any soil whatsoever.
Growing any edible plants in space is always exciting, but using dirt-like growth materials presents potential resource, mess, and sanitation problems. And that’s why Watkins’ triumphant soilless crop could be a thrilling step towards a new age of interstellar discovery.
The Eurepean Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft’s software will be upgraded after 19 years, to make extended observations.
A new GPU-based machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) can help scientists better understand and predict connectivity between different regions of the brain.
The algorithm, called Regularized, Accelerated, Linear Fascicle Evaluation, or ReAl-LiFE, can rapidly analyze the enormous amounts of data generated from diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) scans of the human brain. Using ReAL-LiFE, the team was able to evaluate dMRI data over 150 times faster than existing state-of-the-art algorithms.
“Tasks that previously took hours to days can be completed within seconds to minutes,” says Devarajan Sridharan, Associate Professor at the Centre for Neuroscience (CNS), IISc, and corresponding author of the study published in the journal Nature Computational Science.
Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI, President Pann Ghill Suh) announced on Mar. 4 that its research team led by principal researcher Yoichi Kosodo has developed a technology to mass produce cerebral cortex neurons utilizing Induced pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS). The research outcome will be published in the March issue of Scientific Reports.
Scientists expect that it will be possible to treat brain diseases by restoring damaged area in the brain by mass producing neurons utilizing stem cells even though cerebral neurons die if one suffers from degenerative brain diseases such as dementia and Parkinson’s Disease.
In fact, a research team of Kyoto University in Japan conducted clinical test of transplanting neurons made of iPS into the brain of a patient with Parkinson’s disease. In Parkinson’s disease, neurons that generate the neurotransmitter dopamine die, resulting in symptoms such as muscle stiffness and tremor in hands and feet. Through the clinical test, the patient was treated with new neurons.
A few years ago, Jürgen Knoblich and his team at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) have pioneered brain organoid technology. They developed a method for cultivating three-dimensional brain-like structures, so called cerebral organoids, in a dish. This discovery has tremendous potential as it could revolutionize drug discovery and disease research. Their lab grown organ-models mimic early human brain development in a surprisingly precise way, allowing for targeted analysis of human neuropsychiatric disorders, that are otherwise not possible. Using this cutting-edge methodology, research teams around the world have already revealed new secrets of human brain formation and its defects that can lead to microcephaly, epilepsy or autism.
In a new study published in Nature Biotechnology, scientists from Cambridge and Vienna present a new method that combines the organoid method with bioengineering. The researchers use special polymer fibers made of a material called PLGA) to generate a floating scaffold that was then covered with human cells. By using this ground-breaking combination of engineering and stem cell culture, the scientists are able to form more elongated organoids that more closely resemble the shape of an actual human embryo. By doing so, the organoids become more consistent and reproducible.
“This study is one of the first attempts to combine organoids with bioengineering. Our new method takes advantage of and combines the unique strengths of each approach, namely the intrinsic self-organization of organoids and the reproducibility afforded by bioengineering. We make use of small microfilaments to guide the shape of the organoids without driving tissue identity, ” explains Madeline Lancaster, group leader at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and first author of the paper.