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It rarely makes the news that SpaceX has to fix stuff because they generally fix it within a few weeks and that is not considered newsworthy.

Anyway, at the moment the next Cargo Dragon flight is being delayed due to a thruster propellant leak and the next Crew Dragon capsule has a defective heatshield that is going to have to be replaced before launch. (The heatshield is less of an issue as the flight isn’t until September anyway.)

This Cargo Dragon has flown twice before so it is interesting that it suddenly decided to leak. Its thruster fuel is extra explosive, so SpaceX will need to figure this out. (3 years ago, a Crew Dragon was destroyed by such a leak during testing.)

Misplaced hypergols are not something one messes around with.

Continue reading “NASA and SpaceX stand down on Dragon launch to study hydrazine issue” | >

To assess whether a compound holds promise for treating a disease, researchers usually begin by studying its use in animals. This allows us to see if the compound has a chance of curing the disease.

Animal models, however, rarely reproduce all aspects of a disease. The alternative is to represent the disease in cell cultures. While at first glance, Petri dishes look quite different from a person with a disease, the reality could be quite different when you look at them more closely.

Alzheimer’s has been cured more than 400 times in laboratories. How then can we still consider Alzheimer’s to be incurable? The reason is that it has only been cured in animals.

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A new colorectal cancer drug has shocked researchers with how effective it is against the highly dangerous disease, after it virtually cured every member of a clinical trial.

Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody drug that is already approved to treat endometrial cancer in the UK, smashed expectations in a trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

One year after the trial ended, each of the 18 participants’ cancer had gone into remission, with doctors unable to find signs of the cancer in their body.

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Chance observations corroborate hybrid explanation for drop in brightness.

A weather satellite has helped explain why the red supergiant star Betelgeuse experienced an unprecedented dimming in 2019–20.

Its findings corroborate earlier studies that concluded the dimming was the consequence of a lower-temperature spot on the star, which reduced the heat going to a nearby gas cloud. This, astronomers believe, allowed the cloud to cool and condense into dust that blocked some of Betelgeuse’s light.

As a variable star, nearby Betelgeuse normally fluctuates in brightness, but in October 2019 it began to grow fainter than it had ever been seen before. This led to speculation that it may explode in a supernova. By the end of February, however, Betelgeuse had returned to its normal brightness range, leaving astronomers scratching their heads about what had caused the extreme dip in luminosity.

Continue reading “Weather satellite sheds light on ‘Great Dimming’ of Betelgeuse star” | >