Lifeboat Foundation

“If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants & animals die out on Earth, but are still alive on Mars,” Musk tweeted in mid-April.

What Musk probably didn’t know was that his destiny was already sealed. Not in the stars, but on paper.

In 1,953 a book was published that predicted plans for an “Elon” to take humans to Mars.

The DSN is being upgraded to communicate with more spacecraft than ever before and to accommodate evolving mission needs.

The first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft will not have a crew of astronauts on board, but there are several experienced teams of people behind the mission to ensure the success of the first SLS launch and Orion’s first trip around the Moon.

Donor-derived anti-CD7 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy led to complete responses in 18 of 20 patients with relapsed or refractory (r/r) T-cell acute lymphoblastic (ALL), a first-in-human clinical trial showed.

After a median follow-up of 6.3 months, 15 of the 18 responding patients remained in remission, and seven patients had undergone stem-cell transplantation (SCT). All patients developed cytokine release syndrome (CRS), which was grade 1/2 in most instances. Because the therapy involved unmanipulated T cells, a majority of patients developed graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), grade 1/2 severity in all cases. All of the patients developed severe cytopenias, which were manageable.

The results provided the basis for an ongoing phase II trial of the donor-derived anti-CD7 therapy, reported Jing Pan, MD, of the State Key Laboratory of Experimental Hematology and Beijing Boren Hospital in China, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

In case someone you know needs details.

With an increase in calls to poison-control centers, the CDC and FDA strongly warn against the use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin for COVID-19.

Flying a thrust-vectoring rocket can be a challenge, and even more so if you stack multiple stages and a minimalist flight computer on top of it all. But [Joe Barnard] is not one to shy away from such a challenge, so he built a three stage actively guided rocket named Shreeek.

[Joe] is well known for his thrust-vectoring rockets, some of which have came within a hair’s breadth of making a perfect powered landing. Previous rockets have used larger, more complex flight computers, but for this round, he wanted to go as small and minimalist as possible. Each stage of the rocket has its own tiny 16 × 17 mm flight computer and battery. The main components are a SAM21 microcontroller running Arduino firmware, an IMU for altitude and orientation sensing, and a FET to trigger the rocket motor igniter. It also has servo outputs for thrust vector control (TVC), and motor control output for the reaction wheel on the third stage for roll control. To keep it simple he omitted a way to log flight data, a decision he later regretted. Shreeek did not have a dedicated recovery system on any of the stages, instead relying on its light weight and high drag to land intact.

Continue reading “Three-Stage Thrust Vectoring Model Rocket With Tiny Flight Computers” »

The Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Science has found settlements that date from roughly 10,000 years ago during the early stages of the Butovo culture, described as the communities of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers that occupied the upper catchment area of the forest zone in Western Russia during this period.

The Mesolithic period took place between 10,000 BCE and 8,000 BCE and is otherwise identified as the Middle Stone Age.

Sam Zeloof, 21 builds homemade semiconductors in his family’s garage in Flemington, N.J. (In his latest video, Zeloof refers to it casually as his “garage fab.”) The Carnegie Mellon University student has been doing it since high school, becoming a truly inspiring example of just how far a do-it-yourself spirit can take you.

And best of all, he’s documented it all in detailed blog posts and nearly 50 videos uploaded to YouTube, sharing what he’s learned for others who might follow in his footsteps.

Continue reading “Meet the College Student Who Makes His Own Chips” »

High-energy cosmic rays have proven elusive… but we may have found their source.

Thanks to new research led by the University of Nagoya, scientists have quantified the number of cosmic rays produced in a supernova remnant for the first time. This research has helped resolve a 100-year mystery and is a major step towards determining precisely where cosmic rays come from.

While scientists theorize that cosmic rays originate from many sources — our Sun, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and active galactic nuclei (sometimes called quasars) — their exact origin has been a mystery since they were first discovered in 1912. Similarly, astronomers have theorized that supernova remnants (the after-effects of supernova explosions) are responsible for accelerating them to nearly the speed of light.

Continue reading “We may finally know where high-energy cosmic rays come from” »