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Nov 21, 2020

Meet the All-Electric Elation Freedom Hypercar, a 1,400 HP Beast With a 400-Mile Range

Posted by in category: transportation

To be built in Northern California, the limited-edition vehicles will have a top speed of 260 mph and start at $2.3 million each.

Nov 21, 2020

Your pee could be the golden ticket to a greener world

Posted by in category: sustainability

While many of us simply flush and forget about it, our pee has the potential to be a valuable resource. As it’s currently managed, though, the world’s pee is not doing us nor the planet a service. That’s why momentum for recycling our own liquid gold is growing: upcycled pee could readily sub in for conventional fertilizers.

Nov 21, 2020

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi has now flown on 3 different spaceships. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is ‘the best,’ he said

Posted by in category: space travel

Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi has ridden in three spaceships and spent more than 180 days in space. He said Crew Dragon is “fun to ride.”

Nov 21, 2020

Meteor enters our atmosphere as a blazing ball of fire near Australia

Posted by in category: mapping

Researchers mapping the seafloor off the coast of Tasmania captured the moment a meteor flew through the atmosphere as a fireball and then disintegrated over the ocean.

Nov 21, 2020

Hubble Captures a Black Hole’s ‘Shadow Beams’, Yawning Across Space

Posted by in categories: cosmology, materials

In images from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have spotted an entirely new phenomenon. Reaching tens of thousands of light-years into the void of space, vast shadows stretch from the centre of the galaxy IC 5063, as though something is blocking the bright light from therein.

You’ve probably seen something very like it before – bright beams from the Sun when it’s just below the horizon and clouds or mountains only partially block its light, known as crepuscular rays. According to astronomers, the shadows from IC 5063 could be something very similar. They’re just a whole lot bigger – at least 36,000 light-years in each direction.

IC 5063, a galaxy 156 million light-years away, is a Seyfert galaxy. This means it has an active nucleus; the supermassive black hole at its centre is busily guzzling down material from a dense accretion disc and torus of dust and gas around it.

Nov 21, 2020

Ardi and her discoverers shake up hominid evolution in ‘Fossil Men’

Posted by in category: evolution

A new book covers the big personalities, field exploits and scientific clashes behind the discovery of the hominid skeleton nicknamed Ardi.

Nov 21, 2020

A ‘golden house’ is orbiting Earth! SpaceX launches NASA’s Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, satellites

A ‘golden house’ is orbiting Earth! SpaceX launched the unique spacecraft to orbit this morning. It is the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich ocean observatory, named in honor of former Head of NASA’s Earth Science Division who passed away of cancer in August. The satellite will soon beam the most accurate information of Earth’s oceans which will help meterologists and scientists forecast weather events, like hurricanes, track climate change and rising sea levels. “At NASA, what we do is, we use the vantage point of space to get a global view of the Earth. And in this case, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is going to give us a global view of the sea surface height,” Karen St. Germain Director of NASA’s Earth Science Division stated. “The changing Earth processes are affecting sea level globally, but the impact on local communities varies widely. International collaboration is critical to both understanding these changes and informing coastal communities around the world,” she said. Sentinel-6 is a joint project between NASA and the European Aerospace Agency (ESA).

The house-shaped satellite was deployed to orbit atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off at 9:17 a.m. PST from Space Launch Complex 4E at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Nov 21, 2020

Tesla Dojo Supercomputer Explained — How To Make Full Self-Driving AI

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

Special thanks to Lieuwe Vinkhuyzen for checking that this very simplified view on building neural nets did not stray too far from reality.

The inhabitants of the Tesla fanboy echo chamber have heard regularly about the Tesla Dojo supercomputer, with almost nobody knowing what it was. It was first mentioned, that I know of, at Tesla Autonomy Day on April 22, 2019. More recently a few comments from Georg Holtz, Tesmanian, and Elon Musk himself have shed some light on this project.

Nov 21, 2020

3 Profound Impacts Exercise Has on The Brain

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience

Here are just a few ways exercise changes the structure of our brain.

Memory

Many studies suggest that exercise can help protect our memory as we age. This is because exercise has been shown to prevent the loss of total brain volume (which can lead to lower cognitive function), as well as preventing shrinkage in specific brain regions associated with memory. For example, one magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan study revealed that in older adults, six months of exercise training increases brain volume.

Nov 21, 2020

UNSW team taps light-activated liposomes for safer CRISPR delivery

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Researchers in Australia are shining a spotlight on a safer delivery method for targeted CRISPR gene therapies—and they’re using literal illumination to pull it off.

Scientists and biomedical engineers from the University of New South Wales Sydney say they’ve developed a light-sensitive liposome that can ferry CRISPR molecules to specific sites in the body. When hit with LED light, the liposomes unleash their CRISPR payloads to hunt down faulty genes.

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool consists of a guide RNA that homes in on a target in the DNA, and the Cas9 enzyme, which cuts the DNA much like a pair of molecular scissors. A slate of companies is exploring the technology to treat cancer and even blindness, but the therapy is traditionally delivered using viruses, which can themselves spur unwanted immune responses and other side effects.