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Jun 9, 2020

New Generation of Lightweight, Flexible Solar Cells and Display Screens Using Transparent Graphene Electrodes

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

New roll-to-roll production method could enable lightweight, flexible solar devices and a new generation of display screens.

A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics.

The new manufacturing process, which was developed at MIT and should be relatively easy to scale up for industrial production, involves an intermediate “buffer” layer of material that is key to the technique’s success. The buffer allows the ultrathin graphene sheet, less than a nanometer (billionth of a meter) thick, to be easily lifted off from its substrate, allowing for rapid roll-to-roll manufacturing.

Jun 9, 2020

Watch Crew Dragon Astronaut’s First Interview From Space

Posted by in category: space travel

A week after their arrival, SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have given their first interview from the International Space Station.

Jun 9, 2020

Prehistoric parasite is the oldest one ever found — frozen in action as it was 500 million years ago

Posted by in category: futurism

The Cambrian period was a time when every imaginable type of life-form evolved. Every imaginable life-form includes parasites. When exactly parasitism spawned is still a mystery, but it makes sense that parasites would have crawled out with all the other creatures that appeared during the burst of l…

Jun 9, 2020

5 trillion bytes a day: SpaceX engineers flash some facts about Starlink satellites

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation is still deep into testing mode, but it’s already generating 5 trillion bytes of data on a daily basis and getting software updates on a weekly basis.

Those are a couple of the nuggets coming from a weekend Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session featuring SpaceX’s software team.

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Jun 9, 2020

3D Shape of the Human Genome Has Surprising Roles in Various Fundamental Processes in Life

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The three-dimensional structure of the human genome is essential for providing a rapid and robust inflammatory response but is surprisingly not vital for reprogramming one cell type into another, according to research published today in Nature Genetics. The findings shed new light on the fundamental relationship between how a genome folds and the function of a cell.

Jun 9, 2020

Tesla investor Ron Baron expects exponential growth for Elon Musk’s car company and SpaceX

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel, sustainability

Billionaire investor Ron Baron believes there’s still plenty of room for growth for Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX companies.

Baron said Tuesday morning on “Squawk Box” that he believes “there’s 10 times more to go” with Tesla. He also said SpaceX, a privately held company, will grow by a multiple of 20 in the next 10 years. He previously predicted similar growth for Tesla.

Jun 9, 2020

Have humans reached the end of evolution? Not under these 4 scenarios

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education, evolution, transhumanism

3. Evolution shifts to off-world human colonies.

4. Transhumanism will drive evolution.


Is natural selection still a major force in human evolution? As far back as high school biology, we’ve been taught to think the answer must be yes. But is it really true?

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Jun 9, 2020

How to increase (or decrease) brain activity and memory

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Is it possible to rapidly increase (or decrease) the amount of information the brain can store?

A new international study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) suggests it may be. Their research has identified a molecule that improves brain function and memory recall is improved. Published in the latest issue of Cell Reports, the study has implications for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, such as autism spectrum disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.

Jun 9, 2020

Who’s to blame? These three scientists are at the heart of the Surgisphere COVID-19 scandal

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

I remember questioning this data, as it was not even research on animals, it was observation of people’s medical files.

Three unlikely collaborators are at the heart of the fast-moving COVID-19 research scandal, which led to retractions last week by The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and the withdrawal of an online preprint, after the trove of patient data they all relied on was challenged. The three physician-scientists never were at the same institution nor had they ever before written together, but they are the only authors in common on the disputed papers, and the other co-authors all have ties to at least one of them. Their partnership, which seized a high-impact role during a global public health crisis, has now ended disastrously.

The first author for both retracted papers was cardiac surgeon Mandeep Mehra, an eminent Harvard University professor who works at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and is known internationally for cardiovascular medicine and heart transplants. He provided the kind of gravitas that can fast-track papers to leading journals. In a statement provided by BWH, Mehra said he had met another of the trio, cardiac surgeon Amit Patel, in “academic and medical circles,” and that Patel had introduced him to Sapan Desai, a vascular surgeon and founder of Surgisphere, the tiny company that supplied the data. Journal disclosures, however, also indicate Mehra received compensation from Triple-Gene, a gene therapy company Patel co-founded to develop cardiovascular treatments.

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Jun 9, 2020

Essential components of dietary restriction revealed

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

Another link on diet/healthspan.


Studies by Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI), have provided a new understanding into the roles two essential amino acids play in metabolic health, which may help scientists in the fight against obesity.

Led by Dr. Adam Rose, the recent finding, published in Nature Communications, shows that by reducing the amount of two —threonine and tryptophan—in young healthy mice, they were able to burn more calories than they consumed, without calorie reduction, keeping them lean and healthy and without the side-effect of lower muscle mass. A low-threonine even protected mice that were morbidly obese and prone to developing type 2 diabetes.

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