JEFF Bezos has offered NASA $2 billion in exchange for a contract to allow astronauts to land on the moon.
The Amazon founder made his offer to administrator Bill Nelson in an open letter on Monday, a week after his own historic rocket launch.
Billionaire Bezos wrote: Blue Origin is committed to building a future where millions of people live and work in space to benefit the Earth.
The first science from the eROSITA space observatory is here.
The German-built eROSITA space telescope is creating the most detailed map of the distribution of black holes and neutron stars in the Universe, having discovered over two million such new objects in the two years since its launch in 2019.
A notorious cross-platform crypto-mining malware has refined and improved its techniques to attack Windows and Linux operating systems.
It is among the longest flights by an electric aircraft.
The company, which is backed by Toyota and recently acquired Uber’s flying taxi division, has said that it plans to have a full-scale air taxi service in operation by 2024, including regional trips. The point of the 150-mile flight was to demonstrate how far its aircraft could fly on a single charge, to allay concerns about the vehicle’s range and battery. If you want to fly from New York City to Montauk, Joby wanted to show that it can get you there without running out of juice.
“We’ve achieved something that many thought impossible with today’s battery technology,” JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, said in a statement. “By doing so we’ve taken the first step towards making convenient, emissions-free air travel between places like San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, Houston and Austin, or Los Angeles and San Diego an everyday reality.”
A novel metallic compound of hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur exhibited superconductivity at a balmy 59 degrees Fahrenheit—when pressurized between a pair of diamond anvils.
Via Quanta Magazine9 months ago.
Physicists finally achieved the long-sought goal, but there’s a catch: Their compound requires crushing pressures to keep from falling apart.
Summary: Study reveals an abundance of the CRMP2 protein in people with schizophrenia. The findings could lead to a blood-based biomarker test for the mental health disorder.
Source: SBPMDI
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have discovered how levels of a protein could be used in the future as a blood-based diagnostic aid for schizophrenia. The activity of the protein, which is found in both the brain and blood, affects neural connections in human brains and is uniquely imbalanced in people diagnosed with the condition. The research also provides guidance for future analyses into the molecular basis of this serious, disabling mental disorder.
After controlling for factors such as age, sex, handedness, first language, education level, and other variables, the researchers found that those who had contracted COVID-19 tended to underperform on the intelligence test compared to those who had not contracted the virus. The greatest deficits were observed on tasks requiring reasoning, planning and problem solving, which is in line “with reports of long-COVID, where ‘brain fog,’ trouble concentrating and difficulty finding the correct words are common,” the researchers said.
People who have recovered from COVID-19 tend to score significantly lower on an intelligence test compared to those who have not contracted the virus, according to new research published in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine. The findings suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 can produce substantial reductions in cognitive ability, especially among those with more severe illness.
“By coincidence, the pandemic escalated in the United Kingdom in the middle of when I was collecting cognitive and mental health data at very large scale as part of the BBC2 Horizon collaboration the Great British Intelligence Test,” said lead researcher Adam Hampshire (@HampshireHub), an associate professor in the Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Imperial College London.
“The test comprised a set of tasks designed to measure different dimensions of cognitive ability that had been designed for application in both citizen science and clinical research. A number of my colleagues contacted me in parallel to point out that this provided an opportunity to gather important data on how the pandemic and COVID-19 illness were affecting mental health and cognition.”
With extreme weather causing power failures in California and Texas, it’s increasingly clear that the existing power infrastructure isn’t designed for these new conditions. Past research has shown that nuclear power plants are no exception, with rising temperatures creating cooling problems for them. Now, a comprehensive analysis looking at a broader range of climate events shows that it’s not just hot weather that puts these plants at risk—it’s the full range of climate disturbances.
Heat has been one of the most direct threats, as higher temperatures mean that the natural cooling sources (rivers, oceans, lakes) are becoming less efficient heat sinks. However, this new analysis shows that hurricanes and typhoons have become the leading causes of nuclear outages, at least in North America and South and East Asia. Precautionary shutdowns for storms are routine, and so this finding is perhaps not so surprising. But other factors—like the clogging of cooling intake pipes by unusually abundant jellyfish populations—are a bit less obvious.
Overall, this latest analysis calculates that the frequency of climate-related nuclear plant outages is almost eight times higher than it was in the 1990s. The analysis also estimates that the global nuclear fleet will lose up to 1.4 percent—about 36 TWh—of its energy production in the next 40 years and up to 2.4 percent, or 61 TWh, by 2081–2100.
A robot has wowed the audience at a basketball match during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
The machine, which goes by the name of CUE, showed off its throwing skills during half-time of the Men’s Preliminary Round Group B game between France and the United States (which France won 83–76).
In development by Japanese company Toyota since May 2018, CUE stands 208 cm (6’ 10) tall and weighs 90 kg (200 lbs). It uses sensors on its torso to calculate the angle and distance to the basket, before using its motorised arms and knees to shoot. The whole process from lifting the ball to making the shot takes less than 15 seconds.
