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A bumper crop of applications for the ESA’s astronaut corps is providing a boost to proposals for Europe to develop its own human spaceflight capability.

WASHINGTON — A bumper crop of applications for the European Space Agency’s astronaut corps is providing a boost to proposals for Europe to develop its own human spaceflight capability.

ESA announced June 23 that it received 22589 applications in a solicitation that ended June 18. That’s far more than the 8413 applications it received in the previous astronaut selection round in 2018.

“Having more than 22000 applicants is quite a number,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said in a press conference about the application figures. “This is, I would call it, almost a historic moment for us that we have so many applicants that want to become astronauts. From that point of view, I’m more than satisfied. I’m extremely thrilled by these numbers.”

Continue reading “Europe considering concepts for human spaceflight” | >

The mosaic image is a composition of seven subsequent frames taken from Nellysford, Virginia, as the space station traversed the face of the sun at the speed of roughly 5 miles per second, which is about 18000 mph (29000 kph), according to a NASA photo description.

The six-hour and 45-minute spacewalk was the third for Pesquet and Kimbrough in less than two weeks as they completed work on augmenting the space station’s power systems. The iROSA panel deployed on Friday was the second of six new panels to be installed at the station.

Friday’s extravehicular activity (EVA) positioned the second iROSA opposite the first on the far left, or port side of the space station’s backbone truss. Now both the 2B and 4B power channels on the port 6 (P6) truss have the new arrays deployed.

Continue reading “Wow! NASA photographer spots space station crossing the sun during spacewalk (video)” | >

“I’m at [email protected],” he tells CNBC Make It. He gives it out to everyone because he likes helping people and it keeps him on top of his game.

“I end up learning things that I never imagined I’d want to know,” Draper says.

Draper is a legend in the world of venture capital. Since the mid-1980s, he has built a fortune making early investments in companies like Hotmail, Skype, Baidu, Tesla and SpaceX.

Continue reading “Billionaire bitcoin investor Tim Draper: 1 question he always asks before investing—and why he sometimes gets ‘3 hours of sleep’” | >

Big fan of long-read sequencing. It helped diagnose my rare disease when conventional sequencing failed.

What’s the Difference between Short-Read Sequencing and Long-Read Sequencing? Like their names suggest, short-read sequencing looks at DNA in short snippets (100−350 base pairs) while long-read sequencing measures long fragments of DNA (tens of thousands of base pairs). Why does that matter? Well, when trying to characterize a human genome that has two copies (one maternal and one paternal), each 3.2 billion base pairs in length — having longer snippets of DNA means you: Need fewer snippets to make up the length of the whole genome and have no gaps where the sequence is unknown Can more easily map how one region of the genome is connected to another region Have the ability to phase or determine which copy of a gene, maternal or paternal, a mutation occurs in.

PacBio long-read sequencing provides the most comprehensive view of genomes, transcriptomes, and epigenomes.

Continue reading “Sequencing 101: Whole Genome Sequencing for Rare Diseases” | >

An Australian mammal thought to have been wiped out over 150 years ago can now be crossed off our list of extinct animals, following a new study.

Researchers compared DNA samples fromeight extinct Australian rodents, as well as 42 of their living relatives, to look at the decline of native species since the arrival of Europeans in Australia.

The study showed the extinctGould’s was indistinguishable from the Shark Bay mouse, still found on several small islands off the coast of Western Australia.

Continue reading “Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead” | >

Short of ceasing your grilling activity, there’s no way to completely avoid AGEs, PAH, and HCA when enjoying a summer barbecue. That said, there’s plenty you can do to reduce your carcinogen risk while enjoying smokey flavors over the summer.

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Hickory and oak wood and charcoal are the scents of summer. I associate that campfire smell with fireworks, screaming with neighborhood kids while jumping through a lawn sprinkler, and Dad at the grill with a Blue Moon in hand. Barbeque is a wonderful pastime. So help me, nothing will pry it out of my red-blooded American hands, especially not on the Fourth of July.

And that’s a bit of a problem, as I’m also pursuing human life extension. I’m not talking about the potential fire hazard that grilling is (or the associated $37 million of property damage they cause every year). The trouble is carcinogens. There are a lot of well-established barbecue health risks.

Continue reading “6 Tips to Reduce Carcinogenic Barbecue Health Risks” | >

The US power grid needs all of support it can get. Sad that some would stand in the way of progress.

There is no love lost between the notorious Koch brothers and the nation’s railroad industry, and the relationship is about to get a lot unlovelier. A massive new, first-of-its-kind renewable energy transmission line is taking shape in the Midwest, which will cut into the Koch family’s fossil energy business. It has a good chance of succeeding where others have stalled, because it will bury the cables under existing rights-of-way using railroad rights-of-way and avoid stirring up the kind of opposition faced by conventional above-ground lines.

The Koch brothers and their family-owned company, Koch Industries, have earned a reputation for attempting to throttle the nation’s renewable energy sector. That makes sense, considering that the diversified, multinational firm owns thousands of miles of oil, gas, and chemical pipelines criss-crossing the US (and sometimes breaking down) in addition to other major operations that depend on rail and highway infrastructure.

Koch Industries owns fleets of rail cars, but one thing it doesn’t have is its own railroad right-of-way. That’s a bit ironic, considering that railroads provided the initial kickstart for the family business back in the 1920s, but that is where trouble has been brewing today.

Continue reading “Railroads To Pour Cold Renewable Energy Water On Koch Industries” | >

Summary: Study finds amyloid-beta plaques may not be the cause of memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but instead a consequence of the disease. Regardless of the levels of amyloid plaques, researchers found individuals with high levels of amyloid peptide were cognitively normal. Higher levels of soluble amyloid beta peptide were also linked to people having a larger hippocampus.

Source: University of Cincinnati.

Experts estimate more than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia. But a recent study, led by the University of Cincinnati, sheds new light on the disease and a highly debated new drug therapy.

Continue reading “Prevailing Alzheimer’s Theory in Question With New Discovery” | >