Surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human and confirmed that the body accepted the transplant in a major scientific breakthrough, The New York Times reported.
This successful operation is a promising sign as scientists work to be able to use animal organs in life-saving transplants in humans.
Scientists altered a pig gene and engineered the kidney to eliminate sugar to avoid an immune system attack. In the past, the human body would reject the transplant due to the presence of glycan, a sugar molecule in pig cells.
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Imagine if we could control earthquakes and tsunamis to generate power. Or maybe even terraform every planet in the solar system. These are just a couple of the things that might happen if human civilization was to advance in the future.
The team used a high-resolution atomic force microscope (AFM) operating in a controlled environment at Princeton’s Imaging and Analysis Center. The AFM probe, whose tip ends in a single copper atom, was moved gradually closer to the iron-carbon bond until it was ruptured. The researchers measured the mechanical forces applied at the moment of breakage, which was visible in an image captured by the microscope. A team from Princeton University, the University of Texas-Austin and ExxonMobil reported the results in a paper published Sept. 24 in Nature Communications.
“It’s an incredible image—being able to actually see a single small molecule on a surface with another one bonded to it is amazing,” said coauthor Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and director of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM).
“The fact that we could characterize that particular bond, both by pulling on it and pushing on it, allows us to understand a lot more about the nature of these kinds of bonds—their strength, how they interact—and this has all sorts of implications, particularly for catalysis, where you have a molecule on a surface and then something interacts with it and causes it to break apart,” said Arnold.
NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie “Armageddon.” Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.
The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary. It’s one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across — that’s Didymos proper — and a 160-meter “moonlet” in its orbit.
As the moonlet is more typical of the type likely to threaten Earth — there being more asteroids that are that size and not easily observed — we will be testing the possibility of intercepting one by smashing into it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. This will change the speed of the moonlet by a mere fraction of a percent, but enough that its orbit period will be affected measurably. Knowing exactly how much will help us plan any future asteroid-deflection missions — not surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of existing science on ramming your spacecraft into space rocks.
Is there anything out there?
The concept of primordial black holes has waxed and waned in scientific circles over the decades. At first, it was a fascinating possibility. After all, the first few seconds of the big bang were pretty heady times, and there may have been large enough differences in density to generate black holes of all sorts of sizes, from microscopic to gigantic. But repeated observations have continually been unable to come up with any conclusive evidence for their existence.
And then there’s dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast bulk of matter in the cosmos. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what lies behind dark matter, and primordial black holes are a tantalizing possibility.
But if the universe is flooded with innumerable small black holes, eventually some of those black holes will find each other and merge. And our gravitational wave observatories should be sensitive enough to detect the resulting ripples in spacetime.
October 22 2021 2:30pm – 4pm ET (6:30 – 8pm UTC) 📅 Save to Google Calendar REGISTER FOR THE EVENT THE OVERVIEW EFFECT & HUMANITY’S FUTURE Join us for engaging discussions between astronauts, philosophers, and artists on the new era of space exploration, Frank White’s theory of The Overview Effect phenomenon, and what it could […].
New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the galaxy got off to a fitful start.
An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Frontier Fields, to locate and study some of the smallest faintest galaxies in the nearby universe. This has revealed the formation of the galaxy was likely to be fitful. The first results have just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
One of the most interesting questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades is how and when the first galaxies formed. Concerning the how, one possibility is that the formation of the first stars within galaxies started at a steady pace, slowly building up a more and more massive system. Another possibility is that the formation was more violent and discontinuous, with intense, but short-lived bursts of star formation triggered by events such as mergers and enhanced gas accretion.
Four astronauts are getting ready to launch from Florida.
NASA’s next space station launch is set for Halloween and will put four more astronauts into space on a SpaceX rocket.
The Crew-3 launch is scheduled for Sunday, Oct. 31 at 2:21 a.m. EDT (0721 GMT), using a Falcon 9 rocket. The launch will take place at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television and SpaceX broadcast details will be released at a later date.
Beyond vowels and consonants, complex tonal melodies might be lost to history if not documented in endangered and Indigenous languages.