Mar 21, 2021
Humans are still evolving, and maybe faster now than ever
Posted by Prem Vijaywargi in category: futurism
The sudden prevalence of an artery in the forearm is evidence that we’re still very much a work in progress.
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Mar 21, 2021
How the Ingenuity helicopter will deploy on Mars
Posted by Alberto Lao in category: space
NASA systems engineer Dr. Farah Alibay from JPL talks about the Ingenuity helicopter and how it will separate from the Perseverance rover and then land on the Red Planet.
Mar 21, 2021
HDL Update: Age-Related Changes, All-Cause Mortality Risk, And Progress Towards The Optimal Range
Posted by Mike Lustgarten in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, sex
Here’s my latest video!
In November 2020, I made a HDL video based on a meta-analysis in ~3.4 million subjects that was published in July 2020. In Dec 2020, a larger study (n=15.8 million subjects) was published-those data are presented in the video, and compared against the meta-analysis.
Mar 21, 2021
Neuroscientists Unveil Tech for the Vision Impaired: Bionic Eyes, Textured Tablets and More
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: cyborgs, neuroscience, transhumanism, wearables
Devices shift away from Robocop-like wearables to simpler, more accessible assistive solutions.
There are many, many wearable and portable devices aimed at improving life for the blind and visually impaired (in some cases, even restoring vision). Such devices have been developed for pretty much every part of the body: fingers, wrists, abdomen, chest, face, ears, feet, even the tongue.
Mar 21, 2021
Spacecraft in a ‘warp bubble’ could travel faster than light, claims physicist
Posted by Paul Battista in category: space travel
Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.
However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of Göttingen suggests a way beyond this limit. The catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and it may not be able to propel a spacecraft.
Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could be capable of arranging the structure of spacetime in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within spacetime, spacetime itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. Therefore, a spacecraft contained in a hyper-fast bubble could arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws, even Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.
Mar 21, 2021
NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Metal Asteroid Worth 70,000 Times the Global Economy
Posted by Prem Vijaywargi in categories: economics, space
NASA’s Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Metal Asteroid Worth 70000 Times the Global Economy.
The metallic rarity is valued at $10000, 000000, 000000, 000.
Mar 20, 2021
What will SpaceX do when they get to Mars?
Posted by Alberto Lao in category: space travel
With SpaceX aiming to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, they will need to set up the essentials like water and power before they get there.
Mar 20, 2021
Munching maggots help Singapore startup secure lucrative biomaterial
Posted by Derick Lee in categories: food, sustainability
Working in conjunction with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Insectta’s technology uses a proprietary and environmentally friendly process to extract lucrative substances such as chitosan, melanin and probiotics from the larvae, it said.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) — In a quiet, mainly residential district of Singapore, trays of writhing black soldier fly larvae munch their way through hundreds of kilograms of food waste a day.
The protein-rich maggots can be sold for pet food or fertiliser, but at Insectta — a startup that says it is Singapore’s first urban insect farm — they are bred to extract biomaterials that can be used in pharmaceuticals and electronics.
Continue reading “Munching maggots help Singapore startup secure lucrative biomaterial” »
Mar 20, 2021
An All-Sky X-Ray Survey Finds the Biggest Supernova Remnant Ever Seen
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, mathematics
Our sky is missing supernovas. Stars live for millions or billions of years. But given the sheer number of stars in the Milky Way, we should still expect these cataclysmic stellar deaths every 30–50 years. Few of those explosions will be within naked-eye-range of Earth. Nova is from the Latin meaning “new”. Over the last 2000 years, humans have seen about seven “new” stars appear in the sky – some bright enough to be seen during the day – until they faded after the initial explosion. While we haven’t seen a new star appear in the sky for over 400 years, we can see the aftermath with telescopes – supernova remnants (SNRs) – the hot expanding gases of stellar explosions. SNRs are visible up to a 150000 years before fading into the Galaxy. So, doing the math, there should be about 1200 visible SNRs in our sky but we’ve only managed to find about 300. That was until “Hoinga” was recently discovered. Named after the hometown of first author Scientist Werner Becker, whose research team found the SNR using the eROSITA All-Sky X-ray survey, Hoinga is one of the largest SNRs ever seen.
Hoinga is big. Really big. The SNR spans 4 degrees of the sky – eight times wider than the Full Moon. The obvious question – how could astronomers not have already found something THAT enormous? Hoinga is not where we typically are looking for supernova. Most of our SNR searches are focused on the plane of the Galaxy toward the Milky Way’s core where we’d expect to find the densest concentration of older and exploded stars. But Hoinga was found at high latitudes off the plane of the Galaxy.
Furthermore, Hoinga hides in the sky because it’s so large. At this scale, the SNR is difficult to distinguish from other large structures of dust and gas that make up the Galaxy known as the “Galactic Cirrus.” It’s like trying to see an individual cloud in an overcast sky. The Galactic Cirrus also outshines Hoinga in radio light, often used to search for SNRs, forcing Hoinga to hide in the background. Cross referencing with older radio sky surveys, the research team determined Hoinga had been observed before but was never identified as an SNR due to its comparatively faint glow in radio. Here eROSITA has an advantage as it sees X-rays. Hoinga shines brighter in X-ray light than the Galactic Cirrus allowing it to stand out from the Galaxy to be discovered.
