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You’ve heard of Apple’s famous walled garden, the tightly controlled tech ecosystem that gives the company unique control of features and security. All apps go through a strict Apple approval process, they are confined so sensitive information isn’t gathered on the phone, and developers are locked out of places they’d be able to get into in other systems. The barriers are so high now that it’s probably more accurate to think of it as a castle wall.

The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded SpaceX an $8.5 million contract to investigate manufacturing techniques for heat shields that protect hypersonic vehicles in flight.


WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded SpaceX an $8.5 million contract to investigate advanced materials and manufacturing techniques for heat shields that protect hypersonic vehicles in flight.

Heat protection is a critical technology to shield hypersonic vehicles from the intense heat experienced when flying at more than five times the speed of sound.

Some genes don’t stay in the same place in the genome. Sometimes called jumping genes or transposons, this genetic material can hop around and rearrange itself | Genetics And Genomics.


Some genetic sequences don’t stay in the same place in the genome. Sometimes called jumping genes or transposons, this genetic material can hop around and rearrange itself to create new sequences. Some transposons even encode for their own enzymes, and these co-called transposases can edit the genome by cutting sequences from one place and pasting them to another.

Reporting in Science, researchers have now suggested that transposable elements (TEs) can fuse with portions of existing genes that code for protein called exons, and get incorporated into genes in a process called exon shuffling to create novel genes that are functional, and express new proteins.