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Summary: Using brain organoid models, researchers have identified how the brain grows much larger and has three times as many neurons, as the brains of chimpanzees and gorillas.

Source: UK Research and Innovation.

A new study is the first to identify how human brains grow much larger, with three times as many neurons, compared with chimpanzee and gorilla brains. The study, led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, identified a key molecular switch that can make ape brain organoids grow more like human organoids, and vice versa.

Antiaging expert Aubrey de Grey says there is a 50% chance that we reach longevity escape velocity by 2035.

I now think there is a 50% chance that we will reach longevity escape velocity by 2036. After that point (the “Methuselarity”), those who regularly receive the latest rejuvenation therapies will never suffer from age-related ill-health at any age.

— Aubrey de Grey (@aubreydegrey) March 142021

Great new episode with NASA cosmologist Jason Rhodes who discusses everything from the earliest galaxy surveys to dark matter and the cosmic web.


Jason Rhodes, a cosmologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and the JPL Roman Space Telescope Project Scientist, discusses a proposed galaxy survey to end all galaxy surveys. One that would wring as much information out of our universe’s trillion or so galaxies across cosmic time as humanly possible. Astronomers are still at least half a century off from this final galaxy census, but the hope is that it will give cosmologists most of the answers they need about the makeup and structure of the universe.

Researchers using NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will map and model the core of nearby galaxy Centaurus A.

As technology has improved over the centuries, so have astronomers’ observations of nearby galaxy Centaurus A. They have peeled back its layers like an onion to discover that its wobbly shape is the result of two galaxies that merged more than 100 million years ago. It also has an active supermassive black hole, known as an active galactic nucleus, at its heart that periodically sends out twin jets. Despite these advancements, Centaurus A’s dusty core is still quite mysterious. Webb’s high-resolution infrared data will allow a research team to very precisely reveal all that lies at the center.