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More than 150000 volunteers around the world are helping NASA explore the universe—and you could be one of them! Citizen scientists are helping astronomers map out nearby stars, but that’s only one of the many NASA Citizen Science projects available to the public. Take a look:


Is our solar system located in a typical Milky Way neighborhood? Scientists have gotten closer to answering this question.

Neural networks of neural networks.


Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for dinner); it may be an action (make curry); it may be a change in mood (yay curry!). Whatever the output, that “something” is a transformation of some form of input (a menu) to output (“chicken dansak, please”). And if we think of a brain as a device that transforms inputs to outputs then, inexorably, the computer becomes our analogy of choice.

For some this analogy is merely a useful rhetorical device; for others it is a serious idea. But the brain isn’t a computer. Each neuron is a computer. Your cortex contains 17 billion computers.

NOT curing aging is immoral.


El libro de José Luis Cordeiro y David Wood, “La Muerte de la Muerte”, cuya publicación en español cubrimos en su día, se ha presentado ahora en francés. Los autores han hecho esta presentación en inglés para promocionarlo.

Todos los beneficios son donados a organizaciones que trabajan para acabar con el envejecimiento.

Blue jets have been observed from the ground and aircraft for years, but it’s hard to tell how they form without getting high above the clouds. Now, instruments on the International Space Station have spotted a blue jet emerge from an extremely brief, bright burst of electricity near the top of a thundercloud, researchers report online January 20 in Nature.

Understanding blue jets and other upper-atmosphere phenomena related to thunderstorms, such as sprites (SN: 6/14/02) and elves (SN: 12/23/95), is important because these events can affect how radio waves travel through the air — potentially impacting communication technologies, says Penn State space physicist Victor Pasko, who was not involved in the work.

Cameras and light-sensing instruments called photometers on the space station observed the blue jet in a storm over the Pacific Ocean, near the island of Nauru, in February 2019. “The whole thing starts with what I think of as a blue bang,” says Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. That “blue bang” was a 10-microsecond flash of bright blue light near the top of the cloud, about 16 kilometers high. From that flashpoint, a blue jet shot up into the stratosphere, climbing as high as about 52 kilometers over several hundred milliseconds.

Scientists from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the University of Western Australia (UWA) have set a world record for the most stable transmission of a laser signal through the atmosphere.

In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, Australian researchers teamed up with researchers from the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) and the French metrology lab Systèmes de Référence Temps-Espace (SYRTE) at Paris Observatory.

The team set the for the most stable transmission by combining the Aussies’ phase stabilization technology with advanced self-guiding optical terminals. Together, these technologies allowed laser signals to be sent from one point to another without interference from the .

“This is the first study to use pressure to control this stability, and it really opens up a lot of possibilities,” Yu Lin, researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), said in a statement.

“Now that we’ve found this optimal way to prepare the material, there’s potential for scaling it up for industrial production, and for using this same approach to manipulate other perovskite phases,” Lin added.

The “black” phase, the one successfully stabilized by the scientists, of perovskite has intrigued scientists for years since it has been found to be extremely efficient in converting sunlight to electricity, making it the Holy Grail for solar panel technology.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men. Patients are determined to have prostate cancer primarily based on PSA, a cancer factor in blood. However, as diagnostic accuracy is as low as 30%, a considerable number of patients undergo additional invasive biopsy and thus suffer from resultant side effects, such as bleeding and pain.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that the collaborative research team led by Dr. Kwan Hyi Lee from the Biomaterials Research Center and Professor In Gab Jeong from Asan Medical Center developed a technique for diagnosing from within only 20 minutes with almost 100% accuracy. The research team developed this technique by introducing a smart AI analysis method to an electrical-signal-based ultrasensitive biosensor.

As a noninvasive method, a using urine is convenient for patients and does not need invasive biopsy, thereby diagnosing without side effects. However, as the concentration of cancer factors is low in urine, urine-based biosensors are only used for classifying risk groups rather than for precise diagnosis thus far.

The maximal reduction for biological age when using the biological age calculator, Phenotypic Age, is ~20 years. In other words, if I’m 80 years old and my biomarkers are all reflective of youth, the lowest possible biological age will be ~60 years old. One reason for that is the inclusion of chronological age in the prediction of biological age, which adds strength to the correlation while simultaneously limiting the maximal biological age reduction.

To account for the possibility that youthful biomarkers at an older chronological age can yield a biological age that is more than 20 years younger, it’s important to quantify biological age using a tool that doesn’t include chronological age in its calculation. Aging.ai fits that criterion, and in the video I present biological age data with use of aging.ai for 24 blood tests since 2009.