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A new “transforming” rover in development at NASA will be able to explore rough terrain unlike any rover before it.

DuAxle (short for dual-Axel) gets its name because it’s made of a combination of a pair of two-wheeled Axel rovers. The Axel rover is a simple, two-wheeled rover with a long tether that connects to a larger vehicle and stabilizes the rover as it descends into and explores craters that other rovers would not be able to handle. The Axel is equipped with a robotic arm that can collect samples, as well as stereoscopic cameras to gather imagery.

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Aging is, at least for now, inevitable, and our eyes are not immune to those changes. Vision loss is, in fact, one of the top 10 causes of disability in the US., however, shows that this might be reversible in the future.

A large team of geneticists, ophthalmologists, and other scientists used a group of molecules called Yamanaka factors to turn cells in the eyes of mature mice back to a youthful state. This reversed the damage done by aging, and the cells were then able to regenerate, connect back to the brain, and vision was restored in both models of normal aging and glaucoma.

Yamanaka factors are nothing new in neuroscience. They are named after the after Shinya Yamanaka led research using those factors to convert mature adult cells back to stem cells, kickstarting the field of induced pluripotent stem cells — cells reprogrammed with the ability to generate other types of cells.

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Circa 2020 radiationless laser.

One of the world’s leading specialists in laser fusion, the Australian physicist Prof. Heinrich Hora, has proposed a new type of nuclear reactor which promises to provide highly-efficient, radioactivity-free generation of electric power, with virtually unlimited reserves of fuel. The design uses ultra-high-power, ultra-short-pulsed lasers to trigger fusion reactions between nuclei of hydrogen and boron. Hora believes that a prototype of his reactor could be running within the decade.

In the previous installments of this series, Jonathan Tennenbaum introduced readers to the new reactor concept and its fascinating scientific and technological background.

It is fitting to conclude this series with an interview Tennenbaum conducted in March this year with Heinrich Hora.

Continue reading “Meet the father of the hydrogen-boron laser fusion reactor” | >

Watch out, George Lucas, there’s a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.

Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.

“This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes,” study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement.

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