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Jan 17, 2020

Stealth space startup SpinLaunch snares another $35 million from investors

Posted by in categories: energy, space

The secretive California-based startup, which is developing a novel kinetic-energy-based launch system, has received an additional $35 million from investors, bringing its total investment haul to $80 million.

Jan 17, 2020

China could release emergency pork reserves after losing 100 million pigs to swine fever

Posted by in categories: food, government, sustainability

African swine fever has wiped out a third of China’s pig population. Now government officials are discussing dramatic steps to stabilize the world’s largest pork market.

Pork is a huge deal in China. The country is home to half of all the pigs on the planet. The meat is a staple of the Chinese diet, which means its scarcity could damage China’s social stability. The outbreak of swine fever also threatens to upend the global pork supply chain.

While Chinese authorities have already made plans to shore up the pig market — including subsidies for pig farms and families who may struggle with soaring prices — they’re stepping up efforts to deal with the crisis.

Jan 17, 2020

Study finds billions of quantum entangled electrons in ‘strange metal’

Posted by in categories: materials, quantum physics

In a new study, U.S. and Austrian physicists have observed quantum entanglement among “billions of billions” of flowing electrons in a quantum critical material.

The research, which appears this week in Science, examined the electronic and magnetic behavior of a “strange metal” compound of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon as it both neared and passed through a critical transition at the boundary between two well-studied quantum phases.

The study at Rice University and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement’s role in bringing about quantum criticality, said study co-author Qimiao Si of Rice.

Jan 17, 2020

Elon Musk Says He’ll Put A Million People on Mars By 2050

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, employment, space travel

Musk: “There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!”


According to Musk, you’ll need a crazy amount of cargo capacity to build a human colony on a faraway planet.

“Megatons per year to orbit are needed for life to become multiplanetary,” he tweeted.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Says He’ll Put A Million People on Mars By 2050” »

Jan 17, 2020

DeepMind found an AI learning technique also works in human brains

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Researchers at tech firm DeepMind have found that a learning technique used by AI is also used by dopamine neurons in the brain.

Jan 17, 2020

Antiaging Treatments that are Closest to FDA Approval

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

There are a few dozen antiaging rejuvenation treatments that are progressing through pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Lifespan.io is tracking the antiaging rejuvenation treatments on a rejuvenation roadmap.

Two treatments are in phase 3 clinical trial.

Jan 17, 2020

The CIA’s Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A ‘Poisoner In Chief’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

‘Poisoner In Chief’ Details The CIA’s Secret Quest For Mind Control Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb worked in the 1950s and early ’60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies.

Jan 17, 2020

Quantum properties of water discovered — water is like a hologram

Posted by in categories: holograms, quantum physics

Water is special even based on its simple physical properties since it is the only substance on earth that can be found in all three states (liquid, solid, gas). However, scientists at the US Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have discovered new properties of water that go beyond the known laws of classical physics says the phys.org scientific news portal.

Passes through solid walls.

Jan 17, 2020

Common foods can help ‘landscape’ the jungle of our gut microbiome

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Researchers at San Diego State University have found a new way to harness food as medicine, which has far reaching implications to control harmful microbes in our gut while balancing microbial diversity by fostering the growth of beneficial bacteria.

Foods we eat commonly affect our gut microbiota. New research shows they do so by triggering the production of bacteriophage—viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria. Compounds in these foods have an antimicrobial effect which causes the phage to replicate.

The researchers began by identifying which foods were antimicrobial, then analyzed them before narrowing it down to a shortlist. When examining growth curves of bacteria, they observed that while bacteria multiply over time, eventually their numbers plateau. However, if phages are activated, then bacterial growth stops altogether and their numbers drop dramatically until they’re depleted.

Jan 17, 2020

Microscopy technique reveals cells’ 3D ultrastructure in new detail

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Inside a cell, tentacled vesicles shuttle cargo for sorting. DNA rearranges in the nucleus as stem cells differentiate into neurons. Neighboring neurons cling to one another through a web-like interface. And a new microscopy technique shows it all, in exquisite detail.

The technique, called cryo-SR/EM, melds images captured from and super-resolution light microscopes, resulting in brilliant, clear detailed views of the inside of —in 3D.

For years, scientists have probed the microscopic world inside cells, developing new tools to view these basic units of life. But each tool comes with a tradeoff. Light microscopy makes it simple to identify specific cellular structures by tagging them with easy-to-see fluorescent molecules. With the development of super-resolution (SR) , these structures can be viewed with even greater clarity. But fluorescence can reveal only a few of the more than 10,000 proteins in a cell at a given time, making it difficult to understand how these few relate to everything else. Electron microscopy (EM), on the other hand, reveals all cellular structures in high-resolution pictures—but delineating one feature from all others by EM alone can be difficult because the space inside of cells is so crowded.