Lasers o.o
They could supply energy to far-flung bases, power laser weapons and charge electric vehicles.
Science and technology Mar 14th 2020 edition.
Continue reading “Nuclear power plants are coming to the battlefield” »
Life is rife with patterns. It’s common for living things to create a repeating series of similar features as they grow: think of feathers that vary slightly in length on a bird’s wing or shorter and longer petals on a rose.
It turns out the brain is no different. By employing advanced microscopy and mathematical modeling, Stanford researchers have discovered a pattern that governs the growth of brain cells or neurons. Similar rules could guide the development of other cells within the body, and understanding them could be important for successfully bioengineering artificial tissues and organs.
Their study, published in Nature Physics, builds on the fact that the brain contains many different types of neurons and that it takes several types working in concert to perform any tasks. The researchers wanted to uncover the invisible growth patterns that enable the right kinds of neurons to arrange themselves into the right positions to build a brain.
The Cleveland Clinic has developed a coronavirus test that will be able to deliver results in just eight hours.
It will be significantly faster than tests available at other US public health laboratories, which take between two to seven days to confirm results.
Denmark is on coronavirus lockdown, becoming the second country in Europe to grind to a halt as the life-threatening disease rips across the continent.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that all Danish schools, universities, and kindergartens will be shut for two weeks to slow the spread of the bug.
Continue reading “Denmark becomes second country in Europe to go on coronavirus lockdown” »
Investors betting big against catastrophic diseases are watching the World Health Organization closely as insurance bonds tied to whether the organization labels COVID-19 a pandemic are set to mature in June.
In 2017, the World Bank designed a new way to raise money: Pandemic Emergency Financing bonds. Over $425 million worth of such bonds, which bet against a global outbreak of infectious diseases and will default if WHO declares the coronavirus a pandemic, were sold by the World Bank in its first-ever issuance of catastrophe bonds. In the event of no pandemic, investors would be paid a healthy annualized return. Meanwhile, the World Bank could use the bonds to insure itself against the risk of a global outbreak.
“As an investor, we do not want to lose money,” said Chin Liu, a portfolio manager at Amundi Pioneer, a Boston-based firm that purchased the bonds as a way to diversify the company’s $1 billion catastrophe fund. “But then, we also understand if it’s unfortunately triggered, it benefits every single person, including ourselves, to keep the virus controlled.”
The new coronavirus can live in the air for several hours and on some surfaces for as long as two to three days, tests by U.S. government and other…
In a new video, aerospace company Blue Origin reveals its finished mission control center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where engineers will monitor upcoming launches of the company’s future New Glenn rocket. The rocket is expected to fly sometime in 2021.
Just as there is a mysterious dark matter that accounts for 85 percent of our universe, there is a “dark” portion of the human genome that has perplexed scientists for decades. A study published March 9, 2020, in Genome Research identifies new portions of the fruit fly genome that, until now, have been hidden in these dark, silent areas.
The collaborative paper titled “Gene Expression Networks in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel” is the culmination of years of research by Clemson University geneticists Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt. Their groundbreaking findings could significantly advance science’s understanding of a number of genetic disorders.
The “dark” portion refers to the approximate 98 percent of the genome that doesn’t appear to have any obvious function. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, the building blocks of our bodies and the catalysts of the chemical reactions that allow us to thrive. Scientists have been puzzled by this notion since the 1970s when gene sequencing technologies were first developed, revealing the proportion of coding to noncoding regions of the genome.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly stopped short of calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic – until this week.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon the director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, finally used the term to describe the outbreak, which has now spread to well over 100 countries and infected over 120,000 people.
“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” Dr Tedros said.
