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(Front row from left) Expedition 64 crew members Kate Rubins, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov join Expedition 63 crew members (back row from left) Ivan Vagner, Anatoly Ivanishin and Chris Cassidy inside the space station’s Zvezda service module. N…

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos joined Expedition 63 Commander Chris Cassidy of NASA and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner aboard the International Space Station when the hatches between the Soyuz spacecraft and the orbiting laboratory officially opened at 7:07 a.m. EDT.

The arrival temporarily restores the station’s crew complement to six for the remainder of Expedition 63.

Expedition 64 begins Wednesday, Oct. 21, with the departure of Cassidy, Vagner, and Ivanishin in the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft that brought them to the station on April 9. Cassidy will hand command of the station to Ryzhikov during a ceremony with all crew members that is scheduled for 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20 and will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

Continue reading “Hatches Open, Station Crew Expands to Six” | >

And more countries could be signing soon.

NASA released the draft of the accords to other space-faring countries, and after getting their input, the agency came up with the final document, which includes standards for things like lunar mining and how to handle conflicts on the Moon’s surface. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says the main goal is to get everyone on the same page about lunar exploration and head off any future international misunderstandings or conflicts. “When we think about the Artemis Accords, what we’re trying to do is establish norms of behavior that every nation can agree to,” Bridenstine said during a press call ahead of the announcement.

The seven nations that have signed along with the US are: Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. NASA says that it has also spoken with other countries interested in signing, but these seven nations were able to go through the interagency process the fastest. That means more countries could be signing on to the accords very soon — even before the end of the year, according to NASA. “This first announcement is very much a beginning, not an ending to the nations joining the Accords,” Mike Gold, NASA’s acting associate administrator for the office of international and interagency relations, said during the briefing.

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However, it was unclear how TERRA got to the tip of chromosomes and remained there. “The telomere makes up only a tiny bit of the total chromosomal DNA, so the question is ‘how does this RNA find its home?’” Lingner says. To address this question, postdoc Marianna Feretzaki and others in the teams of Joachim Lingner at EPFL and Lumir Krejci at Masaryk University set out to analyze the mechanism through which TERRA accumulates at telomeres, as well as the proteins involved in this process. The findings are published in * Nature*.

**Finding home**

By visualizing TERRA molecules under a microscope, the researchers found that a short stretch of the RNA is crucial to bring it to telomeres. Further experiments showed that once TERRA reaches the tip of chromosomes, several proteins regulate its association with telomeres. Among these proteins, one called RAD51 plays a particularly important role, Lingner says.

RAD51 is a well-known enzyme that is involved in the repair of broken DNA molecules. The protein also seems to help TERRA stick to telomeric DNA to form a so-called “RNA-DNA hybrid molecule”. Scientists thought this type of reaction, which leads to the formation of a three-stranded nucleic acid structure, mainly happened during DNA repair. The new study shows that it can also happen at chromosome ends when TERRA binds to telomeres. “This is paradigm-shifting,” Lingner says.

The researchers also found that short telomeres recruit TERRA much more efficiently than long telomeres. Although the mechanism behind this phenomenon is unclear, the researchers hypothesize that when telomeres get too short, either due to DNA damage or because the cell has divided too many times, they recruit TERRA molecules. This recruitment is mediated by RAD51, which also promotes the elongation and repair of telomeres. “TERRA and RAD51 help to prevent accidental loss or shortening of telomeres,” Lingner says. “That’s an important function.””

Continue reading “Scientists home in on the mechanism that protects cells from premature aging” | >

The mystery of a galaxy that shouldn’t have existed could now have a solution. Dragonfly 44, a faint galaxy that was found in 2016 to consist of 99.99 percent dark matter, has been closely re-examined, revealing a lower and more normal proportion of dark matter.

This would mean that we don’t have to revise our models of galaxy formation to try to figure out how they could have produced such an extreme outlier — everything is behaving completely normally, the researchers said.

“Dragonfly 44 (DF44) has been an anomaly all these years that could not be explained with the existing galaxy formation models,” said astronomer Teymoor Saifollahi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.

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SpaceX won a $2 million contract from the SpEC consortium to study ways to provide weather data to the U.S. Space Force.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX is looking at ways it could provide weather data to the U.S. military. The company is working under a $2 million six-month study contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

Charlotte Gerhart, chief of the Space and Missile Systems Center Production Corps Low Earth Orbit Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews that SpaceX received the contract in July from SMC’s Space Enterprise Consortium.

The contract is to “assess the feasibility and long term viability of a ‘weather data as a service business model,’” said Gerhart.

Continue reading “SpaceX to explore ways to provide weather data to U.S. military” | >

Researchers know how to make precise genetic changes within the genomes of crops, but the transformed cells often refuse to grow into plants. One team has devised a new solution.

Scientists who want to improve crops face a dilemma: it can be difficult to grow plants from cells after you’ve tweaked their genomes.

A new tool helps ease this process by coaxing the transformed cells, including those modified with the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9, to regenerate new plants. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Specialist Juan M. Debernardi and Investigator Jorge Dubcovsky, together with David Tricoli at the University of California, Davis Plant Transformation Facility, Javier Palatnik from Argentina, and colleagues at the John Innes Centre, collaborated on the work. The team reports the technology, developed in wheat and tested in other crops, October 12, 2020, in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

“The problem is that transforming a plant is still an art,” Dubcovsky says. The success rate is often low – depending on the crop being modified, 100 attempts may yield only a handful of green shoots that can turn into full-grown plants. The rest fail to produce new plants and die. Now, however, “we have reduced this barrier,” says Dubcovsky, a plant geneticist at UC Davis. Using two genes that already control development in many plants, his team dramatically increased the formation of shoots in modified wheat, rice, citrus, and other crops.

Continue reading “New Technology Accelerates Crop Improvement with CRISPR” | >