Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX’s Starship prototype is coming together: Elon Musk recently teased some photos of the spacecraft and its construction site looks like something straight out of Star Wars.

The spacecraft, which serves as a prototype for SpaceX’s Mars-bound Starship, is currently under development, CNN reported. It follows the Starhopper, SpaceX’s first Starship prototype that aced a major hover test in August. Now, SpaceX is ready to build a prototype that may be able to fly into our planet’s orbit.

Droid Junkyard, Tatooine pic.twitter.com/yACFR9y04P

Loki, a faraway volcanic feature on Jupiter’s moon Io, is acting up and planetary scientists want to know why.

Loki has always been a troublemaker.

This particular Loki is a bowl of magma on Jupiter’s moon Io. For a while, Loki brightened and faded with surprising regularity, but then it started misbehaving — Loki completely stopped its regular behavior for a decade, then seems to have restarted on a different timescale. Now, planetary scientists are trying to make sense of what’s happening on this faraway volcanic world.

The nighttime events are among initial results from the InSight lander, which also found hints that the red planet may host a global reservoir of liquid water deep below the surface.

How To Study The Arctic? Freeze A Ship Full Of Researchers Into The Ice A group of scientists is embarking on a bold plan to better understand an extremely understudied part of the rapidly warming Arctic — the central Arctic Ocean.

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The world is not prepared for a crisis of this magnitude.

Humans choose food based on the way it looks, smells, and tastes. But the microbes in our guts use a different classification system — one that is based on the molecular components that make up different fibers. In a study published September 19 in the journal Cell, investigators found particular components of dietary fiber that encourage growth and metabolic action of beneficial microbes in the mouse gut.

The research aims to develop ways to identify compounds that can enhance the representation of health-promoting members of the gut microbial community. The goal is to identify sustainable, affordable dietary fiber sources for incorporation into next-generation, more nutritious food products.

“Fiber is understood to be beneficial. But fiber is actually a very complicated mixture of many different components,” says senior author Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Moreover, fibers from different plant sources that are processed in different ways during food manufacturing have different constituents. Unfortunately, we lack detailed knowledge of these differences and their biological significance. We do know that modern Western diets have low levels of fiber; this lack of fiber has been linked to loss of important members of the gut community and deleterious health effects.”

Just to put this out there: There’s no shortage of Christian apologists who have written books tailored to a younger audience, and the Bible itself has all kinds of children’s editions. But when Dawkins’ book comes out, you can expect Christian writers to accuse Dawkins of trying to indoctrinate children into godlessness. Even though he’s doing exactly what they do, except from a different perspective. The difference is he actually has evidence on his side.

The book will be released this October.

Over 3 million new cases of dermatitis appear in the US per year. Although dermatitis is broadly defined by the sensitivity of the skin, the condition is actually further segmented by a group of diseases. By far the most popular of these is atopic dermatitis, alternatively and perhaps more popularly known as eczema, affecting about 30% of the population. Genetics and environmental factors are the most conclusive predictors but no cause has ever been explicitly determined. The pathology is able to be determined physically, as inflamed skin grows craked and hardens.

Though a new report published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology presents some internal risk increases for sufferers to consider. The Danish researchers set out to examine the association between hospital-diagnosed atopic dermatitis and atrial fibrillation, writing in the report, “Atopic dermatitis is characterized by chronic inflammation, which is a risk factor for atrial fibrillation. P atients with hospital-diagnosed atopic dermatitis have a 20% increased long-term risk of atrial fibrillation, but the absolute risk remains low.”

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