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China is pushing ahead with developing a giant Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation competing with SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb, according to the Washington DC-based analyst Bhavya Lal and California State University’s Professor Larry Press.

Press, professor of information systems at the California State University, mentioned a recent Chinese spectrum filing in a blog of the CircleID website. China “has filed a spectrum application with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations with the cryptic names GW-A59 and GW-2″ for a total of 12,992 satellites, Press said.

“We heard about an announcement of a constellation with nearly 13,000 satellites,” Bhavya Lal said in SpaceWatchGlobal’s Space Café webtalk last week. Lal is a senior space policy analyst at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington DC and was in the lead for IDA’s recently published report “Evaluation of China’s Commercial Space Sector”.

“Out of around 20 Chinese companies engaged in satellite communications, fewer than a half dozen have proposed constellations,” Lal summarized the report’s findings. “Many focus on narrowband communications, targeting markets such as the Internet of Things (IoT).” Companies considering satellite broadband at an early stage include LinkSure and Galaxy Space, Lal said, while state-owned enterprises such as CASIC and CASC “have the deeper pockets needed to more rapidly launch satellite constellations”.

Regarding the not state-owned enterprises (SOE’s) “we found that these broadband companies are all very early-stage, still in the R&D phase, and do not have much in the way of hardware to launch,” Lal said. “However, as in other areas, the Chinese are making fast progress. The best we can tell the current focus of most companies is domestic. But as the Chinese have done in other areas such as high-speed rail, it would be not a stretch of the imagination that once the bugs in the system are worked out domestically, the Chinese will begin to market services internationally.”

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For many, getting older can unfortunately mean an increased risk of illness from cardiovascular disease to cancer. University of Michigan scientists are actively researching the biological underpinnings of aging with the aim of developing interventions that could potentially help people live longer, healthier lives.

A new paper in the journal Science Advances describes the discovery of several promising small molecules that appear to reduce in mouse skin and could lengthen life.

“Cellular resistance appears to be a common feature of long-lived organisms, such as invertebrates and mice,” says the paper’s lead author David Lombard, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pathology. Lombard is part of a multidisciplinary group at U-M’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging. Recent research from colleague and fellow study author Richard Miller, M.D., Ph.D., found several promising drugs, including rapamycin, a cancer drug, and acarbose, a diabetes drug, that extended life in mice.

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They say if you spread out all the gold ever mined from the Earth in all of history, it would only cover a football field 18 inches deep.

Now when you wrap you mind around that image, it doesn’t seem like very much, especially when you digest the fact that the solar system is literally brimming with gold but scientists can’t quite figure out where all this hard-to-make metal is being created.

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When Danish racing team True Cousins got started with electric motorcycle racing, their first attempt was rather modest. But twelve years after fielding their first custom 12 kW electric motorcycle, the team returned to set a new world record with a new bike featuring 100x the power.

The Silver Lightning is a custom built electric drag racing motorcycle featuring up to 1,200 kW of power.

Last week it laid rubber down on the strip at the Santa Pod Raceway in Bedfordshire, England during the event dubbed “NOT the Euro Finals”.

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CERN’s Timepix particle detectors, developed by the Medipix2 Collaboration, help unravel the secret of a long-lost painting by the great Renaissance master, Raphael. 500 years ago, the Italian painter Raphael passed away, leaving behind him many works of art, paintings, frescoes, and engravings.

CERNs Timepix particle detectors, developed by the Medipix2 Collaboration, help unravel the secret of a long-lost painting by the great Renaissance master, Raphael.

500 years ago, the Italian painter Raphael passed away, leaving behind him many works of art, paintings, frescoes, and engravings. Like his contemporaries Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael’s work made the joy of imitators and the greed of counterfeiters, who bequeathed us many copies, pastiches, and forgeries of the great master of the Renaissance.

For a long time, it was thought that The Madonna and Child, a painting on canvas from a private collection, was not created directly by the master himself. Property of Popes and later part of Napoleon’s war treasure, the painting changed hands several times before arriving in Prague during the 1930’s. Due to its history and numerous inconclusive examinations, its authenticity was questioned for a long time. It has now been attributed to Raphael by a group of independent experts. One of the technologies that provided them with key information, was a robotic x-ray scanner using CERN-designed chips.

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Cambodia has razed a US-funded defence facility on its southern coast, the deputy prime minister confirmed Sunday, the latest move in the ongoing controversial expansion of a strategically crucial naval base being developed with Chinese aid.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year on a secret draft deal allowing China to dock warships at the Ream naval base near the kingdom’s coastal city of Sihanoukville.

But Cambodia — awash in recent years with Chinese investments — has strenuously denied the report, although strongman premier Hun Sen has said aid from Beijing will fund the naval base’s development.

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Applying a temperature gradient and a charge current to an electrical conductor leads to the release and absorbtion of heat. This is called the Thomson effect. In a first, NIMS and AIST have directly observing the magneto-Thomson effect, which is the magnetic-field-induced modulation of the Thomson effect. This success may contribute to the development of new functions and technologies for thermal energy management and to advances in fundamental physics and materials science on magneto-thermoelectric conversion.

The Seebeck effect and the Peltier effect have been extensively investigated for their application to thermoelectric conversion technologies. Along with these effects, the Thomson effect has long been known as a fundamental thermoelectric effect in metals and semiconductors. Although the influence of magnetic fields and magnetism on the Seebeck and Peltier effects has been well understood as a result of many years of research, the influence on the Thomson effect has not been clarified because it is difficult to measure and evaluate.

This NIMS-led research team observed heat release and absorption induced in an electrical conductor by simultaneously creating a temperature gradient across it, passing a charge current through the gradient, and applying a magnetic field. The team precisely measured temperature changes in the conductor associated with the heat release and absorption using a heat detection technique called lock-in thermography. As a result, the amount of heat released and absorbed was found to be proportional to both the magnitude of the temperature gradient and charge current. In addition, the team observed strong enhancement of the resultant temperature change when a magnetic field was applied to the conductor. The systematic measurements performed in this study demonstrated that the heat release and absorption signals detected under a magnetic field were indeed generated by the magneto-Thomson effect.

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