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In a study of gorilla skeletons collected in the wild, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and their international collaborators report that aging female gorillas do not experience the accelerated bone loss associated with the bone-weakening condition called osteoporosis, as their human counterparts often do. The findings, they say, could offer clues as to how humans evolved with age-related diseases.

The study was published on Sept. 21, 2020, in Philosophical Translations of the Royal Society B.

“Osteoporosis in humans is a really interesting mechanical problem,” says Christopher Ruff, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “In terms of natural selection, there is no evolutionary advantage in developing with aging to the point of a potential fracture. By looking at close relatives of humans on the evolutionary tree, we can infer more about the origins of this condition.”

The number of mutations that can contribute to aging may be significantly higher than previously believed, according to new research on fruit flies. The study by scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, supports a new theory about the type of mutation that can lie behind aging. The results have been published in BMC Biology.

We live, we age and we die. Many functions of our bodies deteriorate slowly but surely as we age, and eventually an organism dies. This thought may not be very encouraging, but most of us have probably accepted that this is the fate of all living creatures—death is part of life. However, those who study find it far from clear why this is the case.

“The evolution of aging is, in a manner of speaking, a paradox. Evolution causes continuous adaptation in organisms, but even so it has not resulted in them ceasing to age,” says Urban Friberg, senior lecturer in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University and leader of the study.

autonomous drone delivery

DroneUp and NATO Allied Command Transformation performed an experiment to prove a new and innovative way of resupplying soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment proved that autonomous drone delivery works.

“DroneUp recently partnered with North Atlantic Treaty Organization Allied Command Transformation, Joint Force Development Directorate, Operational Experimentation branch in an experiment designed to determine if autonomous delivery of a specified payload to identified recipients under field conditions could be proven viable,” says a press release.

The experiment took place on September 21, 2020 in Lawrenceville, VA and included Pale Horse

autonomous drone delivery

Weapons Institute, Daniel Defense, Ultimate Training Munitions (UTM), and WeaponLogic. In summary, here’s how the autonomous drone delivery system test worked: soldiers running out of ammunition hit a button (which can be attached to their hat or clothing.) That button signals a drone to fly to that individual soldier and drop a payload – which can be unique to that individual. Then the drone returns home for the next mission.

Digital transformations have become a global trend in recent years. To be clear, in mainstream understanding, the term means to increase the use of data, which can then help us to build “smarter” machines, predict the future, dig out insights, eliminate human errors and maximize efficiency. However, according to the stats released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey & Company, only about 30% of digital transformation projects ended up successfully. The result keeps us wondering: What are the key issues to account for such high failure rate? And more importantly, how can we resolve these issues?

SpaceX and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) join NASA in giving an overview of the Crew-1 mission, the first crew rotational flight of a U.S. commercial spacecraft to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and Shannon Walker will launch with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket out of Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 31 at 2:40 a.m. EDT.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and leadership from NASA and SpaceX discuss the upcoming SpaceX Crew-1 mission, which will be the first crew rotational flight of a U.S. commercial spacecraft to the International Space Station. Astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are targeted to launch on Oct. 31 at 2:40 a.m. EDT aboard the Crew Dragon from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.