Why Are Spacesuits So Expensive?
Posted in futurism
Final Flight: 08/21/2020
Posted in space
This week on #SpaceToGround: a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) cargo spacecraft leaves the International Space Station.
Crashing Into Saturn
Posted in space
Electrification of transport has many faces and the automotive industry is exploring various paths to increase the share of electric miles in long-distance travel, but not necessarily by switching to full BEVs with huge batteries.
This summer, a new 5 km (3.1 mi) e-highway test track with catenary overhead lines (in both directions) entered service on the A5 Autobahn in Hessen, near Frankfurt in Germany. It’s part of a three-stage project announced in 2018.
The idea is to use a power supply, kind of like in the case of trains or trams, to drive on the highway using electricity, and then to switch to battery power or internal combustion engine for the final miles. That’s the theory. The major obstacle is the cost of €2 million per km (in both directions) — according to a report from Sweden (see video below) — and further costs of maintenance of the new infrastructure. Another thing is that it does not look too attractive.
Salk Institute scientists have harnessed stem cell technology to generate the first human insulin-producing pancreatic cell clusters that can evade the immune system. Generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), these “immune shielded” human islet-like organoids (HILOs) controlled blood glucose following transplantation into a mouse model of diabetes, without the use of immunosuppressive drugs. The researchers suggest the achievement represents a major advance in the quest for a safe and effective treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D), which impacts an estimated 1.6 million people in the United States, at a cost of $14.4 billion annually.
“Most type 1 diabetics are children and teenagers,” said Salk professor Ronald Evans, PhD, holder of the March of Dimes chair in molecular and developmental biology. Evans is senior author of the team’s paper, which is published in Nature. “This is a disease that is historically hard to manage with drugs. We hope that regenerative medicine in combination with immune shielding can make a real difference in the field by replacing damaged cells with lab-generated human islet-like cell clusters that produce normal amounts of insulin on demand.”
Evans and colleagues reported on their development in a paper titled, “Immune-evasive human islet-like organoids ameliorate diabetes.”
The coronavirus has wreaked havoc on our world’s economy, and many scientists and nations are scrambling to get a vaccine out. In today’s video, I will talk about what will happen when that vaccine actually appears:
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Shalev Hulio wants to explain himself.
Normally, silence and secrecy are inherent in the spy business. For nine full years, Hulio never talked publicly about his billion-dollar hacking company—even when his hacking tools were linked to scandal or he was accused of being complicit in human rights abuses around the world. Lately, though, he’s speaking up.
“People don’t understand how intelligence works,” Hulio tells me over a video call from Tel Aviv. “It’s not easy. It’s not pleasant. Intelligence is a shitty business full of ethical dilemmas.”
Black holes are at the center of almost all galaxies that have been studied so far. They have an unimaginably large mass and therefore attract matter, gas and even light. But they can also emit matter in the form of plasma jets—a kind of plasma beam that is ejected from the center of the galaxy with tremendous energy. A plasma jet can extend several hundred thousand light years far into space.
When this intense radiation is emitted, the black hole remains hidden because the light rays near it are strongly bent leading to the appearance of a shadow. This was recently reported by researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration for the massive black hole in the giant ellipse galaxy M87.
In quasar 3C279—also a black hole—the EHT team found another phenomenon: At a distance of more than a thousand times the shadow of the black hole, the core of a plasma jet suddenly lit up. How the energy for this jet could get there as if through an invisible chimney was not yet known.