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Featured Image Source: u/TomHockenberry via Reddit.

SpaceX is developing its next-generation launch vehicle — Starship — at the company’s South Texas facility located in Boca Chica Beach, Brownsville, TX. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, runs 24/7 operations to develop the stainless-steel spacecraft before the year 2022. SpaceX’s first private customer, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, booked a journey around the moon aboard Starship scheduled for 2023. NASA also selected SpaceX to develop a Starship Lunar Lander as part of the agency’s Artemis program which aims to take the first woman and the next mand to the moon’s surface by 2024. Musk recently shared he still hopes to launch a cargo mission to Mars in 2022 and deploy the first humans to the Red Planet aboard Starship in mid-2024. The company is certainly working on a tight schedule to meet these ambitious timelines.

In June, Musk reportedly told SpaceX’s 7,000 employees that the company’s top priority is Starship development. According to CNBC news, in an email Musk sent to employees he wrote – “Please consider the top SpaceX priority (apart from anything that could reduce Dragon return risk) to be Starship.” He told his teams – “We need to accelerate Starship progress,” and asked them to “consider spending significant time” in Boca Chica to help the company accelerate Starship development, “For those considering moving, we will always offer a dedicated SpaceX aircraft to shuttle people,” he wrote.

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In the COVID-19 outbreak frenzy, several countries are considering massive fiscal stimulus packages and printing money, to blunt the concurrent crises underway: the pandemic and the unraveling economic depression.

These plans are essential, but they need to be strategic and sustainable. Because in addressing the current crises, we must avoid sowing seeds of new ones, as the stakes are incredibly high.

It is time to add a new element to the policy packages that governments are introducing, one we know but have abandoned: Universal Basic Income (UBI). It is needed as part of the package that will help us to get out of this yawning pit.

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Pancreatic cancer is rarely detected at its early stages when it’s most curable. This is because it often doesn’t cause symptoms until after it has spread to other organs. Treatment options are chosen based on the extent of the cancer and may include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or a combination of these. Using mice and lab-grown pancreas models, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have discovered that they can stop the growth of pancreatic cancer cells by blocking the way the cells store cholesterol.

Their study, “SOAT1 promotes mevalonate pathway dependency in pancreatic cancer,” was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and led by David Tuveson, MD, PhD, professor at CSHL.

Tuveson’s team wanted to know why pancreatic cancer cells, like many cancer cells, produce abundant amounts of cholesterol. “Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has a dismal prognosis, and new therapies are needed. Altered metabolism is a cancer vulnerability, and several metabolic pathways have been shown to promote PDAC. However, the changes in cholesterol metabolism and their role during PDAC progression remain largely unknown. Here we used organoid and mouse models to determine the drivers of altered cholesterol metabolism in PDAC and the consequences of its disruption on tumor progression,” the scientists wrote.

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Magnetically separating waste particles makes it possible to reclaim a variety of raw materials from waste. Using a magnetic fluid, a waste flow can be separated into multiple segments in a single step. Researchers from Utrecht and Nijmegen have now succeeded in creating a magnetic fluid that remains stable in extremely strong magnetic fields, which makes it possible to separate materials with a high density, such as electronic components. The results have recently been published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Magnetic density separation

When you drop a stone and a wooden ball into a basin of , the stone will sink while the ball floats on the surface. This is because the two objects have different densities: the stone is more dense than the water, while the wood is less dense. That principle is also used in magnetic density separation (MDS), except that instead of using water—which has a fixed density—it uses a magnetic fluid with an effective density that can change in relation to its distance from a magnet: it has a higher apparent density at less distance to the magnet. As a result, waste particles of different densities float at different depths in the fluid.

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This is the third in a series. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

One of the most notable features of Eric Lerner’s approach to fusion using the Dense Plasma Focus (DPF), presented in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, lies in the possibility of using hydrogen and boron as a fuel. This property is shared by the hydrogen-boron laser fusion reactor, which I discussed in a previous series of articles in Asia Times.

Among other things, the fusion reaction between nuclei of hydrogen and boron is aneutronic: no neutrons are produced, but only charged alpha particles. This gives the DPF enormous potential advantages over the mainline fusion technologies, which are all designed to employ a mixture of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium (D) and tritium (T) as their fuel.

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An AI algorithm is capable of automatically generating realistic-looking images from bits of pixels.

Why it matters: The achievement is the latest evidence that AI is increasingly able to learn from and copy the real world in ways that may eventually allow algorithms to create fictional images that are indistinguishable from reality.

What’s new: In a paper presented at this week’s International Conference on Machine Learning, researchers from OpenAI showed they could train the organization’s GPT-2 algorithm on images.

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