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It’s twice as efficient as a chemical rocket.


Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) has designed a new thermal nuclear engine it says could carry astronauts to Mars in just three months—and back to Earth in the same amount of time. By using ceramic microcapsules of high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, USNC’s thermal nuclear engine could cut the trip in half even from optimistic estimates.

🌌You like our badass universe. So do we. Let’s explore it together.

WASHINGTON — NASA formally certified SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft for transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station, clearing the way for a Nov. 14 launch.

Agency officials completed the certification of the spacecraft by signing a document known as a Human Rating Certification Plan during a flight readiness review for the Crew-1 mission Nov. 10. That confirmed that SpaceX met all of NASA’s requirements for safely carrying astronauts on the Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

“It’s just a tremendous day that is a culmination of a ton of work,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, at a Nov. 10 briefing about the flight readiness review. Lueders managed the commercial crew program at NASA for several years before being promoted to her current position in June. “It’s NASA saying to SpaceX you have shown us you can deliver a crew transportation capability that meets our requirements.”

The finding marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world.

To understand what a tetraquark is and why the discovery is important, we need to step back in time to 1964, when particle physics was in the midst of a revolution. Beatlemania had just exploded, the Vietnam war was raging and two young radio astronomers in New Jersey had just discovered the strongest evidence ever for the Big Bang theory.

On the other side of the U.S., at the California Institute of Technology, and on the other side of the Atlantic, at CERN in Switzerland, two particle physicists were publishing two independent papers on the same subject. Both were about how to make sense of the enormous number of new particles that had been discovered over the past two decades.

Here’s my latest video, “Longevity Genes: APOE”!


A reduced mortality risk and an increased lifespan has been reported for people who have APOE2 alleles, when compared with APOE3 or APOE4, but beyond associations, data for lifespan in APOE-expressing mice was recently reported, evidence that supports a causative role for APOE on longevity.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO of Bioquark, interviews Philip Lymbery, award winning author of books Farmageddon and Dead Zone and CEO of Compassion in World Farming.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Compassion in World Farming (CIWF)is a campaigning and lobbying animal welfare organization which campaigns against the live export of animals, certain methods of livestock slaughter, and all systems of factory farming.

Philip Lymbery, founder of Compassion in World Farming:

Philip Lymbery is the CEO of CIWF, as well as visiting professor at the University of Winchester, ornithologist, photographer, naturalist, self-confessed animal advocate, and award winning author of both Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat (listed as one of The Times Writers Books of the Year) as well as Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were.

Protecting Animals is about Protecting People and the Planet:

The COVID-19 crisis has led to a significant increase in the use of cyberspace, enabling people to work together at distant places and interact with remote environments and individuals by embodying virtual avatars or real avatars such as robots. However, the limits of avatar embodiment are not clear. Furthermore, it is not clear how these embodiments affect the behaviors of humans.

Therefore, a research team comprising Takayoshi Hagiwara () and Professor Michiteru Kitazaki from Toyohashi University of Technology; Dr. Ganesh Gowrishankar (senior researcher) from UM-CNRS LIRMM; Professor Maki Sugimoto from Keio University; and Professor Masahiko Inami from The University of Tokyo aimed to develop a novel collaboration method with a shared avatar, which can be controlled concurrently by two individuals in VR, and to investigate human motor behaviors as the avatar is controlled in VR.

Full movements of two participants were monitored via a motion-capture system, and movements of the shared avatar were determined as the average of the movements of the two participants. Twenty participants (10 dyads) were asked to perform reaching movements with their towards target cubes that were presented at various locations. Participants exhibited superior reaction times with the shared avatar than individual reaction times, and the avatar’s hand movements were straighter and less jerky than those of the participants. The participants exhibited a sense of agency and body ownership towards the shared avatar although they only formed a part of the shared avatar.