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Mars — YES or NOT?


Multi-billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk said he believes there is a 70% chance of him getting to Mars on one of his spacecraft. The Independent reports:

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has claimed there is a 70 per cent likelihood he will make it to Mars on one of his spacecraft – despite there being “a good chance of death”.

DNA replication is a process of critical importance to the cell, and must be coordinated precisely to ensure that genomic information is duplicated once and only once during each cell cycle. Using super-resolution technology a University of Technology Sydney led team has directly visualized the process of DNA replication in single human cells.

This is the first quantitative characterization to date of the spatio-temporal organization, morphology, and in situ epigenetic signatures of individual replication foci (RFi) in single human at the nanoscale.

The results of the study, published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) give new insight into a poorly understood area of DNA replication namely how replication origin sites are chosen from thousands of possible sites.

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In its 10 years observing the Sun, our Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite has gathered over 425 million high-resolution images of our star.

This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall in activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and eruptions. The custom music, titled “Solar Observer,” was composed by musician Lars Leonhard.

Is the Sun an Oddball Star? A fascinating conversation with Kepler and TESS astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., about how our Sun stacks up against other sunlike stars in the galaxy. We cover the history of our solar system, where the Sun might have been born, and why the only intelligent life we know is around this lonely G-Dwarf star.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, is currently spearheading a project to convert part of the old New Hampshire textile plant into a factory for lab-grown lungs, livers, and other organs for transplantation — and he doesn’t think it’ll take long to do it.


The nonprofit is like a club for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine researchers. Groups must have something to offer in order to join (money, equipment, experience), but once a part of ARMI, they gain access to the other members’ research and resources.

Observers said that the fully fledged system could put China in a competitive position against the world’s three other satellite navigation networks – the US-owned Global Positioning System (GPS), the European Union’s Galileo and Russia’s Glonass. It could also expand China’s international engagement and offer an alternative to other countries that had been reliant on US technology, they said.


Final satellite in the navigation network – China’s answer to the US-owned GPS – is sent into orbit on Tuesday after technical problems delayed it by a week.