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Feb 20, 2020

Musician Plays Her Violin During Brain Surgery

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, media & arts, neuroscience

Doctors wanted to ensure they didn’t compromise parts of the brain necessary for playing the violin, so they asked their musician patient to play for them mid-operation.

Feb 20, 2020

Are we supposed to be vegetarian?

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Were humans designed to eat meat? Did we evolve to consume other creatures? Is flesh eating enshrined in our DNA? Here, we discuss these divisive queries.

Feb 20, 2020

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, employment

Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.

But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).

Continue reading “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” »

Feb 20, 2020

Patent Approved for Anti-Gravity Spacecraft using Mass Reduction & Non-Conventional Propulsion

Posted by in category: space travel

Warning: This article presents information that sounds like it comes out of a high-tech Hollywood sci-fi production. I suggest you first view the patent filing linked here to verify its credibility before proceeding.

Because the patent was filed by the US Navy and is now under an “Active” status, this is the real deal. This is NOT a work of fiction.

The Short Story

Feb 20, 2020

Four things you might not know about dark matter

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

How much do you really know about dark matter? Symmetry looks at one of the biggest remaining mysteries in particle physics.

Feb 20, 2020

From ‘living’ cement to medicine-delivering biofilms, biologists remake the material world

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

Engineered living materials (ELM) are designed to blur boundaries. They use cells, mostly microbes, to build inert structural materials such as hardened cement or woodlike replacements for everything from construction materials to furniture. Some, like Srubar’s bricks, even incorporate living cells into the final mix. The result is materials with striking new capabilities, as the innovations on view last week at the Living Materials 2020 conference in Saarbrüken, Germany, showed: airport runways that build themselves and living bandages that grow within the body. “Cells are amazing fabrication plants,” says Neel Joshi, an ELM expert at Northeastern University. “We’re trying to use them to construct things we want.”


Engineered microbes shift from making molecules to materials.

Feb 20, 2020

Meet the Israeli innovation that can put an end to plastic packaging

Posted by in category: innovation

Together, they founded W-Cycle, a start-up that develops compostable packaging solutions to tackle the masses of C-PET plastic used in the huge ready-meal packaging industry. Rather than producing single-use trays from plastic and aluminum, W-Cycle’s patented “SupraPulp” packaging product is based on sugarcane pulp, known as bagasse.

Feb 19, 2020

Astronomers Have Detected Molecular Oxygen in Another Galaxy For The First Time

Posted by in categories: chemistry, space

In a wild galaxy over half a billion light-years away, astronomers have detected molecular oxygen. It’s only the third such detection ever outside the Solar System — and the first outside the Milky Way.

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe, behind hydrogen (naturally) and helium. So its chemistry and abundance in interstellar clouds are important for understanding the role of molecular gas in galaxies.

Astronomers have searched for oxygen again and again, using millimetre astronomy, which detects the radio wavelengths emitted by molecules; and spectroscopy, which analyses the spectrum to look for wavelengths absorbed or emitted by specific molecules.

Feb 19, 2020

New Rocket Design Is Powered by a Ring of Literal Explosions

Posted by in categories: energy, space travel

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zXSsd7uXjt8

Violent Detonations

Engineers have long suspected such a design could revolutionize the fuel efficiency of modern engines, but until now, there was one major problem.

Continue reading “New Rocket Design Is Powered by a Ring of Literal Explosions” »

Feb 19, 2020

NASA Prepares for Moon, Mars With New Addition to Deep Space Network

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space

Robotic spacecraft will be able to communicate with the dish using radio waves and lasers.

Surrounded by California desert, NASA officials broke ground Tuesday, Feb. 11, on a new antenna for communicating with the agency’s farthest-flung robotic spacecraft. Part of the Deep Space Network (DSN), the 112-foot-wide (34-meter-wide) antenna dish being built represents a future in which more missions will require advanced technology, such as lasers capable of transmitting vast amounts of data from astronauts on the Martian surface. As part of its Artemis program NASA will send the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, applying lessons learned there to send astronauts to Mars.

Using massive antenna dishes, the agency talks to more than 30 deep space missions on any given day, including many international missions. As more missions have launched and with more in the works, NASA is looking to strengthen the network. When completed in 2½ years, the new dish will be christened Deep Space Station-23 (DSS-23), bringing the DSN’s number of operational antennas to 13.