Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Could use magnetism to pull the iron back inside. O,.,o.

Earth’s molten core may be leaking iron, according to researchers who analyzed how iron behaves inside our planet.

The boundary between the liquid iron core and the is located some 1,800 miles (2,900 km) below Earth’s surface. At this transition, the by more than a thousand degrees from the hotter core to the cooler mantle.

The new study suggests heavier iron isotopes migrate toward —and into the mantle—while lighter iron isotopes circulate back down into the core. (Isotopes of the same element have different numbers of neutrons, giving them slightly different masses.) This effect could cause core material infiltrating the lowermost mantle to be enriched in heavy iron isotopes.

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SAN FRANCISCO — German launch services provider Exolaunch announced plans April 14 to send multiple small satellites into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for December.

Exolaunch has integrated payloads and arranged launches for almost 100 satellites, but this is the company’s first launch services agreement with SpaceX, Exolaunch Commercial Director Jeanne Medvedeva told SpaceNews.

“Participation in SpaceX’s smallsat rideshare program will allow Exolaunch to offer reliable and cost efficient rideshare options out of the United States,” Medvedeva said by email. “Most of our customers have been proactively requesting such opportunities.”

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Most of the pieces of Elon Musk’s Master Plan, Part Deux are already in place. Tesla’s mass-market cars, the Model 3 and Model Y, have already been released. The Solar Roof is finally seeing a ramp. And the release of a feature-complete version of the company’s Full Self-Driving suite seems to be drawing closer.

For Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite to be feature-complete, the electric car maker would need to master inner-city driving. FSD already works for highway driving with Navigate on Autopilot with automatic lane changes. But when it comes to inner-city streets, Full Self-Driving still has some ways to go. Fortunately, if Tesla’s v10.2 2020.12.5 release is any indication, it appears that more and more aspects of city driving are becoming recognized by the company’s neural networks.

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A nightly jaunt on the exercise wheel enhances muscle-repair capabilities in old mice, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford School of Medicine.

Only older saw this benefit, which the researchers found is due to the rejuvenation of the ’ .

“The effect in old animals is very significant,” said Thomas Rando, MD, Ph.D., professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford’s Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging. “We found that restores youthfulness to tissue repair. Their muscle stem start to look and behave like those of much younger animals.”

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“We were very pleased to find out that even though life span is a very complicated trait caused by variation on a large number of loci, which is true for most complex traits, the number of loci that are in common is a totally finite number. So, we can imagine going on to the next stage and investigating one gene at a time and in combination,” Mackay said.

Scientists believe about 25 percent of the differences in human life span is determined by genetics—with the rest determined by environmental and lifestyle factors. But they don’t yet know all the genes that contribute to a long life.

A study published March 5, 2020, in PLOS Biology quantified variation in life span in the fruit fly genome, providing valuable insights for preserving health in elderly humans—an ever-increasing segment of the population. The paper titled “Context-dependent genetic architecture of Drosophila life span” is the culmination of a decade of research by Clemson University geneticists Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt.

It remains difficult to address the for life span in humans, so researchers conduct their experiments with model systems. Mackay, the Self Family Endowed Chair of Human Genetics, is one of the world’s leading experts on the Drosophila melanogaster model (aka the common fruit fly), which is an excellent model for comparative analysis of human disease and aging. About 70 percent of the fruit fly genome has a human counterpart.

Continue reading “Geneticists zeroing in on genes affecting life span” | >