Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 8392

Estimates of the clock and TMRCA for 2019-nCoV based on 27 genomes.

Kristian Andersen, Scripps Research

[email protected]

Following up on the analyses provided by Andrew Rambaut this is a brief report estimating the evolutionary rate and timing of the epidemic (date of the most recent ancestor (MRCA)) based on 27 publicly shared n2019-nCoV genome sequences. Compared to earlier analyses where several parameters had to be fixed, there is now enough information content in the sequences to obtain reasonable estimates of the clock and TMRCA without fixing parameters. This work is for information purposes only and is not intended for publication. All the data used here is provided by the laboratories listed below through NCBI Genbank or GISAID.

Read more | >

Among the hardest games to play, we find the waiting game. The lore of the DeLorean being produced once again has been floating around the watercooler for some time now. Most recently, rumors pointed to 2016 being the return of the DMC 12. However, due to changes in regulations, it would appear as if the revival wouldn’t exactly be legal. Let’s just say that low-volume auto manufacturers have some hurdles to jump over. These regulations would make the hurdles impossible for DeLorean.

That all changed.

Hagerty tells us that “According to SEMA, the final regulations will allow low-volume automakers to sell up to 325 cars each year that resemble production vehicles manufactured at least 25 years ago.”

Read more | >

To further shrink electronic devices and to lower energy consumption, the semiconductor industry is interested in using 2-D materials, but manufacturers need a quick and accurate method for detecting defects in these materials to determine if the material is suitable for device manufacture. Now a team of researchers has developed a technique to quickly and sensitively characterize defects in 2-D materials.

Two-dimensional materials are atomically thin, the most well-known being graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms.

“People have struggled to make these 2-D materials without defects,” said Mauricio Terrones, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Physics, Penn State. “That’s the ultimate goal. We want to have a 2-D material on a four-inch wafer with at least an acceptable number of defects, but you want to evaluate it in a quick way.”

Read more | >

SHANGHAI—Hundreds of Americans were preparing to fly out of Wuhan, bound for California, as fears grew at the epicenter of China’s health crisis. But more U.S. citizens aren’t leaving, having failed to secure a seat on the single U.S.-bound flight—or decided to ride out the emergency where they are.

A State Department evacuation flight promised relief for a segment of Wuhan’s roughly 1,000 Americans, as a lockdown triggered by a coronavirus outbreak turned the focus to the dangers of contagion and a long quarantine in China’s…

To Read the Full Story.

Read more | >

NASA has announced that they have selected Axiom Space, an American company headquartered in Houston, Texas, to design, build and launch three large pressurized modules and a large Earth observation window to the International Space Station (ISS).

This partnership between NASA and Axiom is issued under Appendix I of NASA Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships 2 (NextSTEP-2) public-private partnership program witch the agency hopes will help stimulate commercial development of deep space exploration capabilities.

Appendix I of NextSTEP-2 was originally issued on June 7th 2019 and called for private companies to bid to develop habitable commercial modules, to be built and launched to the International Space Station, and then attached to the forward end of the station as part of NASA’s long term plan to open up the ISS to large amounts of commercial opportunities.

Read more | >