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Blog – Page 8515

It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.

While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.

Aside from demonstrating the app itself, if you ever wondered how sensors like the accelerometer, magnetometer, or barometric pressure sensor inside your phone actually work, and which one of them you can use to detect toilet flushing on an airplane and measure elevator velocity, and how to verify your HDD spins correctly, you will enjoy the talk. If you just want a good base for playing around with sensor data yourself, it’s all open source and available on GitHub for both Android and iOS.

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A pair of researchers, one with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the other with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CIT, has found a way to estimate how long it will take already launched space vehicles to arrive at other star systems. The pair, Coryn Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia have written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

Back in the 1970s, NASA sent four unmanned probes out into the solar system—Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2—which, after completion of their missions, kept going—all four are on their way out of the or have already departed. But what will become of them? Will they make their way to other star systems, and if so, how long might it take them? This is what Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia wondered. To find some possible answers, they used the Gaia space telescope. It was launched by the European Space Agency back in 2013 and has been stationed at a point just outside of Earth’s orbit around the sun. It has been collecting information on a billion stars, including their paths through space. The latest dataset was released just last year on 7.2 million stars.

With data describing the paths of the four and data describing the paths of a host of stars in hand, the researchers were able to work out when the paths of the four spacecraft might approach very far away .

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Glioblastoma is one of the most common and aggressive forms of brain cancer, and it is particularly difficult to treat. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have come up with a new approach to treatment for the disease, by growing organoids based on a patient’s own tumor to find the most effective treatments. Digital Trends spoke to senior author Dr. Donald O’Rourke to learn more.

The technique uses mini-brains — pea-sized organoids grown from stem cells which recreate features of full-scale brains. The mini-brains are similar enough to real brains that they can be used for testing out medical treatments to see how a full-sized brain would respond.

The breakthrough in this research is regarding treatment individualization. One of the challenges of treating a complex disease like brain cancer is that different people respond in different ways to the various treatment options available. After surgery has been performed to remove a tumor, doctors typically begin further treatment using radiation or chemotherapy around one month later. That means there isn’t always time to use perform genetic analysis to see which treatment might be best suited for a particular patient — the doctors need to know what will work and start further treatment as soon as possible.

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The Race To Find A Cure For Aging Learn about three pioneers working to turn back the clock ~ via Medium #perpetuallife

https://medium.com/discourse/the-race-to-find-a-cure-for-aging-98676b0318dc
We want to look & feel young again, and every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on beauty serums, cosmetic surgery, and exotic supplements in the hopes of appearing more vibrant, healthy, and desirable.

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Science cannot prove the existence of God, but it cannot disprove God either; it can only disprove the notion of a specific, poorly conceived God. If you claim that your God lives in the clouds, you can disprove that God by simply observing the clouds. If you claim that God lives in our Universe, you can disprove that God by observing the entire Universe. But if your God exists in an extra dimension, before cosmic inflation, or outside of space and time altogether, neither proof nor disproof is possible.

In a fundamental way, it is purely a matter of what your faith is. All we can control, at the end of the day, is how we treat one another. Do we welcome those who believe different things than we do into our hearts, communities, and lives? Or do we shun, exclude, and “other” them?

Regardless of what you believe, I have the same advice for you: choose kindness. It costs nothing, while benefitting the giver, the recipient, and those who simply witness it. Whether you say that God made us or not, I would say the same thing: the wonders and joys of science and the Universe are for you, exactly as you are, too.

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