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Jun 6, 2019

Humans ingest at least 50,000 plastic particles a year

Posted by in categories: food, particle physics

Food is contaminated with plastic, which means it’s going directly into our bodies.

If you have resisted giving up bottled water for any reason, this should change your mind. A new study estimates that people who drink bottled water ingest 90,000 additional plastic microplastic particles annually, compared to those who drink tap water, which puts only an extra 4,000 particles into their bodies.

This finding is part of a study that has estimated the number of plastic particles that humans ingest every year. Conducted by researchers at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, it pulled together data from 26 previous studies that had measured plastic in salt, beer, sugar, fish, shellfish, water, and urban air. Pairing this data with the U.S. dietary guidelines, the scientists calculated how many particles people were likely to consume annually. Their discovery? 50,000 for adults, 40,000 for children. When inhalation is factored in, the estimate jumps to between 74,000 and 121,000 for adults.

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Jun 6, 2019

First-of-its-kind platform aims to rapidly advance prosthetics

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI, transhumanism

A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community.

The leg’s free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics.

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Jun 6, 2019

Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say

Posted by in category: space travel

Faster than light travel may actually be possible using a warp drive to bend space around a starship. New calculations suggest such a vehicle would require less energy than once thought.

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Jun 6, 2019

Black Hole Propulsion as Technosignature

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

When he was considering white dwarfs and neutron stars in the context of what he called ‘gravitational machines,’ Freeman Dyson became intrigued by the fate of a neutron star binary. He calculated in his paper of the same name (citation below) that gradual loss of energy through gravitational radiation would bring the two neutron stars together, creating a gravitational wave event of the sort that has since been observed. Long before LIGO, Dyson was talking about gravitational wave detection instruments that could track the ‘gravitational flash.’

Image: Artist conception of the moment two neutron stars collide. Credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT.

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Jun 6, 2019

Using black holes to conquer space: The halo drive

Posted by in categories: cosmology, space travel

The idea of traveling to another star system has been the dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a dream. While theoretical concepts have been proposed, the issues of cost, travel time and fuel remain highly problematic.

A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University’s Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.

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Jun 6, 2019

Black Hole Drive Could Power Future Starships

Posted by in categories: cosmology, space travel

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” — to propel ships to the stars.

It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.

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Jun 6, 2019

NASA’s Warp Drive Changes Everything… Including Time And Space

Posted by in category: space travel

Over the years NASA have conducted a huge number of highly ambitious projects with the goal of the perfection of space travel but their latest project may be the most extraordinary yet.

In a seismically isolated room in the Johnson Space Center, researchers from the space agency are working with an electric field that they are trying to manipulate in such a way that it could literally bend the fabric of space and time. The researchers believe that if they are successful then they could theoretically begin work on interstellar space travel that would allow craft to fly faster than the speed of light. But is this really possible?

NASA Enterprise Ixs Johnson Space Center

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Jun 6, 2019

Free “Shazam for Nature” App Identifies Plants and Animals in Your Pics

Posted by in category: futurism

It’s like Shazam meets Pokémon Go meets nature.

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Jun 6, 2019

How Chinese Spies Got the N.S.A.’s Hacking Tools, and Used Them for Attacks

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

The latest case of cyberweapons escaping American control raises questions about the United States’ expensive and dangerous digital arsenal.

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Jun 6, 2019

HPV vaccine prevents anal cancer, too, Desperate Housewives’ Marcia Cross reminds us

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

“Desperate Housewives” star Marcia Cross said her anal cancer could be linked to her husband’s throat cancer diagnosis in 2009. USA TODAY

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Girls, boys, young men and women, parents: the HPV vaccine helps to prevent cervical, anal, penile, vulvar, throat and esophageal cancers.

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