Forecasters predict near-ideal weather conditions Monday night for the first launch at Cape Canaveral this year, when SpaceX plans to send another 60 Starlink broadband satellites into orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
FULL STORY: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/02/good-weather-predicted…h-of-2020/
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is kicking off the new year with an ultra busy month of tests and missions, including a major test for the company’s first crewed mission to fly NASA astronauts to and back from the International Space Station (ISS).
To drum up hype ahead of the big day, Musk posted a simulated video on Monday showing how the eventual manned launch will look.
SEE ALSO: Why Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists Universally Oppose Moving to Mars.
This year birthed some of the most mind-bending military tech we’ve ever seen.
Whether you’re a war hawk or a pacifist, it’s hard to deny the last year’s mind-bending advances in warfare technology.
Any FDA-approved drug must first pass through three phases of development, to show safety and efficacy. At our launch party, Dr. Cole Marta, a principal investigator at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Los Angeles MDMA phase 3 study site, explains the process of drug development and what happens after a drug gets to market, including factors such as cost to the patient and insurance coverage. How would *you* like to see psychedelic medicines legally come to market?
The accelerator-on-a-chip demonstrated in Science is just a prototype, but Vuckovic said its design and fabrication techniques can be scaled up to deliver particle beams accelerated enough to perform cutting-edge experiments in chemistry, materials science and biological discovery that don’t require the power of a massive accelerator.
“The largest accelerators are like powerful telescopes. There are only a few in the world and scientists must come to places like SLAC to use them,” Vuckovic said. “We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool.”
Team members liken their approach to the way that computing evolved from the mainframe to the smaller but still useful PC. Accelerator-on-a-chip technology could also lead to new cancer radiation therapies, said physicist Robert Byer, a co-author of the Science paper. Again, it’s a matter of size.
Today, medical X-ray machines fill a room and deliver a beam of radiation that’s tough to focus on tumors, requiring patients to wear lead shields to minimize collateral damage.
Researchers believe they have identified specific neurons that are responsible for conscious awareness. Previous studies have implicated both thalamocortical circuits and cortico-cortico circuits in consciousness. The new study reports these networks intersect via L5p neurons. Directly activating L5p neurons made mice react to weaker sensory stimuli. The researchers say if consciousness requires L5p neurons, all brain activity without them must be unconscious.
Quantum computers, quantum cryptography and quantum (insert name here) are often in the news these days. Articles about them inevitably refer to entanglement, a property of quantum physics that makes all these magical devices possible.
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” a name that has stuck and become increasingly popular. Beyond just building better quantum computers, understanding and harnessing entanglement is also useful in other ways.
For example, it can be used to make more accurate measurements of gravitational waves, and to better understand the properties of exotic materials. It also subtly shows up in other places: I have been studying how atoms bumping into each other become entangled, to understand how this affects the accuracy of atomic clocks.
Posted in space
🌖 What will the Moon look like throughout 2020? Using data from our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to visualize with unprecedented fidelity, NASA Goddard’s Dial-a-Moon shows you the Moon each hour: https://go.nasa.gov/37sKofB
Watch a full year of Moon phases from the Northern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2udsqPY
From the Southern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2QHYt1U
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have successfully used a laser-assisted imaging tool to “see” what happens in brain cells of mice learning to reach out and grab a pellet of food. Their experiments, they say, add to evidence that such motor-based learning can occur in multiple areas of the brain, even ones not typically associated with motor control.
“Scientists should be looking at the entire brain to understand specific types of learning,” says Richard Huganir, Ph.D., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Different parts of the brain contribute to learning in different ways, and studying brain cell receptors can help us decipher how this works.”
The work, say the researchers, may ultimately inform efforts to develop treatments for learning-based and neurocognitive disorders.
Scientists have uncovered a new kind of electrical process in the human brain that could play a key role in the unique way our brains compute.
Our brains are computers that work using a system of connected brain cells, called neurons, that exchange information using chemical and electric signals called action potentials. Researchers have discovered that certain cells in the human cortex, the outer layer of the brain, transmit signals in a way not seen in corresponding rodent cells. This process might be important to better understanding our unique brains and to improving programs that are based on a model of the human brain.
