Chip Walter’s new book is titled “Immortality Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions and the Quest to Live Forever.” It’s about the money, and the research, that’s seeking a way to extend human life indefinitely.
Chip Walter discusses “Immortality, Inc.” at Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures: 6 p.m. Thu., Jan. 16. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Main Branch, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland.
Sounds like science fiction, but Walter thinks breakthroughs are just around the corner.
A drone is an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can be programmed for automatic routing and delivery. These come handy in delivery medicines which is easier to carry and can add value to the pharma supply chain. Drone helps to deliver to places with the high expense involved or poor infrastructure and thereby plays a significant role in last-mile delivery.
The pace with which they are now being used for delivery, even Amazon is experimenting with the delivery mechanism offered by drone as its logistics and transport market is forecast to grow 20% in coming times.
Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in “targeted attacks” against users.
The vulnerability, found by Chinese security company Qihoo 360, was found in Firefox’s just-in-time compiler. The compiler is tasked with speeding up performance of JavaScript to make websites load faster. But researchers found that the bug could allow malicious JavaScript to run outside of the browser on the host computer.
In practical terms, that means an attacker can quietly break into a victim’s computer by tricking the victim into accessing a website running malicious JavaScript code.
NASA’s Lucy mission team is seeing double after discovering that Eurybates, the asteroid the spacecraft has targeted for flyby in 2027, has a small satellite. This “bonus” science exploration opportunity for the project was discovered using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 in September 2018, December 2019, and January 2020.
Launching in October 2021, Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojan asteroids, a population of small bodies orbiting the Sun “leading” and “trailing” Jupiter, at the same distance from the Sun as the gas giant. With flyby encounters past seven different asteroids – one in the Main Asteroid Belt and six in the Trojans, Lucy will be the first space mission in history to explore so many different destinations in independent orbits around our Sun.
“This newly discovered satellite is more than 6,000 times fainter than Eurybates, implying a diameter less than 1 km,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, principal investigator of the mission. “If this estimate proves to be correct, it will be among the smallest asteroids visited.”
Assigned to study how two stars would cross paths creating an eclipse, he focused on the solar system TOI 1338, where he noticed something in the orbit of two stars that was blocking the light.
His bosses spent several weeks verifying his observation, and ultimately concluded that Cukier had discovered a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth and only the 13th planet of its kind ever discovered.
“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier said, according to a NASA press release.
Summary: Critical aspects of hippocampal function can be reversed in old age, or compensated for throughout life, with the help of neural stem cells. Source: TU DresdenWe all will experience it.
“It’s kind of like he’s still there, still waving, and it just makes me feel like he’s just still around.”
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in the U.S. has found that objects of different mass dropped in space fall at a rate within two-trillionths of a percent of each other. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their satellite-based physics study and what they learned from it.
Most everyone has heard the story of Galileo dropping two different sized cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa in the 17th century to demonstrate his theory that in the absence of air resistance, two objects will fall at the same rate. Einstein later refined the theory and added it to his Theory of General Relativity. Since that time, many people have tested the theory, and it has always been confirmed. Still, some physicists believe that there are bound to be exceptions to the theory because of the disconnect between general relativity and quantum mechanics. In this new effort, the team in France devised an experiment to measure two objects dropping together for two years—specifically, two chunks of metal in a satellite—to see if they could spot an exception.
The two chunks of a platinum-rhodium alloy and a mass of titanium-aluminum-vanadium alloy were installed in a device the team called the Twin-Space Accelerometer for Gravity Experiment (T-SAGE), which was on board a satellite with the acronym MICROSCOPE. The satellite was launched into space aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Guiana Space Centre ELS.
An international team of cancer researchers has developed a new type of copper-based nanoparticle that can kill tumor cells in mice. While the technology showed effectiveness on its own, by combining it with immunotherapy the scientists say it produced long-lasting effects, quickly killing off any cancer cells that dared to return.
The therapy centers on new knowledge around tumors’ aversion to certain types of nanoparticles. The research team made up of scientists from KU Leuven, the University of Bremen, the Leibniz Institute of Materials Engineering, and the University of Ioannina, discovered that tumor cells were particularly sensitive to nanoparticles made from copper and oxygen.
Once these copper oxide nanoparticles enter a living organism they dissolve and become toxic, killing off cancer cells that happen to be in the area. Key to the new nanoparticle design was the addition of iron oxide, which the researchers say enables it to kill off cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact.
A long-sought-after class of “superdiamond” carbon-based materials with tunable mechanical and electronic properties was predicted and synthesized by Carnegie’s Li Zhu and Timothy Strobel. Their work is published by Science Advances.
Carbon is the fourth-most–abundant element in the universe and is fundamental to life as we know it. It is unrivaled in its ability to form stable structures, both alone and with other elements.
A material’s properties are determined by how its atoms are bonded and the structural arrangements that these bonds create. For carbon-based materials, the type of bonding makes the difference between the hardness of diamond, which has three-dimensional “sp3” bonds, and the softness of graphite, which has two-dimensional “sp2” bonds, for example.
