After a year of working with the Federal Aviation Administration, United Parcel Service was awarded a certification that allows it to use drones on medical campuses.
After committing to having a first crewed launch of its rocket ship in 2019, Blue Origin, the rocket manufacturer and launch services company backed by Jeff Bezos, is likely going to have to push that timeline back to 2020.
Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Blue Origin chief executive Bob Smith said that the window for getting the crewed flight done within the 2019 time frame was narrowing. “We’re not going to be date-driven,” Smith said.
But as commercial launches come to market, customers can expect to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for a ticket on the New Shepard suborbital flight.
The Mathematics of Cooperation
Posted in evolution, mathematics
Cooperation means that one individual pays a cost for another to receive a benefit. Cooperation can be at variance with natural selection: Why should you help a competitor? Yet cooperation is abundant in nature and is an important component of evolutionary innovation. Cooperation can be seen as the master architect of evolution and as the third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and selection. I will present mathematical principles of cooperation.
Topological insulators are quantum materials, which, due to their exotic electronic structure, on surfaces and edges conduct electric current like metal, while acting as an insulator in bulk. Scientists from the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) have demonstrated for the first time how to tell apart topological materials from their regular—trivial—counterparts within a millionth of a billionth of a second by probing it with ultra-fast laser light. Their method could open the way for such materials to be used as logic elements in light-controlled electronics able to process information tens of thousands times faster as currently possible. Their study appeared in Nature Photonics.
The most common illustration of the topology concept involves an elastic pretzel, which can be stretched, bent, or twisted in any way; no matter the deformation, it is impossible to make a bagel out of a pretzel or add holes to it, without tearing it apart. The number of holes in a pretzel is thus invariant and provides topological information about the pretzel shape.
In a solid material, quantum-mechanical laws restrict which energies electrons can have, leading to the formation of bands with either allowed or forbidden energies. Using the concept of topology, physicists can describe complex shapes of allowed energy bands and assign them a specific topological number. A special topology of the band structure in a material system manifests itself in exotic properties that can be observed—such as the surface conductivity in topological insulators.
Today, we have launched the MitoMouse project on our fundraising platform Lifespan.io. This project aims to reverse the damage that aging does to the mitochondrial DNA and to restore energy production in our cells with the goal of preventing age-related ill health.
The power stations of the cell
The mitochondria are the power stations of every single cell in our bodies, and they are responsible for converting the nutrients we absorb into energy. The mitochondria are so efficient at doing this that they are responsible for around 90% of the energy that our cells need to function and survive.
The next major iteration will be coming from BBC later this year, produced as a serial. The BBC just dropped a new trailer for it, which you can view in all its glory here:
People who claim to have been abducted by aliens also say their DNA was manipulated and that human-alien hybrids live among us in this clip from Season 11’s episode, “The Returned”. #AncientAliens
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“Ancient Aliens” explores the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years.
From signing a nine-page consent form to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, a woman has revealed what happens inside a cryonics lab.
A role for the gut microbiome on the health and functioning of many tissues, including the brain, liver, kidney, and adiposity, has been widely reported in the literature. Interestingly, 2019 might be the year that the role of the gut microbiome on skeletal muscle (i.e. the gut-muscle axis) comes into greater focus.
The influence of the gut microbiome on muscle strength
In April, Nay et al. reported that endurance exercise capacity was reduced in mice that do not contain a microbiome (germ-free mice, GFM) when compared with conventionally raised, microbiome-containing mice. This finding suggests that there are microbes in the gut that positively influence aerobic exercise performance.