Jeff Bezos speaking at the grand opening of the Amazon Spheres, a new glass dome conservatory at the company’s Seattle headquarters. If going to space is vital for a thriving civilization, then we had better develop the synthetic biology tools and tech to enable it.
In a series of letters, former suspect Gary Oliva reportedly told his friend that her death was “an accident,” but he saw it happen.
By Chelsea Whyte
Policing power may be about to get much stronger, thanks to another advance in genetic analysis. A new technique can link the patchy, limited DNA information held in forensic databases to the rich DNA libraries held by family tree-building websites, raising further questions about genetic privacy.
Earlier this year, an ancestry database used by people looking to trace their family history was used to identify the suspected Golden State Killer, a serial killer active in California decades ago. Since his arrest in April, genealogy databases – which allow consumers to upload their DNA sequences – have been used to crack several other cold cases.
A water bottle recovered from a construction site where Tim DeSalvo – whose uncle Albert DeSalvo had confessed to being the internationally notorious Boston Strangler – gave police the DNA evidence they needed to bring closure to a case that has been a mystery for nearly 50 years, murders for which no one has ever been charged.
“This is really a story of relentlessness,’’ Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis explained today as Massachusetts top law enforcement officials revealed that DNA preserved from the body of the Boston Strangler’s last victim—raped and murdered in 1964—can now be linked with ”99.9 percent certainty” to the late Albert DeSalvo.
”This is good evidence. This is strong evidence. This is reliable evidence,’’ Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said of the new DNA result. ”But there can be no doubt.”
A widespread outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease has killed one person and sickened possibly dozens of others who were all guests at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel. The hotel evacuated all its guests on July 15 and remains closed as of press time.
Public health officials say a dozen guests had tested positive for Legionnaires’, a bacteria that can cause a severe form of pneumonia. But according to the attorney filing a lawsuit Monday, hundreds more may have been exposed.
By the time guests were evacuated in mid-July, 49-year-old Cameo Garrett was already dead. An autopsy showed she had coronary issues and Legionnaires’ disease. Garrett went to a conference at the Sheraton a week before she died – just like Germany Greer who said he became so sick at one point he didn’t even know his own name.
A method for locating seams of gold and other heavy metals is the unlikely spin-off of Swinburne’s involvement in a huge experiment to detect dark matter down a mine in Stawell, Victoria.
Associate Professor Alan Duffy, from Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing and a member of the Sodium iodide with Active Background REjection (SABRE) project, said cosmic radiation was effectively creating an X-ray of the Earth between the underground detector and the surface.
In the mine, the SABRE experiment seeks to detect particles of dark matter, something no one has conclusively achieved yet. Any signal from dark matter would be miniscule, and so the SABRE team created a phenomenally sensitive detector, which, it turns out, is also sensitive to a host of cosmic particles that can help us to locate gold.
Trying to prove simulation theory could invalidate whatever experiment our universe is being used for.
CRCS Lunch Seminar Date: Monday, October 18, 2010Time: 11:30am – 1:00pmPlace: Maxwell Dworkin 119 Speaker: Simson Garfinkel, Naval Postgraduate School Title: Automated Digital Forensics.
A new type of nuclear reactor designed to power crewed outposts on the moon and Mars could be ready for its first in-space trial just a few years from now, project team members said.
A flight test is the next big step for the Kilopower experimental fission reactor, which aced a series of critical ground tests from November 2017 through March 2018. No off-Earth demonstration is on the books yet, but Kilopower should be ready to go by 2022 or so if need be, said Patrick McClure, Kilopower project lead at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
A remarkable new study from scientists at Stanford University has revealed thousands of previously undiscovered small proteins produced by bacteria in the human microbiome. Almost all of these newly described proteins serve unknown functions in the human body and the researchers suggest their discovery opens up a new frontier for future therapeutic drug development.
