Lifeboat Foundation

The £13m RemoveDebris spacecraft was taken to the ISS in April and stored onboard ahead of Wednesday’s release.

The spacecraft was pushed out of an airlock where a robotic arm then picked it up gave it a gentle nudge down and away from the 400km-high lab.

In the process, RemoveDebris became the largest satellite to ever be deployed from the International Space Station. The time was about 12:35 BST.

New research shows that the brain‘s neuroplasticity isn’t as flexible as previously thought.

One of the brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time.

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning.

Continue reading “The Limits of Neuroplasticity in the Brain” »

An international team of researchers has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees. The finding could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.

“Populations of bees around the world are declining, and viruses are known to contribute to these declines,” said David Galbraith, research scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb and a recent Penn State graduate. “Despite the importance of bees as pollinators of flowering plants in agricultural and natural landscapes and the importance of viruses to bee health, our understanding of bee viruses is surprisingly limited.”

To investigate viruses in bees, the team collected samples of DNA and RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, from 12 bee species in nine countries across the world. Next, they developed a novel high-throughput sequencing technique that efficiently detected both previously identified and 27 never-seen-before viruses belonging to at least six new families in a single experiment. The results appear in the June 11, 2018, issue of Scientific Reports.

It would be silly to think we completely understand our universe, given how small the Earth is compared to the vastness of the cosmos. But from here on our tiny planet, it appears that much of the universe is missing. And I’m not just talking about dark matter. Regular stuff seems to be missing, too.

Astronomy fans probably know that as far as humans can tell, the universe is composed mostly of some mysterious, unexplained energy called dark energy that pushes it apart. The remaining piece, about a quarter, is dark matter, another unexplained thing that seems to build the universe’s skeleton. Just 4 percent is the regular matter that we can see: stars, planets, and interstellar and intergalactic gas. But the observed amount of this regular matter still falls perhaps a third short of the amount of stuff that physicists think should exist based on their models of the universe.

Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station, even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.

By Dhel Nazario

Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station (ISS), even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.

Continue reading “Students make first ever live interview with astronaut from the ISS” »

FURTHER SPACE DEVELOPMENT: President Donald J. Trump signed Space Policy Directive – 3 directing the United States to lead the management of traffic and mitigate the effects of debris in space.

An interaction between aggregate alpha synuclein and ATP synthase implicated in Parkinson’s Disease.

An open-access paper published in Nature Communications sheds light on how an accumulation of α-synuclein protein in brain cells contributes to causing Parkinson’s disease. In particular, the researchers discovered how clumps of the protein damage important proteins on mitochondrial surfaces, leading to impaired energy production, swelling and bursting of the mitochondria themselves, and, ultimately, cell death [1].

Study abstract

Continue reading “Aggregate form of α-synuclein leads to cell death in Parkinson’s Disease” »

From electric cars that travel hundreds of miles on a single charge to chainsaws as mighty as gas-powered versions, new products hit the market each year that take advantage of recent advances in battery technology.

But that growth has led to concerns that the world’s supply of lithium, the metal at the heart of many of the new rechargeable batteries, may eventually be depleted.

Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found new evidence suggesting that batteries based on sodium and potassium hold promise as a potential alternative to lithium-based batteries.

Continue reading “Sodium- and potassium-based batteries could be key for smart grid of the future” »

It seems reasonable that people would want to maximize various aspects of life if they were given the opportunity to do so, whether it’s the pleasure they feel, how intelligent they are, or how much personal freedom they have. In actuality, people around the world seem to aspire for more moderate levels of these and other traits, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our research shows that people’s sense of perfection is surprisingly modest,” says psychological scientist Matthew J. Hornsey of the University of Queensland, first author on the research. “People wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences—they wanted about 75% of a good thing.”

Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130—a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.

Continue reading “Around the world, people have surprisingly modest notions of the ‘ideal’ life” »