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Dec 13, 2018
Live test of the abort motor for Orion’s Launch Abort System at the Northrop Grumman test site in Promontory, Utah
Posted by Michael Lance in category: futurism
Dec 13, 2018
Steph Curry says moon landing comments were a joke, but he will take NASA up on its offer of a tour
Posted by Michael Lance in categories: humor, law, space travel
NBA superstar Steph Curry said he was kidding when he said he doesn’t believe humans landed on the moon.
“Obviously I was joking when I was talking on the podcast,” the Golden State Warriors guard told ESPN on Wednesday. “I was silently protesting how stupid it was that people actually took that quote and made it law.”
While appearing on an episode of the podcast “Winging It,” which posted Monday, Curry asked fellow NBA players Vince Carter, Kent Bazemore and Andre Iguodala “We ever been to the moon?”
Dec 13, 2018
Today, Virgin Galactic will fly their first mission for us — and join the growing list of commercial vehicles supporting our suborbital research
Posted by Michael Lance in categories: particle physics, transportation
Payloads on the flight will collect valuable data to improve technologies for future exploration missions. This flight will be specifically be used to study how dust disperses in microgravity. Understanding dust dynamics can help abate the damage that is caused by particles contaminating hardware and habitats. Swoop in: https://go.nasa.gov/2Gr79YT
Dec 13, 2018
Aubrey de Grey – Clinical Trials in Five Years
Posted by Steve Hill in categories: biotech/medical, cryonics, government, life extension
In November, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a graduate of the University of Cambridge, was in Spain to attend the Longevity World Forum in the city of Valencia, and he gave a press conference organized by his friend, MIT engineer José Luis Cordeiro.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the scientific director (CSO) and founder of the SENS Research Foundation. In Madrid and Valencia, Dr. de Grey reaffirmed for Tendencias21 one of his most striking statements of 2018: “In the future, there will be many different medicines to reverse aging. In five years, we will have many of them working in early clinical trials.”
The Longevity World Forum is a congress on longevity and genomics in Europe. It is heir to the first congress in Spain, the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit, which was held at the CSIC headquarters in Madrid in May 2017, and Dr. de Grey also participated in that event. In Valencia, his presentation was recieved with interest, and Dr. de Grey explained to this select audience that aging will be treated as a medical problem in the near future. Rather than treating its symptoms using the infectious disease model, the root causes of aging will themselves be treated.
Dec 13, 2018
A Designer Seed Company Is Building a Farming Panopticon
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: biological, food, satellites
Indigo Ag, known for its microbe-coated seeds, is acquiring geospatial data startup TellusLabs to use satellites to learn every last thing about its farmers’ fields.
Dec 13, 2018
Researchers Develop Nanodiscs That Can Wipe Out Tumors
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology, robotics/AI
Cancer research is an area of medical science that, rightfully, gets considerable attention. There are nearly 14.5 million Americans with a history of cancer and with more than 13 million estimated new cancer cases each year. It’s no wonder even artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten into the field. Researchers from the University of Michigan are not getting left behind, with a groundbreaking method that has the potential to eliminate tumors.
This new technology uses nano-sized discs, about 10 nm to be exact, to teach the body to kill cancer cells. “We are basically educating the immune system with these nanodiscs so that immune cells can attack cancer cells in a personalized manner,” said James Moon from the University of Michigan.
Each of these ‘nanodiscs’ is full of neoantigens (tumor-specific mutations) that teach the immune system’s T-cells to recognize each neoantigen and kill them. These work hand-in-hand with immune checkpoint inhibitors that boost the responses of T-cells — forming an anti-cancer system in the body that wipes out tumors and potentially keeps them from reemerging.
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Dec 13, 2018
Biologists shed new light on the diversity of natural selection
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: genetics, sex
Evolutionary genetic theory shows that genetic variation can be maintained when selection favors different versions of the same genes in males and females—an inevitable outcome of having separate sexes. That is, for many genes, there may not be a universally ‘best’ version, but rather one is best for males and one is best for females. This is known as sexually antagonistic genetic variation, but it might only be maintained under a narrow set of conditions, limiting its prevalence in nature. However, a new study by Dr. Karl Grieshop and Professor Göran Arnqvist, published in PLoS Biology, may change this view.
“One of the simplest ways for sexually antagonistic selection to maintain genetic variation in fitness is via sex-specific dominance reversal, where neither version of a gene is always dominant or recessive, but rather the version that benefits a given sex is also dominant in that sex. So whether a given version of a gene is dominant or recessive to the other will depend upon which sex it is in,” says Dr. Karl Grieshop.
Dec 13, 2018
A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in category: neuroscience
New test proposal… Do you experience stress, entropy, decoherence? Yes? Ofcourse you do. Well, I declare you self- aware 😁🙈.
A report that a fish can pass the “mirror test” for self-awareness reignites debates about how to define and measure that elusive quality.
Dec 13, 2018
Timechain : a Decade of Misunderstanding Blockchain
Posted by Steve Nichols in category: bitcoin
https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/
Abstract: The term “blockchain” has caused much confusion and damage due to its failure to accurately capture the core characteristics of decentralized byzantine fault tolerant systems. In this article, a restoration of an older term is proposed as replacement.