This week: 🚁 A new mission to Saturn’s largest Moon Titan 🚀 Launching new missions & landing astronauts…on the same night!
🎛️ Restoring the glory to the Apollo Mission Control Room.
There are a few of the stories to tell you about on the latest episode of This Week at NASA! Watch:
A new mouse study highlights the proteins responsible for LC3-associated endocytosis (LANDO), an autophagy process that is involved in degrading β-amyloid, the principal substance associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Proteostasis
Proteins in the human brain can form misfolded, non-functional, and toxic clumps known as aggregates. Preventing these aggregates from forming, and removing them when they do, is a natural function of the human body, and it is known as proteostasis. However, as we age, this function degrades, and loss of proteostasis is one of the hallmarks of aging. The resulting accumulation of aggregates leads to several deadly diseases, one of which is Alzheimer’s.
Meet National Scientis Dr. Lourdes J. Cruz, a biochemist whose research on Conus geographus venom made a significant impact on neurological medicine.
What’s at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and what would be different if Earth was positioned there?
Nearly 6 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease without solid treatment options.
HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. (WCNC) – A North Carolina couple couldn’t bear to break the bond they had with their furry feline friend. So after 19-year-old Cinnabun passed away, the Bullerdicks decided to clone their kitty.
The cost? A whopping price of $25,000.
The couple found a Texas-based company known for cloning dogs, cats and horses. They bought a kit and with a skin sample and saliva sample… Cinnabun the second was born.
It’s a mesh network system that sends data between devices — no cell towers, Wi-Fi hotspots or Bluetooth needed.
Next stop? Saturn’s moon Titan!
Titan, an analog to the early 🌎, can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet. Working with the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), we’ll send our new mission #Dragonfly to take to the skies in search for the building blocks of life: https://go.nasa.gov/2Nv0Eb0
Flashback to 2 years ago…
Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices.
In their Science article “‘Who’ is Saying ‘What’? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech,” the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique ‘neural fingerprint’ in the listener’s brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.
Seven study subjects listened to three different speech sounds (the vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/), spoken by three different people, while their brain activity was mapped using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI). With the help of data mining methods the researchers developed an algorithm to translate this brain activity into unique patterns that determine the identity of a speech sound or a voice. The various acoustic characteristics of vocal cord vibrations (neural patterns) were found to determine the brain activity.
