A Winnipeg pet shelter got a rare surprise when a feral cat gave birth to her kittens in the rescue.
Winnipeg, meet Unicorn Andy, an eight-week-old kitten who is also a male calico – something that happens for maybe one calico cat in 10,000, said D’Arcy Johnson, CEO of D’arcy’s ARC.
“In all these years of working at the shelter and all my years of working in the clinic … I haven’t seen one, and even some of our long-term veterinarians have never seen them,” he said.
Though it’s impossible to know whether any given person will end up developing cardiovascular disease later in life, there are known factors and lifestyle decisions that increase the risk. Knowing whether you’re at a higher risk of developing a heart health issue makes it possible to take preventative steps, and here to help with that is a new study detailing seven ‘key’ prediction metrics.
Tesla has just launched pricing and ordering for the Tesla Model 3 that will be made in the Shanghai Gigafactory. The 328,000 RMB ($47,475) price for the Standard Range Plus is before local incentives, and crushes fossil rivals in the same class and without somewhat similar specs, the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes C-Class (also both locally made in China).
Tesla Model 3 order page in China (text is auto-translated and may include errors) — Click to Zoom.
Also, loosely following technology that could be used to build a real working time machine. Anyone with an interest in time travel is welcome to participate.
But, I have been watching tech news for what could be used to build a time machine. I think we are pretty close. You’d still need a few physics guys with 150+ IQ’s to work on the equations, a guy with a 200+ IQ to figure out how to put the whole thing together, and a guy with billions of dollars to fund it. But most of this stuff is for sale to the public, (short list):
1. quantum computer; to run the calculations.
A satellite view of how beautiful this planet is.
Planet Earth is just incredible. 🌍
The ability to confine water in an enclosed compartment without directly manipulating it or using rigid containers is an attractive possibility. In a recent study, Sara Coppola and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Biomaterials, Intelligent systems, Industrial Production Engineering and Advanced Biomaterials for Healthcare in Italy, proposed a water-based, bottom-up approach to encase facile, short-lived water silhouettes in a custom-made adaptive suit.
In the work, they used a biocompatible polymer that could self-assemble with unprecedented degrees of freedom on the water surface to produce a thin membrane. They custom designed the polymer film as an external container of a liquid core or as a free-standing layer. The scientists characterized the physical properties and morphology of the membrane and proposed a variety of applications for the phenomenon from the nanoscale to the macroscale. The process could encapsulate cells or microorganisms successfully without harm, opening the way to a breakthrough approach applicable for organ-on-a-chip and lab-in-a-drop experiments. The results are now published in Science Advances.
The possibility of isolating, engineering and shaping materials into 2-D or 3D objects from the nanometer to the microscale via bottom-up engineering is gaining importance in materials science. Understanding the physics and chemistry of materials will allow a variety of applications in microelectronics, drug delivery, forensics, archeology and paleontology and space research. Materials scientists use a variety of technical methods for microfabrication including two-photon polymerization, soft interference lithography, replica molding and self-folding polymers to shape and isolate the material of interest. However, most materials engineering protocols require chemical and physical pretreatments to gain the desired final properties.
A terminally ill patient who opted for assisted death has undergone cryonic preservation at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. This preservation—the first of its kind—signifies an important milestone for cryonics advocates, who argue that the right to death, paradoxically, is a potential pathway to an eternal life.
On October 30, 2018, Alcor performed its 164th cryopreservation. It was an otherwise unremarkable moment for the nonprofit organization, save for the way Norman Hardy of Mountain View, California met his demise. Hardy was diagnosed with terminal metastatic prostate cancer, and it had spread to his bones and lungs. As noted in Alcor’s case summary, his “pain had been poorly managed,” so he opted for assisted death, which was legalized in California in 2016 through the End of Life Options Act (EOLOA).
