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NASA on Friday gave SpaceX the green light to test a new crew capsule by first sending an unmanned craft with a life-sized mannequin to the International Space Station.

“We’re go for launch, we’re go for docking,” said William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator with NASA Human Exploration and Operations.

A Falcon 9 rocket from the private US-based SpaceX is scheduled to lift off, weather permitting, on March 2 to take the Crew Dragon test capsule to the ISS.

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Taking their name from an intricate Japanese basket pattern, kagome magnets are thought to have electronic properties that could be valuable for future quantum devices and applications. Theories predict that some electrons in these materials have exotic, so-called topological behaviors and others behave somewhat like graphene, another material prized for its potential for new types of electronics.

Now, an international team led by researchers at Princeton University has observed that some of the in these magnets behave collectively, like an almost infinitely massive electron that is strangely magnetic, rather than like individual particles. The study was published in the journal Nature Physics this week.

The team also showed that placing the kagome magnet in a causes the direction of magnetism to reverse. This “negative magnetism” is akin to having a compass that points south instead of north, or a refrigerator magnet that suddenly refuses to stick.

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Since my previous post about Youtube and anti-vaccination was such a hit, here’s now Pinterest handles it. They broke their own search engine to keep these things from getting passed around. They also blocked the ability to pin links or images from any number of pseudoscience websites such as Mercola, Natural News, GreedMedInfo, and HealthNutNews.

They also did this to their hash-tag library to keep people from finding workarounds.


O n Wednesday morning, Adam Schiff, the powerful chair of the House intelligence committee, joined journalists around the world in a nascent Twitter meme: he searched “vaccine” on Facebook and posted a screenshot of the results.

Schiff’s search results were indeed alarming: autofill suggestions for phrases such as “vaccination re-education discussion forum”, a group called “Parents Against Vaccination”, and the page for the National Vaccine Information Center, an official-sounding organization that promotes anti-vaccine propaganda. And while search results on Facebook are personalized to each user, a recent Guardian report found similarly biased results for a brand new account.

That’s why Ellington sees a more immediate use for the technology in the up-and-coming field of DNA data storage. Large tech firms and startups alike are evaluating whether nucleotides can beat out silicon when it comes to long-term, archival information storage. DNA is notoriously data-dense, and the arrival of hachimoji just doubled its information-carrying capacity.


But first, chemists hope to improve DNA data storage and churn out new medical compounds.

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