Posted in space
In this episode of #EarthfromSpace, the Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite takes us over the Gulf from the ESA Web TV studios.
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A French physicist has won an Ig Nobel Prize for using mathematical formulas to determine whether cats are liquid or solid.
The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded every year by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to science and humor. The goal is to highlight scientific studies that first make people laugh, then think.
Scientists from around the world are meeting in Sydney to discuss the latest advancements in silicon quantum computing.
Scientists from around the world are landing in Sydney this week to join discussions on the latest research in silicon quantum computing with renowned physicist and Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, and UNSW Sydney researchers from the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQCT), including Professor Andrew Dzurak, Professor Sven Rogge and Professor Andrea Morello.
Bringing together more than 200 leading researchers in the field, the Silicon Quantum Electronics Workshop is a global initiative to share research insights and technology advancements in the race to build the world’s first quantum computer – in silicon.
Fats and cholesterol that build up along the insides of blood vessels can limit the flow of blood around the heart, causing heart attacks or strokes. To treat this condition, called atherosclerosis, millions of Americans take drugs every day—the most popular of these, statins, alone cost up to $13 billion per year in 2014, and these don’t work for every patient. Now scientists have discovered that a compound already approved by the FDA can dissolve away this buildup in the blood vessels more effectively than existing treatments. The researchers published their study today in Science Translational Medicine.
The compound is called beta-cyclodextrin, and it’s already used in some pharmaceuticals to bind the active drug to fatty acids in the body where it is most needed.
Now, here’s the good news: beta-cyclodextrin is also the main ingredient used to make powdered alcohol. Pour booze into a heap of cyclodextrin, and the alcohol molecules cling to the ring-shaped cyclodextrin molecules, making a fluffy dry powder that packs a punch.
The periodic table is chemistry’s holy text. Not only does it list all of the tools at chemists’ disposal, but its mere shape—where these elements fall into specific rows and columns—has made profound predictions about new elements and their properties that later came true. But few chemists on Earth have a closer relationship with the document than Dawn Shaughnessy, whose team is partially responsible for adding six new elements to table’s ranks.
Shaughnessy leads a team of real-life alchemists. You might be familiar with alchemy as a medieval European practice where mystics attempted to transmute elements into more valuable ones. But rather than turn the element lead into gold, Shaughnessy and her team turned plutonium into flerovium.
Shaughnessy’s parents encouraged her to pursue science from a young age—her father was an engineer, and she had an electronics kit as well as a chemistry set as a child. She’d first thought about doing orthopedic research but didn’t want to cut people open, she explained to me, and chemistry was a natural fit. But when she arrived at the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate, she learned that chemistry could be more than just mixing liquids in beakers. She could create the atoms themselves.
Sydney Harbour and the Egyptian pyramids feature in the debut images from the first all-UK radar spacecraft.
NovaSAR was developed jointly by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited of Guildford and Airbus in Portsmouth, and launched to orbit in September.
Its pictures are now being assessed for use in diverse applications, including crop analysis, flood and forestry mapping, and maritime surveillance.
In a world first, a patient with Parkinson’s disease has undergone transplant therapy, which uses reprogrammed stem cells to replace neurons destroyed by the disease.
Stem cell therapy is part of the toolkit
The stem cell field is an area of science that is relatively well funded and, out of all the branches of medical science relevant to aging, is probably the most understood by the public. In the last decade or so, progress in stem cell research has been rapid, and scientists now have a wide range of cell types they can create on demand via cellular programming.
Join crew members Alexander Gerst and Serena Auñón-Chancellor as they get ready for #Thanksgiving aboard the International Space Station with poundcake and candied yams. Watch: https://go.nasa.gov/2qZt4LY
