Abstract: ‘Oumuamua (1I/2017 U1) is the first object of interstellar origin observed in the Solar system.
Recently, Micheli et al. (2018) reported that ‘Oumuamua showed deviationsfrom a Keplerian orbit at a high statistical significance.
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Scientists in Japan have developed the world’s first test that can detect cancers in patient urine samples. The breakthrough technology by Japanese researchers from engineering firm Hitachi has been in development for two years and it may be made available by 2020.
According to Agence France-Presse, the research team will work with Nagoya University to analyze 250 urine samples to check for breast, colon, and childhood forms of the disease in central Japan. The experiments will begin this month and end in September.
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The future of mass depends on a conference vote next week.
A long-discussed resolution for next week’s General Conference on Weights and Measures would toss out the international prototype of the kilogram—a hunk of platinum and iridium in Paris that everyone agrees weighs 1 kilogram. Instead, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) would redefine the International System of Units to ensure that kilograms are based on things that can’t change over time. It would require an entire rethinking of how kilograms work.
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It’s been a busy month for the Parker Solar Probe which, if you haven’t been keeping track, is currently moving faster than any man-made object ever and also closer to the sun than anything humans have ever built. The spacecraft launched a couple of months back, but it’s finally ready to do some science, and it just made it first close pass by our Sun, which is obviously cause for celebration.
The probe, which will make dozens of passes of the star, achieved its closest distance of this particular loop (called “perihelion”) on Monday night. Now, its handlers back on Earth are eagerly awaiting word from the craft so that it can share whatever information it has gathered.
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LSD changes the communication patterns between regions of the brain, a new study by researchers of the University of Zurich and Yale University shows. The study also provides insights into how mental health disorders develop and how these could be treated.
The researchers used brain imaging technology to examine the effects of LSD on the brains of healthy study participants. The data suggests that LSD triggers a reduction in the communication between the brain regions that are responsible for planning and decision making. At the same time, LSD increases the connectivity in brain networks associated with sensory functions and movement.
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Turbulence in this sea of charged particles can interfere with satellites 🛰 as well as communication 📡 and navigation 📶 signals. When it launches tomorrow, our #NASAICON mission will watch and image airglow, helping scientists better understand the extreme variability of the region where Earth meets space.
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A new study by Calico found that our genes determine our lifespan much less than previously accepted and lifespan heritability is less than seven percent.
Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own. The research, from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry, was published in Genetics.
“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby. “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”
Ruby’s employer, Calico Life Sciences, is a research and development company whose mission is to understand the biology of aging. They teamed up with scientists from the online genealogy resource Ancestry, led by Chief Scientific Officer Catherine Ball, to use publicly available pedigree data from Ancestry.com to estimate the heritability of human life span.