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What is UBI? How would free money change our lives.

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It was just last month that Elon Musk took to Twitter to unceremoniously announce that he was changing the name of the crew module and rocket booster of SpaceX’s BFR rocket program to “Starship” and “Super Heavy,” respectively. Now, in another spontaneous update from Musk via Twitter, we’re getting our first good look at the Starship section in all its stainless steel glory.

In the early morning hours, Musk tweeted out an image of the top section of the spacecraft with the simple caption “Stainless Steel Starship,” before following up with a few additional details about the progress of the program.

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A new Tel Aviv University study describes a process to make bioplastic polymers that don’t require land or fresh water—resources that are scarce in much of the world. The polymer is derived from microorganisms that feed on seaweed. It is biodegradable, produces zero toxic waste and recycles into organic waste.

The invention was the fruit of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU’s Porter School of Environmental and Earth Sciences and Prof. Michael Gozin of TAU’s School of Chemistry. Their research was recently published in the journal Bioresource Technology.

According to the United Nations, plastic accounts for up to 90 percent of all the pollutants in our oceans, yet there are few comparable, environmentally friendly alternatives to the material.

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Although it’s impossible (at least for now) to travel back in time to see the Big Bang, The New York Times has provided its readers the closest simulation of the experience via its latest augmented reality feature.

On Friday, the Times published “It’s Intermission for the Large Hadron Collider,” an interactive story that gives readers a virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and explores its most famous discovery, the Higgs boson.

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Merry Christmas


Is the Fountain of Youth still just a dream, or does hope spring eternal when it comes to beating the curse of aging? Having haunted us for centuries, is a solution finally within our grasp? We spoke to Dr Aubrey de Grey, anti-aging pioneer, chief science officer, and co-founder of SENS Research Foundation.

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Sophie Shevardnadze: Dr. Aubrey de Grey, anti-aging pioneer, chief science officer and co-founder of SENS Research Foundation, welcome to the show, great to have you with us. So what you propose in order to reverse aging is cleaning the organism of all the junk that accumulates there on the cellular level. Tell me the gist of it – why will that stop the wearing of time on my organs?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, it’s not quite that simple. What we propose is that we can keep people healthy late in life by repairing all of the damage that the body does to itself throughout life in the cause of its normal operation. And some of that damage is of the sort that you’ve just described, essentially, the accumulation of waste products both inside cells and also in the spaces between cells. But some of this is not quite like that. For example, sometimes simply we have too many of a particular bad type of cell that is misbehaving, or, in other cases, we don’t have enough cells of a particular good type. Cells die, and they are not necessarily replaced automatically by the division of other cells. Furthermore, there is damage to the structure, the kind of lattice of proteins that holds the body together, which is called the extra-cellular matrix. So, as you can see, there are many different types of damage, and we have to fix them all.

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Astronomers have spotted a monstrous stellar flare coming from a baby star 685 light-years away that’s estimated to be 10,000 times larger than any such event emitted by our sun.

Experts say the stellar ‘tantrum’ could provide a window into the birth of potentially habitable exoplanets, revealing how huge events shake up the material orbiting distant stars.

The M-type star is just 2 million years old, meaning it has yet to reach the size at which it will remain for most of its life.

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