Science & TechnologyS


Satellite

Russian space chief questions NASA plans, praises partnership with China

Eric Berger
ars Technica
Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:20 UTC
Russian-Chinese talks at Constantine Palace in 2016.
China's Vice Premier Wang Yang (standing) and Russia's then-Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin at Russian-Chinese talks at Constantine Palace in 2016.
"Today relations between Russia and China are very good."

The chief of Russia's space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, offered less-than-flattering comments about NASA's Moon program in a recent interview with a Russian tabloid newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Asked about Russia's interest in sending humans to the Moon and possibly partnering with NASA, Rogozin dismissed the Artemis program. He responded: "Frankly speaking, we are not interested in participating in such a project."

The Russian space chief has publicly complained for some time that NASA has chosen a 2024 landing date for political reasons. He has also compared US efforts to build a sustainable program of exploration on the surface of the Moon to American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

"It's more of a political project for the US now," Rogozin said of Artemis.
"With the lunar project, we are seeing our US partners move away from the principles of cooperation and mutual support that have developed with cooperation on the ISS. They see their program not as international but as similar to NATO."

Comment: See also:

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Moon

US plans to build nuclear reactors for the Moon and Mars to host 'sustainable human presence'


RT
Sun, 26 Jul 2020 12:18 UTC
Nuclear power plant
© Markus Distelrath/Pexels
The US is planning to construct nuclear reactors for use on the Moon and on Mars that would allow humans to inhabit them for long periods of time - and it's asking for help from the private sector to do it.

Washington wants to have a "fission surface power system" ready to go to space by the end of 2026, according to a formal request put out by the Department of Energy on Friday and directed at "leaders in the nuclear and space industries." The request asks industry leaders to help the government develop innovative technologies that will work both on the moon and on Mars.

"The prospect of deploying an advanced reactor to the lunar surface is as exciting as it is challenging,"said John Wagner, associate laboratory director of INL's Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate.

First, a reactor design will need to be developed. Then a test reactor will be built, along with another that will be sent to the Moon. A flight system and lander will also need to be designed so that the reactor can be transported. The prototype will resemble "to the greatest extent practicable" all the aspects of the actual reactor to be subsequently deployed to the Moon, "which must include extensibility to Mars," the request said.
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People 2

Review of Debra Soh's 'The End of Gender'

Barbara Kay
The Post Millennial
Sun, 26 Jul 2020 17:00 UTC
debra soh
Most authors dedicate their books to loved ones or inspirational teachers. Debra Soh, sexologist and neuroscientist, dedicates her new book, The End of Gender: Debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society to "everyone who blocked me on Twitter."

It's a fitting tribute, since aggressive opposition to Soh's spirited defence of science against the prevailing theory-based doctrines of the trans movement has guided Soh's professional trajectory for a number of years now.

As Soh informs readers at the outset, she left her eleven-year research career in academia, because it was clear her field had been compromised by trans activism, and her freedom to explore her subject — gender, sex and sexual orientation — was continuously shrinking. Assessing the "long, ugly history between transgender activists and sexologists," she could see no foreseeable end to the tensions, and segued to a career in journalism (Playboy, the Globe and Mail, Scientific American, Quillette, and others).

From her first article, arguing against early transition for children, the mobbing began and never let up. But neither did supportive encouragement from ordinary people who find themselves baffled and disturbed by dogmas and vocabulary — "people who menstruate" — that make no sense to them, and which many women find offensive (I certainly do). Soh wrote the book for them: "to answer your questions at a time when it's next to impossible to tell apart politically motivated ideas from scientific truth."

The book is organized around a series of trans-movement assumptions Soh identifies as myths: that "biological sex is a spectrum"; that "gender is a social construct"; that "there are more than two genders"; that "sexual orientation and gender identity are unrelated"; and so forth.
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Better Earth

Viruses from space & evolution: Dr. Wickramasinghe explains it all in new video

Hagia Sophia:
Panspermia.org
Sat, 25 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
Wickramasinghe
Screenshot
I've had the privilege of being in regular touch with Chandra Wickramasinghe this year. Daily emails and regular Skype and Zoom calls have become a wonderful (wonder-full) intellectual dialogue. I am amazed at his ability to stay inspirational and continue to contribute despite his ostracism from the field HE founded: Astrobiology.

There is simply no question that Chandra and Fred Hoyle were the fathers of the Astrobiology. There is also no mention among "astrobiologists" of this role. No awards. No privileged papers. No lectures. Sir Fred got a statue, but you can't trust those anymore.

This is a queer circumstance (unless you share the cynical nature of the Tusk). Astrobiology today is a timid creature, only brave enough to speculate, but never prove their proposition. If they were to do the right thing and acknowledge, re-address, and incorporate the work of H-W into their studies, they might have a productive field of inquiry.

Comment: As Pierre Lescaudron details in his most recent article, while Covid-19 shows clear signs of tampering by human agency, the role of viruses in evolution are only just beginning to be understood: Compelling Evidence That SARS-CoV-2 Was Man-Made

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Beaker

Lego-inspired bone and soft tissue can be repaired with tiny, 3D-printed bricks


Medical Express
Sat, 25 Jul 2020 17:24 UTC
lego design bone implant repair
© Oregon Health & Science UniversityOregon Health & Science University researchers have developed a tiny, 3D-printed technology that can be assembled like Lego blocks and help repair broken bones and soft tissue.
Tiny, 3-D-printed bricks have been designed to heal broken bones — and could one day lead to lab-made organs for human transplant.

Inspired by Lego blocks, the small, hollow bricks serve as scaffolding onto which both hard and soft tissue can regrow better than today's standard regeneration methods, according to new research published in Advanced Materials. Each brick is 1.5 millimeters cubed, or roughly the size of a small flea.

"Our patent-pending scaffolding is easy to use; it can be stacked together like Legos and placed in thousands of different configurations to match the complexity and size of almost any situation," said Luiz Bertassoni, Ph.D., who led the technology's development and is an associate professor in the OHSU School of Dentistry and an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the OHSU School of Medicine.
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Info

Rare supernova in Draco may explain how white dwarfs explode


Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 23 Jul 2020 19:43 UTC
Rare Supernova
© Northwestern UniversityThe blue dot marks the approximate location of the supernova event.
Astrophysicists have spotted a spectacular flash of ultraviolet light accompanying a white dwarf explosion.

It's only the second time such a rare type of supernova has been seen, they say, and may help explain how white dwarfs explode.

The flash "is telling us something very specific", says Adam Miller from Northwestern University, US, the lead author of a paper in in the Astrophysical Journal.

"As time passes, the exploded material moves farther away from the source. As that material thins, we can see deeper and deeper.

"After a year, the material will be so thin that we will see all the way into the centre of the explosion."

Using the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, the researchers spotted the event, named SN2019yvq, just a day after it occurred last December in a galaxy about 140 million light-years from Earth and very close to the tail of the dragon-shaped Draco constellation.

They quickly studied it in ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths using NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and classified it as a type Ia supernova.
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Galaxy

In international collaboration, astrophysicists fill in 11 billion years of our universe's expansion history


The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Thu, 23 Jul 2020 18:26 UTC
Universe galaxy
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the Universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in our possible exploration of its history.

"We know both the ancient history of the Universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there's a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years," says cosmologist Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who leads the team announcing today's results. "For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade."

The SDSS map is shown as a rainbow of colors, located within the observable Universe.
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Beaker

Biophysicists find water wires are biological information channels


Evolution News
Wed, 22 Jul 2020 17:04 UTC
water wire
Water conducts electricity; it can also conduct energy and information. Biophysicists are finding that "water wires" at the nanoscale fine-tune enzymatic actions — indeed, can be indispensable for function.

In a post here back in April, Evolution News shared a remarkable fact about dynein, one of the molecular machines that "walks" on microtubules. The scientist in that story theorized that water molecules bind to the stalk and help transmit kinetic energy via "water waves" from the reaction center, where ATP is spent, to the "feet" where walking takes place. The water molecules are so positioned as to create a virtual "tsunami" of energy from one end of the machine to the other, which causes the feet to move. Obviously, this requires very precise cooperation between the water molecules and the amino acids in the stalk. Now, other instances are coming to light of biological systems incorporating water molecules into their functional specificity.

How Water Wires Work

Biophysicists have long suspected that water molecules facilitate the passage of substrates through membrane channels. The purpose of membrane channels is to permit certain molecules through the cell membrane but prohibit others. This is called active transport, because normally molecules would move by diffusion (passive transport). Cells need to both attract the right molecules to go through the channel and authenticate them through the "selectivity filter." Water can assist this process via electricity. Since H2O is bipolar, single water molecules in a chain, held together by hydrogen bonds, become a sort of "wire" through which ions can pass. Additionally, the fact that some amino acids are hydrophilic allows biological channels to attract water molecules to the exact positions inside the channel where they can assist the selectivity filter.
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Bug

Mammal cells could struggle to fight space germs

University of Exeter
Phys Org
Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00 UTC
Mars atmosphere
© CC0 Public Domain
The immune systems of mammals — including humans — might struggle to detect and respond to germs from other planets, new research suggests.

Microorganisms (such as bacteria and viruses) could exist beyond Earth, and there are plans to search for signs of them on Mars and some of Saturn and Jupiter's moons.

Such organisms might be based on different amino acids (key building blocks of all life) than lifeforms on Earth.

Scientists from the universities of Aberdeen and Exeter tested how mammal immune cells responded to peptides (combinations of amino acids) containing two amino acids that are rare on Earth but are commonly found on meteorites.

The immune response to these "alien" peptides was "less efficient" than the reaction to those common on Earth.

Comment: Extraterrestrial microorganisms do not just pose a danger to space missions - but have, in fact, for many thousands of years presented dangers to humans on Earth in the form of plague. The arrival of comets, neo's and meteors quite often brought more from space than just the atmospheric and geologic disruptions that were their most obvious effects.

See also:

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Info

Hair cell loss may explain hearing loss


Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 22 Jul 2020 20:45 UTC
Hearing Loss
© Robert Essel NYC / Getty Images
It seems your parents were right. Too much loud music isn't good for you.

US scientists say they have shown that age-related hearing loss - presbycusis - is mainly caused by damage to hair cells, the sensory cells in the inner ear that transform sound-induced vibrations into the electrical signals that are relayed to the brain by the auditory nerve.

This challenges the prevailing view of the past 60 years that age-related hearing loss is mainly driven by damage to the stria vascularis, the cellular "battery" that powers the hair cell's mechanical-to-electrical signal conversion.

In other words, hearing loss is not so much a natural consequence of getting old, as the result of decisions made when young. In humans at least.

"It's likely that if we were more careful about protecting our ears during prolonged noisy activities, or completely avoiding them, we could all hear better into old age," says Charles Liberman from Massachusetts Eye and Ear, co-author of a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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