Toggle light / dark theme

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

We are happy to announce Dr. Dongsheng Cai, Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as a speaker for the 2019 Undoing Aging Conference

“Dongsheng’s fabulous work on the involvement of the hypothalamus in aging first came to my attention six years ago, as a result of a groundbreaking paper on the role of GnRH, and he spoke at the last Cambridge conference in 2013. His group’s research has since continued to make immense progress, including very recent advances, and I’m delighted that he has agreed to update us in Berlin”, says Aubrey de Grey.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-dongsheng-cai-to-speak…aging-2019

Nerves that control heart rate may contribute to autism

Having a muted RSA and an elevated resting heart rate reflects a heightened state of arousal, which is an appropriate response to danger, says Amy Vaughan Van Hecke, associate professor of psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was not involved in the study.


The part of the nervous system that regulates heart rate and breathing is involved in autism, a new study suggests.

Specifically, the changes in heart rate that ordinarily accompany breathing are slow to develop in autistic children.

Heart rate usually speeds up slightly as a person inhales and slows as she exhales. These fluctuations, known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), serve as a proxy for the activity of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates heart rate and breathing, among other functions. The fluctuations are also important for regulating emotions and attending to social cues.

Mining Thousands of Tons of Space Ice with Queen Bee

Five-thousand tons of water-ice delivered to cislunar space per two-year mission! In a recent announcement, TransAstra Corporation proposed a spacecraft able to achieve this. They call it the Queen Bee, a new part of the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies (APIS; Apis) architecture. Queen Bee is a large scale version of their asteroid mining spacecraft design.

TransAstra is a Los Angeles, California based aerospace company founded in 2015 by Joel Sercel. Their goal is to help make industrial processes in space possible. A key process they study is extracting volatiles, including water, from small Near Earth Asteroids (NEA). Their past work has focused on Optical Mining, asteroid encapsulation, and solar thermal thrusters for the mining and utilization of carbonaceous Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) volatiles.

Europe’s next €1-billion science projects: six teams make it to final round

The six newly shortlisted initiatives include: a project that would explore how AI can enhance human capabilities; one to hasten clinical availability of cell and gene therapies; a personalized-medicine initiative; two projects that aim to make solar energy more efficient; and a humanities project called the Time Machine, which seeks to develop methods for enabling digital search of historical records in European cities.


AI enhancement and a virtual time machine are included in the shortlist of pitches.