All animals rely on oxygen at least at some stage of their life, but a parasite that infects fish seems to have completely lost the ability to use it – where it gets its energy from is still a mystery.
Philip Anderson, the theoretical physicist whose ideas reshaped condensed matter physics and stretched to the forefront of other fields, died yesterday in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96. Anderson had spent the past 45 years at Princeton University, which confirmed his death in a statement.
Combative savant made contributions—and enemies—across many fields.
Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak.
They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%.
Previously, these so-called “brain-machine interfaces” have had limited success in decoding neural activity.
“Proprioceptive Control of an Over-Actuated Hexapod Robot in Unstructured Terrain,” by Marko Bjelonic, Navinda Kottege and Philipp Beckerle from Technische Universitat Darmstadt and CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia was presented at IROS 2016 in Daejeon, South Korea.
Despite significant limitations, Viet Nam has defied expectations and is tackling the spread of coronavirus. Here’s how.
Circa 2019
The Star Wars-like tactile 3D display isn’t a conventional hologram.
Continue reading “Scientists Created a ‘Hologram’ That You Can Feel and Hear” »
Two coronavirus patients in New York City are off ventilators and out of intensive care after they received an experimental drug to treat HIV and breast cancer.
As the skyrocketing number of cases stretches city hospitals to the limit, doctors are racing to find out which drugs on the market or in development might help in fighting the infection.
The drug, leronlimab, is delivered by injection twice in the abdomen, the Daily Mail reported.
Just a quick update on a new study:
“Researchers found that half of the patients they treated for mild COVID-19 infection still had coronavirus for up to eight days after symptoms disappeared.”
“If you had mild respiratory symptoms from COVID-19 and were staying at home so as not to infect people, extend your quarantine for another two weeks after recovery to ensure that you don’t infect other people,” recommended corresponding author Lixin Xie, MD, professor, College of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing.
Actemra (tocilizumab) – an interleukin-6 inhibitor – has already been approved in China for the treatment of patients infected with the novel coronavirus disease, who have developed serious lung damage and also have elevated levels of IL-6 in the blood.
It was first cleared by the FDA as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and has also subsequently been approved in juvenile idiopathic arthritis, giant cell arteritis and CRS associated with CAR-T cell therapies for cancer.
Plans to initiate trial in early April.
Some people have claimed that a “business case” for profitable interplanetary trade with a Mars settlement, or at least the identification a saleable product for trade, is required before such a settlement can be established or supported by business or government. But there is no reasonable prospect for trade in any significant mass of physical material from a Mars settlement back to Earth in the near future due to the high transport costs. In his recent article in the National Review, “Elon Musk’s Plan to Settle Mars,” Robert Zubrin makes exactly the same point: a business case based on physical trade is not necessary and makes little sense. Later trade and commerce via non-physical goods such as software is probable once a settlement is fully operational. More significant and interesting economic situations will occur on Mars.
A good model for the expenditures needed to found colonies is the Greek and Phoenician expansion all across the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas in the period early in Greek history (before about 600 BC), leading to the founding of one of the greatest trading cities in history, Carthage. The cities who founded each colony did not expect immediate profit, but wanted good places for an expanding population and knew that, once the new cities were established, trade would also become established. Most of the cost was probably in building more ships. When European colonies were first established in the New World by Spain and Portugal, the emphasis was initially on a search for treasure, not production of products. English and Dutch colonies later led the way to commerce across the Atlantic, with tobacco, sugar, and cotton suddenly becoming a major part of world trade.
A look at some of the steps required to create a Mars settlement will help us understand at least a little about Mars settlement economics. For a Mars settlement, motivation and economics are interwoven. It is possible for at least a partial business case to be made for the transport of settlers and the materials they will need to initiate some phase of Mars settlement. This includes the current effort to create a large number of reliable, low cost, and reusable super-heavy boosters and spacecraft, able to take payloads of 100 tons or more of cargo and passengers to Mars and land them at the right location. Part of this development and construction cost will be defrayed by commercial and government uses of the same vehicles, such as placing very heavy payloads in LEO and taking equipment and passengers to and around the Moon.
