Dr. Ian Hale., my friend and occasional collaborator, is a renowned authority on autism and Asperger’s. He has spent a lifetime furthering our understanding of both.
Creating a research database to explore the autism spectrum and better understand neurodiversity. | Check out ‘Fund the Key to Autism’ on Indiegogo.
Ever since he was a young boy growing up in Bengaluru, the city home to India’s space research organisation, he dreamt of going to space one day. Now he wants to be the first human on Mars.
One would expect him to train to be an astronaut or dismiss the idea altogether. But that’s not how he plans to get to the red planet.
Meet Gadhadar Reddy, a nano-technologist from Bengaluru, who might just get to live his dream someday in the near future thanks to a new material his company is manufacturing.
Both SpaceX and NASA are eager to get the Dragon cargo spacecraft back to Earth now that it has fulfilled its duties in bringing much-needed supplies to the crew aboard the International Space Station. The ship was originally expected to be released from the ISS earlier this week but plans have since changed, and NASA now expects the space station to bid farewell to the Dragon on Sunday afternoon instead.
Prior to this latest change, the most recent schedule would have seen the ISS release the Dragon on Sunday morning, but now NASA says it wants to release it later due to some weather quirks back on Earth.
Living in extreme conditions requires creative adaptations. For certain species of bacteria that exist in oxygen-deprived environments, this means finding a way to breathe that doesn’t involve oxygen. These hardy microbes, which can be found deep within mines, at the bottom of lakes, and even in the human gut, have evolved a unique form of breathing that involves excreting and pumping out electrons. In other words, these microbes can actually produce electricity.
Scientists and engineers are exploring ways to harness these microbial power plants to run fuel cells and purify sewage water, among other uses. But pinning down a microbe’s electrical properties has been a challenge: The cells are much smaller than mammalian cells and extremely difficult to grow in laboratory conditions.
Now MIT engineers have developed a microfluidic technique that can quickly process small samples of bacteria and gauge a specific property that’s highly correlated with bacteria’s ability to produce electricity. They say that this property, known as polarizability, can be used to assess a bacteria’s electrochemical activity in a safer, more efficient manner compared to current techniques.
Continue reading “Technique identifies electricity-producing bacteria” »
Scientists working with the Event Horizon Telescope project may have have captured an image of a black hole in the Milky Way, which could be ‘the most iconic ever’.
Scientists have suggested that for the first time, they may have finally captured what could end up being the first image of a black hole within the Milky Way. A team of international astronomers have been hard at work analyzing two specific areas of space located in Sagittarius A and M87 through the Event Horizon Telescope project (EHT), and have reported that they have discovered what amounts to “spectacular” data during their research, which in this case, would be the faint image of the silhouette of a black hole.
According to the Daily Mail, this image may very well prove to be “one of the most iconic ever.” The scientists involved with the EHT collaboration are currently analyzing tremendous amounts of data from 2017, and this data is set to be made public later on this year.
