Lifeboat Foundation

Sexually transmitted infections can be worrisome and embarrassing, but with a few notable exceptions, most of them are quite treatable these days. Unfortunately, a new one may be on the rise. British public health officials say that Mycoplasma genitalium, a bacterial infection known as MGen for short, could soon become immune to antibiotics. If this happens, the bacterium would become what’s known as a superbug, the growing class of bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotic drugs.

The bacterium, which can live in humans’ urinary and genital tracts, is transmitted through sexual intercourse. Women infected with the bacterium can experience pelvic inflammation and cervical inflammation, while men can experience inflammation of the urethra. An infected patient would feel these symptoms, generally speaking, as pain. Perhaps most disconcertingly, though, sometimes the infection will not cause any noticeable symptoms, meaning that an infected person can transmit it without even realizing that they’re doing so. If the infection is left untreated for too long, it can cause female patients to become sterile.

In response to the emerging threat posed by MGen, the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV on Sunday issued its draft guidelines for dealing with MGen. The organization also warned that antibiotic-resistant MGen could become much more prevalent in the coming years.

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Biologist Dan Gibson edits and programs DNA, just like coders program a computer. But his “code” creates life, giving scientists the power to convert digital information into biological material like proteins and vaccines. Now he’s on to a new project: “biological transportation,” which holds the promise of beaming new medicines across the globe over the internet. Learn more about how this technology could change the way we respond to disease outbreaks and enable us to download personalized prescriptions in our homes.

It’s a fantastic comic that holds up well as a story for a number of reasons. It’s cyberpunk without the genre’s trademark dinge: Robertson, Ramos, and colorist Nathan Eyring deserve a lot of credit for making a future packed with information overload, but not obscured by smog or gloom or perpetual rain. It’s also genuinely funny. Angry Warren Ellis is gifted at turning the combination of rage, foul language, and body parts into something beautiful. It’s also appropriately cynical, and I think this is where a lot of the comparisons to the present day come from.

Holy mother of God, Transmet is over 20 years old. But is it still sharp commentary, or a relic of its time?

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These experiments paved the way for today’s most advanced aircraft.

Researchers made a neural network out of DNA that can recognize handwritten numbers.

How large is a neutron star? Previous estimates varied from eight to 16 kilometres. Astrophysicists at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the FIAS have now succeeded in determining the size of neutron stars to within 1.5 kilometres by using an elaborate statistical approach supported by data from the measurement of gravitational waves. The researchers’ report appears in the current issue of Physical Review Letters.

Neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe, with a mass larger than that of our sun compacted into a relatively small sphere whose diameter is comparable to that of the city of Frankfurt. This is actually just a rough estimate, however. For more than 40 years, the determination of the size of neutron stars has been a holy grail in nuclear physics whose solution would provide important information on the fundamental behaviour of matter at nuclear densities.

The data from the detection of gravitational waves from merging neutron stars (GW170817) make an important contribution toward solving this puzzle. At the end of 2017, Professor Luciano Rezzolla, Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University Frankfurt and FIAS, together with his students Elias Most and Lukas Weih already exploited this data to answer a long-standing question about the maximum mass that neutron stars can support before collapsing to a black hole—a result that was also confirmed by various other groups around the world. Following this first important result, the same team, with the help of Professor Juergen Schaffner-Bielich, has worked to set tighter constraints on the size of neutron stars.

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It’s not just your car’s wheel that’s getting an upgrade. From bikes to NASA rovers, there’s a wheel of the future for everyone.

Sending stuff up to space is no easy task — even 45 years after Apollo 11. Size, weight, and cost are all massively important, so some researchers are turning to advanced origami to fold up solar arrays. The result of their two years’ worth of work is a solar array with a diameter of just 8.9 feet (2.7 meters) when folded and a massive 82 feet (25 meters) when unfurled. A 1/20th scale model of the array is what you see here.

To build the solar array, Shannon Zirbel and professor Larry Howell of Brigham Young University, and mechanical engineer Brian Trease of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, enlisted the help of renowned origami expert Robert Lang. One of the major difficulties faced by the team is that solar arrays are not as thin as paper. “You have to rethink a lot of that design in order to accommodate the thickness that starts to accumulate with each bend,” Trease said in a press release.

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The LumiWatch projects images onto your arm that respond to touch.