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Blog – Page 9688

By many accounts, the Tesla Model 3 is a great car. Sure, it’s needed some work on the body and on fit and finish, but there’s lots of cool engineering behind Tesla’s highest volume offering, including the “Superbottle,” an awesome packaging solution for the cooling system that contains a fun little easter egg.

Last week, I stopped by Munro and Associates, the fascinating company that tears cars apart to find out exactly how they’re built. While there, manufacturing experts showed me the Tesla Model 3’s bizarre-looking coolant bottle, which features a cape-wearing bottle as part of the mold:

Also on the bottle is the text “Superbottle”:

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With no less than FOUR rocket launches by four different companies, today promised to be an epic one for space fans. But by mid-morning, two of the most anticipated launches, by SpaceX and Blue Origin, were scrubbed by glitches, while weather forced another launch delay in South America.

SpaceX and Blue Origin kicked off the launch attempts today (Dec. 18). A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was set to launch GPS III SV01, the first of an advanced new navigation satellite system for the U.S. military. At first the mission, initially scheduled for 9:11 a.m. EST (1411 GMT), slipped a few minutes to 9:34 a.m. EST as SpaceX prepared for launch at its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station pad in Florida. But seven minutes before liftoff, the Falcon 9’s onboard computer triggered an abort, forcing SpaceX to stand down for the day.

“We did have an abort,” SpaceX Firmware Engineer Tom Praderio said during live commentary. “This abort was triggered by the onboard Falcon 9 flight computer. The unfortunate part is that it has pushed us past our launch window today.” SpaceX had a 26-minute window for the launch attempt. The company will try again Wednesday (Dec. 19), with liftoff set for 9:07 a.m. EST (1407 GMT).

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A team of scientists has developed a method that yields, for the first time, visualization of a gene amplifications and deletions known as copy number variants in single cells.

Significantly, the breakthrough, reported in the journal PLoS Biology, allows early detection of rare genetic events providing high resolution analysis of the tempo of evolution. The method may provide a new way of studying mutations in pathogens and .

“Evolution and disease are driven by mutational events in DNA,” explains David Gresham, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s senior author. “However, in populations of these events currently cannot be identified until many cells contain the same mutation. Our method detects these rare events right after they have happened, allowing us to follow their trajectory as the population evolves.”

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Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer for women yet the leading cause of cancer-related death in developing countries, an unfortunate statistic that highlights the importance of access to screening. Through a comprehensive trial involving thousands of subjects, a newly designed test has been found to greatly outperform current screening methods in terms of both cost and accuracy, while also shedding new light on the mechanics at play.

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Well that’s good news.

I see several parts to the problem where many people believe the doomer overpopulation myths.

The fear story resonates with deep caveman fears of starvation. Any individual person can experience hunger. This reinforces and validates the fear of potential starvation.

The small scale and valid fears and issues for individuals and small groups do not match up to real global risk. There are counter-intuitive aspects.

Continue reading “World Population Might Go to 40 Billion by 2150 But We Can Already Feed All Those People” | >

The topic for the December Journal Club will be the recently published paper – Fisetin is a senotherapeutic that extends health and lifespan. This commonly available supplement and a plant-based polyphenol appears to influence the aging process in mice by clearing senescent cells, one of the suggested reasons we age.

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Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6197652/

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