Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 76

A study on Y chromosome loss titled "Hematopoietic loss of Y chromosome leads to cardiac fibrosis and heart failure mortality" has been published in the journal Science.

Researchers from the Osaka Metropolitan University have investigated how a condition called mLOY (mosaic Loss Of Y chromosome) contributes to the risk of cardiovascular disease and strokes with age. The condition arises when errors occur during DNA replication as new cells are made in the body, and letters in the DNA code change, sometimes resulting in the loss of entire chromosomes as cells divide and replicate.

mLOY occurs when white blood cells lack their Y chromosome and appears in at least 20% of 60+ year olds and 40% of 70+ year olds. The condition is associated with shorter lifespans and a greater risk of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and cancer. The team found that mLOY leads to tissue damage in mice, ultimately leading to heart failure or cardiovascular disease.

NASA researchers recently revealed that there was a brief moment of panic at NASA headquarters when engineers couldn't communicate with Webb.

NASA Mission Operations Manager Carl Starr appeared on Science Channel where he explained that Webb's tennis court-sized sunshield, that is used to protect the observatory's extremely sensitive instruments from the Sun's rays was failing to respond to communications from Mission Control. Starr explained that NASA engineers never saw the Sun shields "switches activate", which means that the shield wasn't fully deployed.

Starr continued and said that the next thing engineers did was fire the deployment again, "and it didn't work". The Mission Control Operations Manager admitted that when this problem presented itself the room became "very quiet, and people became very solemn". Mission Control never got a response from Webb, but engineers and researchers alike sighed in relief when a report came in on Webb's temperature readings, which indicated that the sunshield had deployed.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has already sent back some stunning images of the cosmos with its highly-advanced scientific instruments.

Webb's development cost more than $10 billion, and now that its reached its destination, calibrated its instruments, it's ready to begin scientific operations with the first set of images already been released. While Webb is extremely expensive, and its instruments are next-generation, you would expect its hard drive that stores its images to be extremely large - however, this isn't the case.

Webb's doesn't have a hard drive, it has a solid state drive (SSD), and it's much smaller than you would anticipate at just 68 gigabytes, according to IEEE Spectrum. For context, 68 gigabytes is just half of the standard iPhone storage capacity. How does Webb take such incredible photos and store them on such a small SSD? Firstly, the SSD is actually a "solid state recorder" and is a highly modified piece of hardware that has been given the capabilities of withstanding the harsh conditions of space (radiation).

At the beginning of June, NASA confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope, the space agency's newest space telescope, had been struck by a micrometeorite.

NASA confirmed that a micrometeorite struck the new observatory sometime between May 23 and May 25, and after analysis, engineers were able to discover that the tiny space rock impacted Webb's primary mirror. Unfortunately, micrometeorites are an "unavoidable aspect of operating any spacecraft", according to NASA. Notably, engineers accounted for micrometeorite impacts throughout Webb's construction and anticipated that impacts would be somewhat common.

As for the impact that occurred between May 23 and May 24, NASA stated that Webb is still performing at a level beyond its mission requirements and that over the course of its estimated 10-year lifespan, impacts such as these will "gracefully degrade telescope performance". The segment that was impacted was segment C3, and according to reports, the overall impact on the telescope's performance is small "because only a small portion of the telescope was affected".

A study on cognitive decline and alcohol titled "Associations between moderate alcohol consumption, brain iron, and cognition in UK Biobank participants: Observational and mendelian randomization analyses" has been published in the journal PLoS Medicine.

Researchers from the University of Oxford analyzed 20,965 participants in the UK Biobank, all of whom self-reported their alcohol consumption and had their brains scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The team found that consuming seven or more standard drinks of alcohol weekly was associated with higher iron levels in the brain. In the United Kingdom, a standard drink refers to 8 grams of pure ethanol, while a standard drink in the United States is 14 grams.

Higher alcohol consumption was associated with higher concentrations of iron in the basal ganglia, a group of brain regions responsible for controlling "motor movements, procedural learning, eye movement, cognition, emotion, and more." Higher iron levels in these regions were, in turn, associated with poorer cognitive function.

A study on the bioartificial heart component titled "Toward Hierarchical Assembly of Aligned Cell Sheets into a Conical Cardiac Ventricle Using Microfabricated Elastomers" has been published in the journal Advanced Biology.

Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T) have grown a miniature version of the left ventricle of a human heart. It is constructed from bioartificial tissue comprising living heart cells and can beat strongly enough to pump fluid. The left ventricle is responsible in humans for pumping freshly oxygenated blood into the aorta, the main artery carrying blood away from the heart.

The small-scale model ventricle provides researchers with a new means to study various heart diseases and conditions and potential therapies for treating them. The team created it with scaffolds made from biocompatible polymers, littered with heart muscle cells, which were left to grow to form living tissue. The scaffold ensured the tissue grew into the shape the team sought, creating "three overlapping layers of heart cells that beat in unison."

Researchers are preparing to present new research that shows a team-up effort between human and artificial intelligence.

The new research will be presented by Dr. Mike Walmsley from the University of Manchester and the Galaxy Zoo Collaboration at the National Astronomy Meeting sometime this week. Notably, the researchers describe this joint approach between AI and humans as a "cyborg". Reports indicate that Walmsley used a decade of Galaxy Zoo measurements to create a new AI algorithm named Zoobot, which is capable of identifying key markers that indicate a chaotic event throughout a galaxy's lifetime.

Human volunteers currently look through the Galaxy Zoo website and identify these markers, but due to the size of the universe and all of the variables within it, humans have more work on their hands than they can carry. To be able to draw a conclusive line between one chaotic event and the galaxy that caused it requires a lot of humans to sift through thousands of images. This is where Zoobot comes in.

NASA's $10+ billion James Webb Space Telescope is up and running, with the space agency already releasing the first batch of colored images.

Now that Webb is ready for scientific operations, astronomers and researchers are sitting on the edge of their seats to see what Webb will be pointed at next and what it will be able to produce with its next-generation instruments. In a recently published article in The Conversation, Silas Laycock, a Professor of Astronomy, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, explained the importance of Webb's potential and the treasure trove of data the new observatory has already gathered.

Laycock explains that the first image released by NASA showcases a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, which is located approximately 5.12 billion light-years from Earth. Laycock says that the large white galaxies located in the center of the image are similar in age to the Sun and the Earth. Surrounding the galaxies in the center are more galaxies that appear stretched or contorted.

Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, who is 76 years old, has revealed he had a baby girl with his 35-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout.

Errol Musk spoke to The Sun and explained that he believes that humans were put on the Earth for one reason, to reproduce. The sentiment from Errol Musk speaks to his son's highlighting of the declining birthrates and push for more people to have children as it was recently revealed that Musk had twins with a top Neuralink executive. Errol says that the pregnancy with Jana was "unplanned" and that they aren't living together due to the age gap of 41 years.

For those that don't know, the Musk dynasty is continuing to grow, with Elon already having ten children and his father now having seven. Notably, Errol already had a child with Jana in 2017, a now 5-year-old boy named Elliot Rush. According to the New York Post, Elon and Errol had a falling out when Elon discovered that Errol had a child with Elon's stepsister. In the recent interview with The Sun, Errol admitted that the family still doesn't like it.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has decided to sever its cooperation with Russia for an upcoming Mars mission.

The ESA had suspended its work with Russia on the ExoMars mission following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. Now, it has officially terminated all cooperation on the mission with the nation, which was originally going to use its rockets to deliver Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars as part of the mission. The ESA is now looking to partner with NASA to get its rover to Mars.

This decision led to the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, responding to ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher's decision by posting on Telegram, saying, "has the head of the European Space Agency thought about the work of thousands of scientists and engineers in Europe and Russia which has been ended by this decision? Is he prepared to answer for sabotaging a joint Mars mission?"

A study on video games and the brain titled "Video game players have improved decision-making abilities and enhanced brain activities" has been published in the journal Neuroimage: Reports.

Researchers from Georgia State University have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of frequent video game players. Their study showed "superior sensorimotor decision-making skills" and enhanced brain activity in key brain regions compared to people who did not play video games. The study examined 47 young adult participants, with 28 deemed regular video game players and 19 deemed non-players.

Patients lying inside an fMRI machine were presented with a mirror to see a visual cue followed by moving dots on display. They were asked to press a button either in their left or right hand to indicate which direction they saw the dots move or not to press a button if there was no movement. Overall, the study found the video game players to have faster and more accurate responses correlated with enhanced activity in certain brain regions. Speed and accuracy were both noticeably better, with no trade-off between the two.

A study on the new vaccine microparticles titled "Experimental and computational understanding of pulsatile release mechanism from biodegradable core-shell microparticles" has been published in the journal Science Advances.

MIT researchers have created new microparticles that can be adjusted to deliver chemical payloads in delayed stages, in which could be used to create "self-boosting" vaccines. Typical vaccines require multiple shots over a somewhat lengthy period for a person to be considered fully vaccinated against what the vaccine is designed to protect against. However, these microparticles are designed to circumvent the need for additional shots.

Rocket Lab has launched a US spy satellite from its New Zealand site on July 13 at 2:30 AM Eastern, according to reports.

The recent launch featured a Rocket Lab Electron booster that had aboard the NROL-162 spy satellite for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), marking the first of two Electron mission for the NRO. The most recent mission is named "Wise One Looks Ahead" and is the sixth mission Rocket Lab has conducted in 2022, and the third mission under the NRO's Rapid Acquisition of Small Rocket (RASR) contracts.

The NRO controls the United States' various spy satellites, and with the recent launch by Rocket Lab and once the satellite is operational, the NRO will have upgraded its ability to receive/send timely intelligence information. Rocket Lab is planning the second NRO launch which will feature the NROL-199 spacecraft no earlier than July 23. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

A study is already underway, under the title "Personalized Neo-Antigen Peptide Vaccine for the Treatment of Stage IIIC-IV Melanoma or Hormone Receptor Positive Her2 Negative Metastatic Refractory Breast Cancer" on the U.S National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Clinical Trials website.

The listed study lists Amazon.com Services LLC as a collaborator with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center for the trial. It is currently recruiting patients to participate in an FDA-approved clinical trial. The framework for the study was initially submitted in mid-October 2021, and the study officially began on June 9th, 2022. It is currently in Phase 1 and is expected to finish collecting data around November 1st, 2023.

Twenty-one varieties of cancer fall within the scope of the study, and three treatments are being considered:

China's Tianwen-1 satellite orbiting Mars has finished photographing the entire surface of the Red Planet.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched Tianwen-1, which translates to "quest for heavenly truth," on July 23rd, 2020, consisting of six separate spacecraft: an orbiting satellite, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and the Zhurong rover. The orbiter circled Mars 1,344 times to complete its primary mission of imaging the planet, contributing to the 1,040 gigabytes of raw scientific data it has captured so far.

The data collected by the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been processed by scientists back on Earth and is now in the hands of researchers for further analysis. Tianwen-1 marks the third successful attempt in history to send an orbiter to Mars and to have a rover land on the planet in the same mission, the first two being NASA's Viking 1 and 2 missions in 1975. The Zhurong rover's successful operation on Mars also makes it the third nation to land working spacecraft on the planet.

Astronomers are keeping an eye on an 11-mile-wide comet called Comet C/2017, or K2, as it makes its closest approach to Earth on July 14.

The comet was originally found back in 2017 when it was approximately 1.5 billion miles away from the Sun, between the planets Saturn and Uranus, and now the mysterious icy body is moving toward the inner solar system where it will make an approach to Earth. At first, researchers believed that K2 was 99 miles wide, but after follow-up observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, it was established that K2 is approximately 11 miles wide.

Notably, most comets are 0.62 - 1.86 miles in diameter, which means K2 is still an extremely large comet, approximately two Mount Everest's stacked on top of each other . As for the mystery behind K2, researchers are still perplexed at how the comet has remained "active" throughout its long journey through cold space. For those that don't know, when a comet is "active," it's producing a halo or coma, which is the iconic tail and glow. Comet's typically become more active as they approach the Sun as the heat from our local star heats up the frozen exterior producing a gas.

NASA recently released the first batch of colored images snapped by the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Webb's extremely powerful instruments are already giving researchers more insight into star formation, galaxies, and more. NASA recently took to its blog to shine a spotlight on Webb's first scientific operation images, and the next-generation space telescope certainly didn't disappoint as NASA states Webb has already produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

If you have been keeping up with the news surrounding Webb, it's likely you have already seen the first set of colored images. However, there is one more image you may not have seen as it was published inside the JWST commissioning report, a document detailing all of the tests carried out on Webb's scientific instruments. The image shows Jupiter, and according to New Scientist, our solar system's biggest planet was a target for Webb's calibration to make sure the observatory was capable of tracking fast-moving objects.

A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) related to the weedkiller has been published on the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) website.

The CDC analyzed glyphosate, a widespread herbicide. Two thousand three hundred ten urine samples were analyzed from individuals representative of the broader U.S. population, and 1,885 had detectable levels of the toxic chemical in them - about 81%. Of these, 650 samples were from children, where detectable levels of glyphosate were found in 87% of samples.

A study on lithium mining titled "Relic Groundwater and Prolonged Drought Confound Interpretations of Water Sustainability and Lithium Extraction in Arid Lands" has been published in the journal Earth's Future.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) and the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) have completed a significantly more comprehensive analysis of the environmental impact of lithium mining and extraction from brine water. Lithium is the backbone of many renewable energy technologies, as it is used for lithium-ion batteries that can store energy produced by renewable sources, so it is important to understand the impact of obtaining it.

Lithium is a highly reactive metallic element and does not prefer to exist in solid form. Instead, it often leaches into groundwater and reacts with the water to form a briny mixture. This dense mixture settles beneath a layer of fresh water, which is lighter. Over 40% of lithium deposits are found in Salar de Atacama, Chile's largest salt flat, where these freshwater layers host diverse and fragile ecosystems containing unique wildlife.

A study on the precursor molecules titled "Molecular Precursors of the RNA-World in Space: New Nitriles in the G+0.693−0.027 Molecular Cloud" has been published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

Spanish researchers have observed the center of the Milky Way galaxy and found a host of different organic molecules called nitriles. These are used in building prebiotic molecules (precursors to molecules associated with life) that are commonly associated with RNA, a similar molecule to DNA used to carry genetic information.

The team found evidence of nitriles, including cyanic acid, cyanoallene, propargyl cyanide, and cyanopropyne, in the G+0.693-0.027 molecular cloud. The cloud is located inside the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) at the center of the Milky Way, where many prebiotic molecules have been found.