Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 76

Sotheby's is auctioning a collection of artifacts and memorabilia preserved by Buzz Aldrin, the Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, which landed the first humans on the Moon on July 26th, 2022.

The collection includes Aldrin's jacket worn in space during the Apollo 11 mission when not wearing his space suit. Also being auctioned is the part of the broken circuit breaker that almost stranded Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the Moon and the felt-tipped pen Aldrin used to save them. The broken switch part and the Duro-brand marker are expected to fetch between one and two million dollars.

Aldrin's jacket is expected to be sold for a similar price and is the only garment from the Apollo 11 mission that someone can own privately. It appears in many famous pictures from the mission, aside from those where Aldrin is on the Moon in his spacesuit. The spacesuits Aldrin and Armstrong wore on the Moon reside in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

A study on the bear serum titled "Supplementing cultured human myotubes with hibernating bear serum results in increased protein content by modulating Akt/FOXO3a signaling" has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Researchers from Hiroshima University and Hokkaido University have cultured human skeletal muscle cells, supplementing them with a serum taken from hibernating black bears. The infusion confirms that unique molecules in their blood allow them to stave off muscular atrophy, or the death of muscle cells, despite being inactive for months at a time. Only three weeks of inactivity will lead to muscle mass loss in humans and contribute to diseases like obesity and obesity.

Muscle mass is typically maintained by a balance of mechanisms controlling muscle proteins being synthesized and degraded. The serum the team extracted from hibernating Japanese black bears suppressed the "destruction mechanism" for muscle proteins and was able to boost protein synthesis in the human muscle cell culture significantly. This effect was not present when the culture was supplemented with serum collected from bears during summer when they do not hibernate.

Researchers are investigating whether stem cells may grow better in zero gravity conditions than here on Earth.

Researcher Dhruv Sareen's stem cells have made their way to the International Space Station (ISS) on a supply ship sent by the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which is trying to find new ways to mass produce stem cells. The stem cells are induced pluripotent stem cells, meaning they can differentiate themselves into almost any other kind of cell found in the body, and have the potential to treat various diseases.

So far, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved blood-forming stem cell treatments for patients with blood disorders like lymphoma, with the stem cells being sourced from umbilical cord blood. The stem cells being sent to space could be used for futuristic therapies to treat conditions like Type 1 diabetes, macular degeneration, Parkinson's disease, or damage from heart attacks.

The internet is currently clawing for answers from NASA as recent images released from the space agency revealed a strange spaghetti-like object.

The image seen above was snapped by NASA's Perseverance rover, which is currently exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars. The photograph was taken on July 12, 2022, with Perseverance's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A and can be found on the NASA website, where the space agency lacks a description for the strange string-like object seen in the middle of the image.

So, what is the object? At the moment, there is no official explanation from NASA on what the object could be, but CNET has reported that the most likely answer is it is Perseverance's own landing gear. This wouldn't be very surprising, considering it was only last month that NASA's Mars rover spotted its own thermal blanket that was used to protect it on its entry to the Red Planet.

The Sun is entering its most active phase and now officials are putting out warnings for a potential solar storm impacting Earth.

Spaceweather.com has reported that a minor G1-class geomagnetic storm is possible within the coming days as a slow-moving coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to approach and hit Earth's magnetic field sometime between July 20 and July 21. Space Weather Physicist, Dr. Tamitha Skov, also known as the "Space Weather Woman," took to Twitter to post a warning about the coming solar storm.

Notably, Skov also posted a video of a NASA prediction model that showcases Earth is within the "strike zone" of the impact. The solar storm and CME can be traced back to a filament moving across and seemingly snapping on the surface of the Sun - Skov describes this filament as "snake-like". According to Skov the expected geomagnetic storm could bring G2, possibly G3 levels.

A study on the quantum processes titled "Time-reversal-based quantum metrology with many-body entangled states" has been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way to measure the vibrations of atoms significantly more accurately, using quantum entanglement and time reversal. Manipulating the quantum entangled atoms caused them to behave "as if they were evolving backward in time." This amplified any changes observed in the atomic vibrations, making them more easily detectable. Gravitational waves, dark matter, and other unexpected phenomena can all affect atomic vibrations.

The vibrations, or oscillations, are the basis of atomic clocks, and the new technique for measuring them could improve the accuracy of the current best atomic clocks by 15 times. In effect, such clocks would be so precise that they would be no more than 20 milliseconds off over the entire age of the universe, which is approximately 13.8 billion years old.

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.

The hollow microparticles remain in the skin after injection and contain a particular vaccine to be released at a specified time. The particles are made from a biocompatible polymer called PLGA, which is already used in other medical implants, including sutures. The design of the microparticles is analogous to a cup and a lid, with the "cup" containing the vaccine and the "lid" keeping the vaccine inside the cup until it is time to be released.

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: