While the science in The Martian is solid, there is one obstacle Mark Watney rarely had to cope with - his own body. During his two years alone on the Red Planet, Mark Watney never fell sick. He never had to splint his own bones or pass a kidney stone, never suffered a bout of insomnia [...]
By Leonard David, Space.com's Space Insider Columnist... Work is underway to establish the world's first private, international commercial space station, a complex that would serve a global community of sovereign and private astronauts. The builders of the Axiom International Commercial Space Station aim to enlarge the landscape of low-Earth orbit, to create what they view [...]
From www.space.com: Researchers may now know why spaceflight is so hard on the eyes — and what to do about the problem. The likely culprit is the lack of a day-night cycle in the pressure inside astronauts' skulls, a new study reports. This finding, in turn, suggests a possible fix: the use of some sort of [...]
From phys.org: Forget chemicals, catalysts and expensive machinery—a Kansas State University team of physicists has discovered a way to mass-produce graphene with three ingredients: hydrocarbon gas, oxygen and a spark plug. Their method is simple: Fill a chamber with acetylene or ethylene gas and oxygen. Use a vehicle spark plug to create [...]
From an article at phys.org: Chemists at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated that synthetic nanoparticles can achieve the same level of structural complexity, hierarchy and accuracy as their natural counterparts - biomolecules. The study, published in Science, also reveals the atomic-level mechanisms behind nanoparticle self-assembly. The findings from the lab of Chemistry Professor Rongchao Jin [...]
From an article by Hanneke Weitering, Staff Writer-Producer at space.com: After President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim nations, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk turned to Twitter to voice his frustrations. The billionaire entrepreneur usually abstains from making his political opinions known, especially on social media, with the exception [...]
Fiona MacDonald, ScienceAlert: More than 80 years after it was first predicted, physicists have created metallic hydrogen - a mysterious form of hydrogen that could be capable of superconducting electricity without resistance at room temperature. Scientists have long suspected that hydrogen could exist as a metal in certain parts of the Universe, but this is [...]
From DNA India: A charitable foundation backed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife has said it has bought a Canadian artificial intelligence startup as part of a mission to eradicate disease. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not disclose financial terms of the deal to acquire Toronto-based Meta, which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend [...]
From the New York Times: Oliver Smithies, a British-born biochemist and inveterate tinkerer who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering a powerful tool for identifying the roles of individual genes in health and disease, died on Tuesday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 91. His death, after a short illness, was announced by the University [...]
What if we could find cancerous tumors years before they can harm us — without expensive screening facilities or even steady electricity? Physician, bioengineer and entrepreneur Sangeeta Bhatia leads a multidisciplinary lab that searches for novel ways to understand, diagnose and treat human disease. Her target: the two-thirds of deaths due to [...]
