Mars is the solar system’s near-miss world. Earth may have gotten everything right when it came to sustaining life—atmosphere, water, proximity to the sun. Mercury, Venus and the outer planets, with their extreme temperatures and inhospitable chemistry, may have gotten everything wrong. Mars, on the other hand, came so close, yet fell short.
Thanks to data from rovers and other spacecraft, we know that the Red Planet once fairly sloshed with water—with dry deltas, riverbeds, and sea basins stamped into its surface. But 4 billion years ago, the Martian core cooled, shutting down the dynamo that sustained its magnetic field. That left the planet vulnerable to the solar wind, which clawed away the atmosphere, and allowed the Martian water to sputter into space. Before long—in geological terms—the planet was a desert.
At least that’s long been the thinking. But a new paper published Sept. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests otherwise. According to the new research, Mars was doomed from the start. Its small size—about half the diameter of Earth and less than one-ninth the mass—simply never produced the gravitational muscle to allow the planet to hold onto either its air or its water. With or without a magnetic field, Mars was destined to die.
It sounds as though the four space tourists on SpaceX’s historic Inspiration4 flight last week had a bit of a smelly mishap. The Waste Management System experienced an “anomaly” — that’s code of “uh oh” in space jargon — with its suction fan causing the crew to struggle with doing their business while floating hundreds of miles above the surface.
Musk also promised a number of improvements for the next all-civilian space tourism flight. “Definitely upgraded toilets,” Musk responded to another Twitter account suggesting heated toilet seats. “We had some challenges with it this flight.”
Red blood cells are the most abundant cell type in blood, carrying oxygen throughout the human body. In blood circulation, they repetitively encounter various levels of oxygen tension. Hypoxia, a low oxygen tension condition, is a very common micro-environmental factor in physiological processes of blood circulation and various pathological processes such as cancer, chronic inflammation, heart attacks and stroke. In addition, an interplay between poor cellular deformability and impaired oxygen delivery is found in various pathological processes such as sickle cell disease. Sickle red blood cells simultaneously undergo drastic mechanical deformation during the sickling and unsickling process.
The interactions between hypoxia and cell biomechanics and the underlying biochemical mechanisms of the accelerated damage in diseased red blood cells are well understood, however, the exact biomechanical consequences of hypoxia contributing to red blood cell degradation (aging) remains elusive.
Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sought to identify the role of hypoxia on red blood cell aging via the biomechanical pathways. In particular, they examined hypoxia-induced impairment of red blood cell deformability at the single cell level, compared the differences between non-cyclic hypoxia and cyclic hypoxia, and documented any cumulative effect vs. hypoxia cycles, such as aspects that have not been studied quantitatively. Red blood cell deformability is an important biomarker of its functionality.
:3 Basically we simply waste chemicals that are sometimes used in compost but actually have literally millions of tons of chemicals gone to waste rather reclaiming these very expensive chemicals. For instance some medicine costs thousands of dollars to make and will not recycle completely even current compost problems are not seeing the literally value of wasted medical refuse dissolved in waste water. Literally possibly trillion dollars or more down the drain from waste but this new reclaiming system will reap the benefits 😗 Even new innovative recycled toilet paper is a new concept but someday even vital chemicals will not be wasted with these new reclaiming systems.
With sometimes offbeat technology, innovators seek to extract certain chemicals from municipal waste by.
Applying Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning In Drug Discovery & Design — Dr. Ola Engkvist Ph.D., Head, Molecular AI, Discovery Sciences, R&D, AstraZeneca
Dr. Ola Engkvist is Head of Molecular AI in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D (https://www.astrazeneca.com/).
Dr. Engkvist did his PhD in computational chemistry at Lund University followed by a postdoc at Cambridge University.
After working for two biotech companies Dr. Engkvist joined AstraZeneca in 2004. He currently leads the Molecular AI department, where the focus is to develop novel methods for ML/AI in drug design 0 productionalize the methods and apply the methods to AstraZeneca’s small molecules drug discovery portfolio.
Dr. Engkvist’s main research interests are deep learning based molecular de novo design, synthetic route prediction and large scale molecular property predictions, and he has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Dr. Engkvist is also adjunct professor in machine learning and AI for drug design at Chalmers University of Technology and a trustee of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center.
Watch the full documentary on Vimeo on demand: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/339083
The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind — a pattern structure made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, its neural code, then we can build the same functionality into our computer systems. There’s no consensus on what produces consciousness, but everyone regardless of metaphysical views can agree what it is like to be conscious. Given that consciousness is subjectivity, what consciousness is like is what consciousness is.
‘Mind’ and ‘Consciousness’ are two different but somewhat overlapping terms related to the phenomenality of our experiential reality. Different species have a variety of their biological information processors which unsurprisingly results in qualia diversity. All species live in their own unique sensory universes. There is “something it is like to be” an organism. The human brain, our biological “wetware,” has a fractal structure on many genetic and abstract cognitive levels. Information is “modus operandi” of consciousness.
If we are to reason for the non-dual picture of the world then quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness. The human brain is a physical organ that transmits and interprets electrochemical signals. Its biochemistry is certainly governed by quantum physical laws, and consciousness — which is clearly related to the functioning of the brain — must therefore be related to the quantum physical processes going on within the brain and in the cosmos at large. Research has shown that consciousness is non-local, a scientific way of alluding to a connection within a higher dimensional order. Matter has also been shown to be non-local, which hints that matter might be an expression of consciousness, emerging from the ‘Unified Field’ — the quantum layer of pure potentiality — the code layer beneath all dimensions where time and space are information.
Reality is fundamentally experiential. Nothing is real for us until perceived. A little while ago, the idea that our minds create reality would have seemed preposterous to most westerners. But today everyone in the West becomes a bit more susceptible to this bold new idealistic, computationalist thinking along with certain QM interpretations directly pointing to the fundamental laws of Nature emerging from consciousness…
*Based on recent book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020) by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov, available as eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds-Evolution/dp/1733426140
Molnupiravir, a wide-spectrum antiviral that is currently in phase 2/3 clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19, is proposed to inhibit viral replication by a mechanism known as ‘lethal mutagenesis’. Two recently published studies reveal the biochemical and structural bases of how molnupiravir disrupts the fidelity of SARS-CoV-2 genome replication and prevents viral propagation by fostering error accumulation in a process referred to as ‘error catastrophe’.
Analysis of unique fingerprints in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed “significant reservoirs” of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life, say researchers.
Dr. John Ilee, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds who led the study, says the findings suggest that the basic chemical conditions that resulted in life on Earth could exist more widely across the Galaxy.
The large organic molecules were identified in protoplanetary disks circling newly formed stars. A similar disk would have once surrounded the young Sun, forming the planets that now make up our Solar System. The presence of the molecules is significant because they are “stepping-stones” between simpler carbon-based molecules such as carbon monoxide, found in abundance in space, and more complex molecules that are required to create and sustain life.
September 15 2021 — Breathe in, breathe out. That’s how easy it is for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to enter your nose. And though remarkable progress has been made in developing intramuscular vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 such as the readily available Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, nothing yet – like a nasal vaccine – has been approved to provide mucosal immunity in the nose, the first barrier against the virus before it travels down to the lungs.
But now, we’re one step closer.
Navin Varadarajan, University of Houston M.D. Anderson Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and his colleagues, are reporting in iScience the development of an intranasal subunit vaccine that provides durable local immunity against inhaled pathogens.
