20 Apr Dinosaurs ended – and originated – due to a mass extinction

It is commonly understood that the dinosaurs disappeared with a bang – wiped out by a great meteorite impact on the Earth 66 million years ago.

But their origins have been less understood. In a new study, scientists from MUSE – Museum of Science, Trento, Italy, Universities of Ferrara and Padova, Italy and the University of Bristol show that the key expansion of dinosaurs was also triggered by a crisis – a mass extinction that happened 232 million years ago.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.bristol.ac.uk

20 Apr Elon Musk is raising half a billion in cash for SpaceX – and there are 3 epic projects to spend it on

Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is likely raising about $500 million in new funding. The cash investment would be a boon to SpaceX, which is chasing three incredibly ambitious projects in the coming decade. Those plans include (i) a global satellite-internet network, (ii) a spaceship to explore and colonize Mars, and (iii) the world’s fastest transportation system.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.appy-geek.com

16 Apr TESS – NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is Launching Soon 

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS is an all-sky survey mission that will discover thousands of exoplanets around nearby bright stars.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to launch no earlier than 6:32 p.m. EDT Monday, April 16, 2018. TESS is on a mission to find planets outside of our solar system and the prelaunch mission coverage will start on NASA Television and the agency’s website Sunday, April 15, with three live briefings.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is prepared to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Once in space, TESS will spend approximately two years monitoring 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to detect planets outside our solar system.

TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and largely increase the current number of known exoplanets.

TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively close stars, giving future researchers a vast set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, such as the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

Launch Resources:

TESS Launch Blog
TESS Launch Team
TESS Briefings and Events
Launch Campaign Photos

TESS project website at NASA Goddard

TESS Guest Investigator Program Office website

TESS science writers guide

HD multimedia on TESS

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nasa.gov

07 Apr 200 universities just launched 600 free online courses. Here’s the full list. —

If you haven’t heard, universities around the world are offering their courses online for free (or at least partially free). These courses are collectively called MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. In the past six years or so, close to 800 universities have created more than 8,000 of these MOOCs. And I’ve been keepin

Sourced through Scoop.it from: qz.com

06 Apr How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete | News | The Guardian

The long read: If we could understand how the infant mind develops, it might help every child reach their full potential. But seeing them as learning machines is not the answer

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theguardian.com

06 Apr DARPA-funded prosthetic memory system successful in humans, study finds

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering have demonstrated a neural prosthetic system that can improve a memory by “writing” information “codes” (based on a patient’s specific memory patterns) into the hippocampus of human subjects via an electrode implanted in the hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in making new memories).

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.kurzweilai.net

06 Apr The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.snopes.com

06 Apr What If Your Blood Was Deadly to Malaria-Transmitting Mosquitoes?

A commonly used anti-parasite drug could be the next weapon in the fight against malaria. Researchers from Kenya and the United Kingdom report that dosing people with ivermectin, commonly used in heartworm pills, makes them deadly targets for the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Nearly all of the mosquitoes in the experiment died after drinking ivermectin-laced blood, they say.

While malaria rates have been dropping historically, the disease still afflicts over 200 million people a year, mostly in the developing world, and was responsible for nearly half a million deaths in 2015, according to the WHO. And there are worries that resistance to artemisinin, the drug of choice for combating malaria, could continue to spread beyond southeast Asia, where most resistant strains are currently found.

Ivermectin could be another solution, and one that’s easily applicable given the prevalence of the drug. In the study, published last month in The Lancet, the researchers gave 47 malaria patients 600-milligram doses of ivermectin for three consecutive days. That’s around three times the normal dose, but the drug possesses few side effects, and had already been shown to be deadly to mosquitoes when in the bloodstream.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: blogs.discovermagazine.com