Future Transport
Along with the warming climate, in 2030 the Arctic Ocean is to allow free navigation. This means the emergence of a new, shorter sea route connecting Europe with East Asia.
Credit Good Times Bad Times
Read the full article at: www.thefuturist.co
Good design takes a lot of skill, time and energy – it never happens by chance. And it’s vital to remember that design is ultimately about clear communication. Just as a writer or speaker needs to choose the perfect words to deliver their message, designers must communicate theirs by selecting the correct visual elements, which convey exactly what they want to say.
But unintended interpretations sometimes occur, creating confusion through oversight or lack of feedback. Sometimes, those mistakes can be so major that onlookers outside the process wonder how the design got signed off. Bad design can serve a purpose, though, which is to exist as a lesson on what not to do. Here, we round up 12 ginormous design fails, covering packaging, UI and logo design, which offer us all something to learn from. If you’d like a lesson on what to do, see our guide to logo design.
We look at 12 design blunders that serve as lessons to avoid repeating in your own projects.
Read the full article at: www.creativebloq.com
The test flight didn’t come close to the edge of space, but the prototype was a big step toward the rocket’s first orbital mission.
Just recently, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas. This is the rocket that Elon Musk hopes will soon carry humans to the moon and, eventually, to Mars, but Wednesday’s launch was an unmanned test flight that lasted just a few minutes. The rocket flew to an altitude of 40,000 feet—roughly the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner—and performed what Musk has called a “belly flop” maneuver on its way back to earth. The rocket executed a controlled descent to the surface and righted itself just a few hundred feet above the ground. But it wasn’t able to slow its descent enough to safely touch down, and it exploded spectacularly near the landing pad. While the rocket made it only about a tenth of the way to space and didn’t survive the landing attempt, it’s still a major step toward a first orbital mission and a big win for Musk’s interplanetary ambitions.
Read the full article at: www.wired.com
Researchers from the Tel Aviv University (TAU) have shown that the coronavirus can be killed efficiently, quickly, and cheaply using ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (UV-LEDs). They believe that the UV-LED technology will soon be available for private and commercial use.
This is the first study conducted on the disinfection efficiency of UV-LED irradiation at different wavelengths or frequencies on a virus from the family of coronaviruses. The article was published in November 2020 issue of the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology.
Read the full article at: aftau.org
Scientists tested whether a classic technique could detect subsurface oceans on the moons of Uranus. In this scenario, the planet’s oddball magnetic field offers a big advantage.
Uranus’s magnetic field, like so much about the planet itself, is quite odd compared with other solar system planets: The field is tilted by 59° from the planet’s spin axis, and its center is shifted by about a third of the planet’s radius from the planet’s center.
Magnetic induction confirmed the presence of Europa’s and Callisto’s subsurface oceans, but Jupiter’s very symmetric magnetic field made it impossible for the Galileo mission to figure out the oceans’ depth, thickness, or salinity with its small number of flybys.
Read the full article at: eos.org
A British company has claimed that they have built the world’s first robotic kitchen. The total concept consists of a robot assembled into a luxury kitchen where the robot will learn the recipe and serve you with freshly cooked food in front of you. The name of the company is Moley Robotics which was established in the year 2014. Dr. Mark Oleynik is the creator of this amazing robotic kitchen which even mimics the patterns made by human hands at the time of cooking meals.
Read the full article at: kedlist.com
The 10-year survival rate for cancer, once regarded as an incurable disease, has steadily been improving in Japan and if the cancer can be detected early enough, this survival rate increases further.
The National Cancer Center Japan has announced that the 10-year survival rate for patients diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2007 was 58.3%. A study was conducted using the statistics of 94,000 cancer patients aged between 15 and 94 at 21 cancer medical facilities, where they had been diagnosed. Cases of death other than cancer were not included in the calculation of survival rates. This figure is a 1.1 percentage point increase compared to the survival rate during the previous study, based on cancer patients diagnosed from 2003 to 2006. This is the sixth time the National Cancer Center has announced the 10-year survival rate and it continues to improve due to advances in treatment, such as new medicine development.
A closer look at the 10-year survival rates by cancer type shows that prostate cancer had the highest rate with 98.8% and those for breast, thyroid, and uterine cancers were all above 80%. Those with a survival rate of less than 20% were gallbladder and bile duct with 19.1%, liver with 16.1%, and pancreatic with 6.2%. Meanwhile, the 5-year survival rate, based on a study of 148,000 patients diagnosed with cancer between 2010 and 2012 at 32 facilities nationwide, stood at 68.6%. This was a 0.2-point rise from the previous study based on diagnoses given between 2009 and 2011. The survival rate for prostate cancer was 100% and for breast cancer it was 93.6%.
Read the full article at: www.nippon.com
The COVID-19 vaccine may spell the end of the pandemic, but while mass vaccination is not available it is vital to stop community transmission. The new antiviral drug MK-4482 / EIDD-2801 or Molnupiravir, has managed to suppress “completely” the transmission of the coronavirus in just 24 hours , according to studies by the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of Georgia State University. “This is the first demonstration of an orally available drug that quickly blocks the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 , so it could be a game changer,” the researchers explained in the work published in the journal Nature Microbiology . The antiviral drug was developed at Emory University in Atlanta by the drug innovation company Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory (DRIVE), which was licensed by Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, which partnered with Merck & Co. Molnupiravir was originally designed to treat the flu and prevent the virus from making copies of itself, creating errors during viral RNA replication.
The experts detail that tests were carried out on ferrets and it was observed that they presented a reduction in the amount of viral particles. Then those ferrets were put with others that had not been treated. None of the ferrets in the second group became infected with COVID-19. “We believe that ferrets are a relevant transmission model because they easily spread SARS-CoV-2, but for the most part they do not develop a serious disease, which is very similar to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in young adults,” he said. Dr. Robert Cox, a postdoctoral fellow in the Plemper group and co-lead author of the study. “We observed early on that MK-4482 / EIDD-2801 has broad spectrum activity against respiratory RNA viruses and that oral treatment of infected animals with the drug reduces the amount of viral particles spread by several orders of magnitude, drastically reducing transmission. These properties made MK-4482 / EIDD / 2801 a powerful candidate for the pharmacological control of Covid-19 ”, the report adds.
If this ferret-based data is translated into humans, Covid-19 patients treated with the drug could become non-infectious within 24 hours of starting treatment. The drug can be taken orally, and treatment can be started early for a triple potential benefit: inhibiting patients’ progress to severe disease, shortening the infectious phase to alleviate the emotional and socioeconomic cost of prolonged patient isolation, and containing quickly local outbreaks. Molnupiravir is currently in advanced phase II / III clinical trials. It is being tested in three different doses every 12 hours for five days in patients with SARS-CoV-2.
Findings published in Nat. Microbiology (Dec. 3, 2020):
Read the full article at: www.entrepreneur.com
A team of researchers from Duke University, the University of the Witwatersrand and Hunter College has found that elephants have the highest volume of daily water loss ever recorded in a land animal. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes experiments they conducted with captive elephants to measure how much water they lose.
Many animals, such as humans, keep cool in hot weather by perspiring—as sweat evaporates, the skin is cooled down. Other animals, such as dogs, keep cool by panting—and still others, such as elephants, have large organs that work as a cooling system—their ears keep them cool when it is hot. Elephants have sweat glands, as well, but they are small and located in their feet, near their cuticles. Elephants are also known to drink an enormous amount of water—hundreds of liters every day. Such huge amounts of water help to keep elephants cool by its presence in the body, but it is also needed to break down the huge amounts of food that elephants eat—and because their digestion process is so inefficient, they defecate from 12 to 15 times a day. Elephants also lose a lot of water through urinating, as well.
Read the full article at: phys.org
A new study, led by U.S. National Science Foundation-funded researchers at the University of California, Irvine, has deepened the understanding of epigenetic mechanisms in tumorigenesis and revealed a previously undetected repertoire of cancer driver genes. The results were published in Science Advances.
Using a new prediction algorithm, called DORGE (Discovery of Oncogenes and tumor suppressoR genes using Genetic and Epigenetic features), researchers were able to identify novel tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) and oncogenes (OGs), particularly those with rare mutations, by integrating the most comprehensive collection of genetic and epigenetic data.
“Existing bioinformatic algorithms do not sufficiently leverage epigenetic features to predict cancer driver genes, despite the fact that epigenetic alterations are known to be associated with cancer driver genes,” said Wei Li, senior author of the study. “Our computational algorithm integrates public data on epigenetic and genetic alternations to improve the prediction of cancer driver genes.”
Cancer results from an accumulation of key genetic alterations that disrupt the balance between cell division and apoptosis. Genes with “driver” mutations that affect cancer progression are known as cancer driver genes and can be classified as TSGs and oncogenes OGs based on their roles in cancer progression. This study demonstrated that cancer driver genes, predicted by DORGE, included both known cancer driver genes and novel driver genes not reported in current literature. In addition, researchers found that the novel dual-functional genes, which DORGE predicted as both TSGs and OGs, are highly enriched at hubs in protein-protein interaction and drug/compound-gene networks.
“Our DORGE algorithm successfully leveraged public data to discover the genetic and epigenetic alterations that play significant roles in cancer driver gene dysregulation,” explained Li. “These findings could be instrumental in improving cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment efforts in the future.”
Read the full article at: www.nsf.gov