An anonymous reader quotes CBS News:
Researchers, armchair astronauts and even brides and grooms looking for an out-of-this-world wedding experience will be able to celebrate, collect data or simply enjoy the view from an altitude of 100,000 feet in a balloon-borne pressurized cabin, complete with a bar and a restroom, a space startup announced Thursday. “Spaceship Neptune,” operated by a company called…
Tag: borne
Monitoring of ticks in the US is patchy and underfunded
Tick-borne diseases like Lyme are on the rise in the US, but a survey has found that programmes to assess and control tick populations are lacking Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2246237-monitoring-of-ticks-in-the-us-is-patchy-and-underfunded/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
CDC Warns of Increasingly Aggressive Rodents Looking For New Food Sources
New submitter Way Smarter Than You shares a report from The Seattle Times: Humans aren’t the only ones hankering for the days they could dine out at their cities’ restaurants: Some rats that miss feasting on the scraps are becoming increasingly brazen to find new food sources, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday. Amid stay-home restrictions set across…
Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?
“Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse. “This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real…
What are zoonotic diseases and what can we do about them?
Infectious diseases that leap from animals to humans are called zoonotic diseases. Covid-19 is an example of a zoonotic disease caused by a coronavirus. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/what-are-zoonotic-diseases-coronavirus-covid19…
America’s Government Approves Release of Genetically-Engineered Mosquitoes
America’s Environmental Protection Agency “granted permission for genetically engineered mosquitoes to be released into the Florida Keys and around Houston to see if they can help limit the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses,” writes Bloomberg Environment. clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) shared their report on ab experimental use permit granted to British biotech company Oxitec Ltd:
Oxitec’s first field trial in Brazil achieved up…
Does the novel coronavirus have any links to a high-security lab in Wuhan?
Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Several ideas have been put forward from natural-borne in bats, an escape from a lab in Wuhan and others. Here’s the murky origin story of the novel coronavirus. Source: https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicated-origins.html
Are gamma-ray bursts powered by a star’s collapsing magnetic fields?
When a massive star in a distant galaxy collapses, forming a black hole, two giant jets of light-emitting plasma shoot from its core. These extremely bright gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the universe, and when a jet points towards Earth, the afterglow can be detected from ground and space-borne telescopes. Material does not simply catapult from an…
Density fluctuations in the solar wind based on type III radio bursts
Type III bursts are among the strongest radio signals routinely observed by both space-borne and ground-based instruments. They are generated via the plasma emission mechanism, when beams of suprathermal electrons interact with the ambient plasma, triggering radio emissions at the plasma frequency (the fundamental emission) or at its second harmonic (the harmonic emission). As the electron beams propagate outward from the…
Skin cream applied to mosquito bites stops viruses infecting mice
An immune-boosting skin cream applied directly to mosquito bites stopped viral infections in mice. If approved for human use, it could help prevent mosquito-borne viruses like Zika Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2231141-skin-cream-applied-to-mosquito-bites-stops-viruses-infecting-mice/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…