Peter Thiel is backing the offshore testing of an experimental herpes vaccine. Thiel invested $7 million in the ongoing vaccine research, according to the U.S. company behind it. Southern Illinois University also trumpeted the research and the study’s lead researcher, even though he did not rely on traditional U.S. safety oversight in the first trial, …
Novartis found that giving low doses of a drug called everolimus to people over 65 increased their response to flu vaccines. It did, by about 20 percent. Yet behind the test was a bigger question about whether any drug can slow or reverse the symptoms of old age. Novartis’s study on everolimus, which looked at …
The Swedish government has decided to re-activate conscription from January 1 2018. The security environment in Europe and in Sweden’s vicinity has deteriorated and the all-volunteer recruitment hasn’t provided the Armed Forces with enough trained personnel. The re-activating of the conscription is needed for military readiness. Trained personnel are fundamental for building military capability. In …
Silicon crystals are the semiconductors most commonly used to make transistors, which are critical electronic components used to carry out logic operations in computing. However, as faster and more powerful processors are created, silicon has reached a performance limit: the faster it conducts electricity, the hotter it gets, leading to overheating. Graphene, made of a …
Some researchers believe a singularity can be removed from a black hole (have no event horizon) and this would be a wormhole. They modelled observers (objects like a chair, a scientist, and a spacecraft ) as an aggregation of points connected by physical or chemical interactions that hold everything together as the object travels along …
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an upcoming 2017 English-language French science fiction action film produced, written and directed by Luc Besson. The film is based on the French science fiction comics series Valérian and Laureline, written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières. It stars Dane DeHaan as Valérian and …
Our Sun experiences an 11-year activity cycle. At the solar minimum, the Sun is nearly spot-free. At solar maximum, typically more than 100 sunspots cover less than one percent of the Sun’s surface on average. A new study finds that Proxima Centauri undergoes a similar cycle lasting seven years from peak to peak. However, its …
Wireless transmitters that operate at very or ultra low frequencies (0.3‐30 kHz) typically require some big antenna complexes to handle their communications. DARPA interested looking to eliminate that issue and develop physical structures 1000 times smaller that could handle new long-distance communication applications. At these frequencies, free‐space electromagnetic (EM) field wavelengths are measured in tens …
The FAA and the federal government has granted approval for startup Moon Express to send a mission to the moon. Moon Express intends to launch a small, single-stage spacecraft to land on the Moon by the end of 2017. Eventually the federal government would like to come up with a standard launch licensing process for …
Britain votes to leave the European Union Pound crashes to 1985 low as sterling falls below $1.35 David Cameron will be stepping down. Scotland could leave the UK to remain with the EU The Economist explains that this departure will take two years or more Britain has voted for Brexit. What happens now? Nothing immediate …
China’s economy has grown enormously over the past three-and-a-half decades. Its gross domestic product (GDP), the most common measure of economic output, was $10.4 trillion in 2014, making it the world’s second-largest economy—only the U.S. economy is larger.2 This growth has propelled China’s standard of living, formerly one of the lowest in the world, to …