If all goes well late on May 6, 2024, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will blast off into space on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Launching from the Kennedy Space Center, this last crucial test for Starliner will test out the new spacecraft and take the pair to the International Space Station for about a week.Part of NASA’s commercial crew program, this long-delayed mission will represent the vehicle’s first crewed launch. If successful, it will give NASA – and in the fut ...read more
A bit of medical advice: Stay away from medieval squirrels. That’s what a study in Current Biology seems to suggest, anyway, after showing that red squirrels hosted strains of the leprosy bacteria Mycobacterium leprae in England’s Middle Ages.“In the wake of COVID-19, animal hosts are now becoming a focus of attention for understanding disease appearance and persistence,” Inskip said in a statement. “Our research shows that there is a long history of zoonotic diseases, and they have ha ...read more
The average human body expends a rough equivalent to 800 AA batteries of energy per day. But the body’s mechanical efficiency is only estimated at around 15 to 30 percent, meaning most of the energy we gain from food is released as heat.At the same time, humans are increasingly in need of a safe, reliable source of power for the growing arsenal of implantable devices that researchers are developing to improve and save lives. At present, cardiac pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, neurostim ...read more
In the latest wave of popular weight-loss treatments, several types of drugs commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes have been making headlines. Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and other diabetes medications aim to target different types of glucose receptors in the body, which helps to lower blood sugar in diabetes patients. Yet you may be more familiar with them for a different reason — these drugs can also help curb patients’ appetites by binding to these same receptors. This discovery has u ...read more
Though they spend the vast majority of their lives in hiding, cicadas will be all the buzz this spring as they prepare to return to the surface in enormous numbers. Over the next several weeks, in the spring of 2024, billions (and possibly more than a trillion) of cicadas will emerge from the ground in what some experts are calling “cicada-geddon.” Yet while John Cooley, a biologist at the University of Connecticut, says he’s noticed apprehension about this historic co-emergence, he says ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine