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Elon Musk spoke at The Mars Society on making Starlink for Mars and Moonship on October 17, 2020 and highlights (recap) are here. Within this online conference Elon announced many interesting things. Self sustaining city on Mars is the core aim for Elon Musk's SpaceX and Starship spacecraft prototype. Elon Musk speaks that humanity have to made self sustaining city on Mars before the World War III start. The goal is to put enough people to Mars and enough tonnage. Metane is the general propellant. When the Starship will make stratosphere flight is currently secret. Elon said that Starship will...

Even as the search for the coronavirus vaccine continues, there is a lot of confusion and contradictory views regarding usage of drugs to fight against COVID-19. Some health officials, including specialists from Melbourne, recently suggested to the doctors in India to prescribe Ivermectin, a drug used to treat lice and other parasites, to treat coronavirus. Dr Shashikant Manikappa, specialist cardiac anesthetist of Monash Health, Melbourne (Australia), said that medications like Hydroxychloroquine, and more recently Ivermectin, had shown some promising results against coronavirus. But despite some promising results, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) hasn't included Ivermectin in its treatment...

Gilead Sciences Inc has questioned the findings of a World Health Organization (WHO) study that concluded its COVID-19 drug remdesivir does not help patients who have been admitted to hospital. The American company told Reuters the data appeared inconsistent, the findings were premature and that other studies had validated the drug's benefits. In a blow to one of the few drugs being used to treat people with COVID-19, the WHO said on Thursday its "Solidarity" trial had concluded that remdesivir appeared to have little or no effect on 28-day mortality or length of hospital stays among patients with the respiratory...

Places with highest daily reported cases per capitaSeven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

The St. Ivan ("St. John") Island is located about 900 meters away from the closest point on the Bulgarian mainland, the Stolets Peninsula (Cape Stolets, or Scamnia) in the town of Sozopol. The St. Peter Island, which is really small, is roughly the same distance from the coast, and only 50 meters away from the St. Ivan Island. The town of Sozopol itself is the modern-day successor of ancient Apollonia Pontica (Sozopolis), an Ancient Greek colony dating back to the 6th century BC, on the western Black Sea coast which was inhabited by Ancient Thracians. The St. Ivan Island is...

...an ancient set of leather balls inside tombs of the prehistoric Yanghai cemetery near the modern city of Turfan... contained a central core crafted from leather or hair products and are encased in a leather pouch tied up together with a band. Two of the three are clearly marked with a red cross on the outer leather cover and were located in the burials sites of possible horse riders, indicating that they might have been employed in an early form of polo. These baseball-sized Turfan balls were carefully examined by researchers and radiocarbon dated back to the period between 1189...

A mysterious circle on a grainy scan, this is what scientists are claiming is finally evidence that Earth has been visited by aliens. Researchers have claimed the fuzzy outline is a flying saucer that ended up 300ft down on the ocean floor between Sweden and Finland. They were stunned when sonar scans taken while searching for a century-old wreck showed up the shape against the dirt.

Dr. Shaban Faruqui, strapped into a gurney, rolled down the hallway five months ago at Baton Rouge General Medical Center to cheers and applause from the hospital’s employees. It was May 18, two months after he was hospitalized with the coronavirus. As the former chief of gastroenterology at the hospital, everyone had been rooting for him. He had survived the worst of it and was going home. To a wife of 45 years, to three daughters and four grandchildren who had hung paintings of hearts and sunny skies on the walls of his Baton Rouge home to greet him. When...

> Places with highest daily reported cases per capitaSeven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

The great race for a COVID-19 vaccine has more than 130 medicines in development, with 40 being tested on humans, of which 10 are in large, phase 3 trials. The U.S. Government has invested about $11 billion in Operation Warp Speed, making advance purchases from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer/BioNTech, Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline, Novavax and AstraZeneca — betting that at least some will be soon approved by regulators as “safe and effective” vaccines. No matter your Twitter feed, “vaccines have been one of the greatest public health tools to prevent disease,” as The New York Times explained in January. But as late...

Red dwarfs are the coolest kind of star. As such, they potentially allow liquid water to exist on planets that are quite close to them. In the search for habitable worlds beyond the borders of our solar system, this is a big advantage: the distance between an exoplanet and its star is a crucial factor for its detection. The closer the two are, the higher the chance that astronomers can detect the planet from Earth. "But these stars are rather small and emit little light compared to most other stars, such as our Sun," Brice-Olivier Demory, lead author of the...

Pluto as seen from data taken by New Horizon’s flyby in 2015 of the dwarf planet, with a close-up view of the Pigafetta Montes mountain range. The colorization on the right indicates the concentrations of methane ice, with the highest concentrations at higher elevations in red, decreasing downslope to the lowest concentrations in blue. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI and Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter ============================================================================= The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice, creating bright deposits strikingly like the snow-capped mountain chains found on Earth. New...

Satellite-tracking company LeoLabs on Wednesday said the defunct objects could come within 39 feet of each other and that there was a 10% chance that they could still collide around 8:56 p.m. ET. The company deemed the potential crash to be a "very high risk." "This event continues to be very high risk and will likely stay this way through the time of closest approach," LeoLabs tweeted. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the two objects were a defunct Soviet navigation satellite called Parus [Kosmos 2004] that launched in 1989 and a Chinese rocket stage....

(ALMA - ESO/NAOJ/NRAO, E/O'Gorman/P.Kervella) ========================================================================= In the wake of recent fluctuations in Betelgeuse's brightness, astronomers have rigorously examined the star's vital statistics, and come up with a bit of a surprise. According to the team led by researchers at Australian National University (ANU), the results change a few important things about our favourite red giant. "The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery – earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter," says astronomer László Molnár from the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. "Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two...

Crew members aboard the International Space Station are dealing with a failed oxygen supply generator located within a Russian module. Thankfully, the astronauts and cosmonauts are not in danger, but this is now the second recent glitch involving a Russian component, which might be cause for concern. The malfunctioning oxygen supply system is located within the Russian Zvezda module and it conked out late yesterday, reports AFP. Sounds scary, but a second oxygen supply system located on the U.S. side is functioning normally and providing breathable air for the ISS crew. Moreover, extra oxygen supplies are stored on the ISS...

Places with highest daily reported cases per capitaSeven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

GREENVILLE, SC—As Halloween approaches, haunted house attractions and extreme horror experiences are competing for the crown of "most horrifying haunted house in the country." According to horror enthusiasts, a new attraction called Maskless Murder Mansion has left the competition in the dust with a twisted new vision of horror: an old mansion filled with regular people who happen to not be wearing masks. "Yeah we know this is really messed up stuff," said Zach McDongle, owner and mastermind behind the attraction. "So far, no one has had the courage to make it all the way through." For anyone brave enough...

Abraham Wald was a Hungarian mathematician, but his work with statistics in 1943 would prevent the Navy armoring exactly the wrong places on planes, saving the lives of countless flight crews who likely would have been shot down if their most vulnerable parts were left exposed. .... As Jordan Ellenberg wrote in How Not To Be Wrong, there was a running joke in the SRG that Wald's secretaries had to rip notepaper out of his hands as soon as he finished writing on it because he didn't have the clearance to read his own work. .... So the only planes...

Ideology in Science Is Destroying Trust Science should never be tainted by ideology. After all, science isn’t supposed to be about political beliefs but is a powerful method for learning about and understanding the physical universe.Science’s tools are decidedly empirical, i.e., observation, measurement, experimentation, falsification, and the like. To be effective, science must be pursued objectively. The point is to determine what is—not what one wants to be—real.Which is why I am so alarmed that highly respected science and medical journals are becoming so political. For example, Science—one of the world’s most respected scientific publications—recently published a stridently ideological column...