China prepares for the launch of the Shenzhou 11 spacecraft.

China is steadily preparing for the launch of the Shenzhou 11 spacecraft. The recent rollout of the Long March 2F vehicle which carried the spacecraft is a sign that the whole project is in good shape. However, not much information is available as China keeps its preparations low key.

Nonetheless, the deployment of the Shenzhou 11 spacecraft to the launch pad at Jiuquan has offered some details about the state of the project and other essential aspects required for the launch. At this point, there is no information available in regard to a specific date for the official launch of the spacecraft

The Shenzhou 11 spacecraft alongside the Launchpad must be in good conditions otherwise, it wouldn’t have been deployed. The Tiangong 2 space laboratory which will receive the crew of the spacecraft must also be operating properly. Any problems aboard the laboratory would have certainly led to a delay in the deployment.

The Chinese state media coverage of the event has been relatively tight. Although China’s astronaut launches are starting to become a routine process, there is the expectation that the launch of Shenzhou 11 spacecraft will be covered extensively.

Experts can speculate on launch based on the recent rollout. However, any such approximation is subject to change depending on various factors. The number of glitches found during maintenance and the weather before the launch are some of the most important factors when establishing a launch date. Nonetheless, most experts think that the launch will happen before October 20.

One of the biggest mysteries regarding the Shenzhou 11 spacecraft is the crew. This information is under tight control by the Chinese space agency and most likely won’t be made publicly until a few days before the official launch. There will also be a backup crew, whose members are unknown as well.

China is steadily building its space station and by 2024, when the ISS will be retired, it’s going to be the only country with a space station in orbit. Currently, China has sent two laboratory modules into orbit the Tiangong 1 and Tiangong 2. The core of the space station will be launched into space in 2018. Overall, the station is expected to be completed by 2022 and will feature two lab modules, once core and ports used to dock spacecraft.

Image source: Pixabay

Scientists proved that violence could be inherited

The quest to understand if violence is in the human’s genes has preoccupied sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers for centuries. Are our behaviors influenced by the environment we live in as Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentioned in his theory or are we born with the violence as Thomas Hobbes assumed in the 1650s?

To answer this problem, a team of scientists analyzed the problem from another angle, different from the evolutionary biology. Their conclusion was that we inherit part of our violent behavior from an early ancestor, and distribute it to other primates. The researchers noted that the lethal violence had its origins in the lineage of Homo sapiens, apes, and monkeys. By occupating a position within an unusually violent mammalian clade ( a biological word for an organization of organisms that have a common ancestor), humans inherited a certain amount of violence.

To reach these conclusions, researchers collected information on more than 1,024 present mammal species, as well as more than 600 human population from 50 000-10 000 years ago until the present day.  Data involved the analysis of more than four million deaths of the species which accounted for more than 80 percent of the mammalians.

Scientists then analyzed the deaths caused by lethal violence perpetrated by a member of the same species. Examples for humans were intentional killings, infanticide, execution, war, and homicide. The findings showed that intraspecies killing caused 0.3 percent of deaths. But for the parent of all primates, hares, and rodents, killings produced about 1.1% of mortality, increasing to 2.3 % for the next, more current, common ancestor of tree shrews and primates.

Scientists noted that this could only mean that humans have inherited their violence. However, the co-author of the study, Jose Maria Gomez Reyes, said that environmental constraints on survival also influence the evolutionary components that lead to brutality. Territoriality and social behavior are the two features that are shared with relatives of Homo sapiens and are very likely changing the level of lethal brutality which the humans inherited.

However, the findings showed that individuals could curtail the tendencies. In a modern society, that is equipped with prisons, legal systems, and strong cultural beliefs which discard violence, the death rates are 200 times lower than the author foretold for the state of nature.

Image source: Pixabay

Scientists mentioned that it is very easy for hackers to attack the emergency response system

Researchers from Ben-Gurion University mentioned that if hackers would successfully attack the emergency response system, the callers would receive a busy tone when calling the 911 service.

Since first created in 1968, the 911 emergency phone system has fortunately saved millions of lives by directing the calls to crisis responders close to the person in need.

Recently, some analysts announced that they have figure out a way to disable the 911 system for a lengthened period by quickly performing the TDoS attack on 911 call centers, also known as the telephony denial-of-service assault.

The method includes making phones mechanically call the 911 service without their owner’s permission or knowledge thus crowding the call center lines which will lead to the failure of real callers to reach the service.

Researchers suggested that to interrupt the emergency response system throughout the whole state of North Carolina, they would only need to infect approximately 6,000 phones, an activity which seems to be very easy for hackers to achieve. Moreover, to disrupt the 911 system throughout the United States, hackers would need to infect around 200,000 phones.

The analysts at Ben Gurion University in Israel stated that an attacker would this way be able to determine 33 percent of callers to stop trying to contact the 911 service.

The director of R&D at the University’s Cyber Security Center, Mordechai Guri, said that while routers and call centers operate under normal circumstances at near capacity, increasing the call numbers, just a bit could overpower them.

Mordechai also said that he and his team are aware of the vulnerability for a TDoS attack and that they brought the situation to the attention of DHS a few years ago.

The manager of government operations for the National Emergency Number Association, Trey Forgety, declared that the emergency response system is highly limited, usually less than five circuits operate all 911 requests for a state.

Annually, the Americans make more than  240 million calls to approximately 7,000 call centers across the country, and around 70 percent of the requests come from mobile telephones. However, experts believe that the emergency response systems haven’t kept pace with the needed technology to deal with such a great volume of calls.

Image source: Wikipedia

Tiny magnetic bits from air pollution have been observed for the first time to remain in the human brain.

Researchers have found serious quantities of possibly toxic magnetic nanoparticles in the human brain, inducing the fear that these could cause brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. These tiny magnetic bits from air pollution have for the first time been observed to remain in the human brain.

Lancaster University specialists saw abundant magnetite nanoparticles in the brain membrane of 37 people aged three to 92-years-old from Manchester and Mexico City. The toxic magnetic mineral is involved in the creation of reactive oxygen species (free radicals) in the human brain. They are highly connected to neurodegenerative illnesses.

Lancaster Environment Centre professor, Barbara Maher and some of her colleagues from Mexico City, Oxford, Manchester, and Glasgow utilized spectroscopic investigation to distinguish the particles as magnetite. Contrary to angular magnetite that is supposed to form frequently within the brain, the 150 nm spherical particles that the scientists observed were typical of a high-temperature formation such as from open fires or automobile (mostly diesel) engines.

The toxic magnetite particles disturb normal cellular roles in the brain by inducing oxidative stress and producing unstable free radicals – bits which damage essential constructions in brain cells.

More recent studies have found an association between high quantities of magnetite and the Alzheimer’s disease, although no explicit connection has been confirmed.

Unfortunately, every year more than three million premature deaths occur due to air pollution, according to the World Health Organisation.

It is estimated that in U.K alone, 50,000 individuals die annually due to air pollution, and more than 520,000 are assumed to suffer from Alzheimer’s, a common form of dementia.

The co-director of the Centre for Paleomagnetism and Environmental Magnetism at Lancaster University, Barbara Maher, mentioned that the magnetite nanoparticles from the atmosphere could access the human brain.

By doing so, they are known to affect people’s health, including generating diseases such as Alzheimer’s. She also stated that when analyzing the human brain and doing a magnetic extraction she discovered millions of particles in just one gram of brain tissue. The millions of particles represent millions of o opportunities to harm the human body.

However, it’s too early to confirm that the particles could influence Alzheimer’s disease or any other kind of brain illness and scientists believe that more studies need to be made.

Image source: Pixabay

Could North Dakota continue to be the national leader in honey production?

The yearly substitution of queen bees to control hive fertility has hurt the apiary community raising the question as to whether North Dakota could continue to be the national leader in honey production in future years.

Dave Huelsman, the owner of D & L Apiaries, has developed his business since 1992 and now owns 130 beehive places in northwest North Dakota. It is almost impossible for him to place an order to suppliers for 4,000 queen bees, a year ahead if he is to be guaranteed that mated queens come spring.

Guessing which bee communities might fail is a pricey chance apiarists have to take once they have to pay $8 per queen. According to Huelsman, the request has now pushed the price to $24 each. He also added that it’s getting harder to save queens as they tend to lose fertility and eventually end up only producing male offsprings. When this starts happening, the producers consider the hive a dead one.

While a queen’s purpose is to provide the functioning duties of the hive, a drone’s only objective is to mate with a queen.

Without the queens that create worker bees, apiaries are required to requeen hives at an accelerated rate. Huelsman supposed that by giving the queens pollen substitute, they are pushing the queens too hard. Wheat and beets crops offer bees no nutrition and don’t need pollination.

The skepticism with suppliers has changed from buying mated queens to cell-form – which would be mated by their drones after queens get out of their cell. The success rate of this process is estimated by Jay Miller of JL Apiaries at around 80 percent.

The best producer of the cold-pressed honey lemonades, Honeydrop Beverages, celebrates honey’s purity and versatility in honor of National Honey Month this September. National Honey Month acknowledges Colony Collapse Disorder which is a phenomenon that happens when worker bees abandon the colony and leave the queen behind along with nurse bees to look after for the surviving immature bees and plenty of food. This process highly influences the honey production.

The ‘Buy a Bottle, Save a Bee’ program is the initiative of Honeydrop Beverages to fight the Colony Collapse Disorder. With every bottle sold, a percentage of the profit is donated to beekeepers to create new hives and run instructional programs to assist the protection of the bees and to guarantee that honey can be appreciated in the future.

Image source: Pixabay

Retinoic acid which is a compound obtained in the body from vitamin A could help overcome colon cancer.

A new animal research implies that the retinoic acid which is a compound obtained in the body from vitamin A could have a significant role in overcoming colon cancer.

The senior study author Dr. Edgar Engleman also a professor of medicine and pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif mentioned that the retinoic acid is known to suppress inflammation in the intestine.

When external intruders like bacteria wind up in the intestines, the immune system prepares to crush them. Most of the times, inflammation — which results from the discharge of chemicals from damaged cells leading to swelling — results. Cancers including colorectal cancer are influenced by these inflammations. Moreover, inflammatory bowel disease, like ulcerative colitis, has been correlated with colon cancer.

Engleman wanted to determine whether and how retinoic acid levels instantly affect cancer spread.

The researchers discovered that mice with colon cancer had lower levels of retinoic acid in the intestines. The study also showed that in humans, colon cancer victims who had raised levels of a protein that degrades retinoic acid in their intestinal tissue led to having worse results than other patients.

Researchers tried to find out if taking the levels of retinoic acid in the tissue close to a more normal range could influence the disease progression. Engleman mentioned that when they supplied the animal with retinoic acid they were capable to dramatically decrease the tumor burden in the animals. Like expected, when they started inhibiting retinoic acid activity meaningfully enhanced the tumor burden.

The research is the primary to explain an intricate dance between immune-related inflammation, retinoic acid levels, and gut microorganisms.

The researchers then examined the levels of the synthesis and degradation proteins in collected samples of intestinal tissue taken from individuals with either ulcerative colitis or colorectal cancer linked with ulcerative colitis. However, it was not plausible to directly estimate the retinoic acid levels in the human tissues because the samples weren’t freshly obtained but stored.

It seems that the study conclusions pointed out new ways to treat or prevent colon cancer. However, the animal experimentation doesn’t always provide the same effects in humans.

After discovering a role for retinoic acid insufficiency in colorectal cancer, scientists would like to name the specific microorganisms that started these changes in humans.

Image source: Wikipedia