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Biden Directs NASA to Figure Out What Time It Is on the Moon – Futurism

Telling the exact time on the Moon is more important than you think. Half Past Moon

When an astronaut walks the surface of the Moon, what time should their wristwatch read?

It's a pertinent question to the United States' renewed efforts to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface and the White House is keen to come up with a universally agreed-upon standard.

So the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has released a new memorandum in an attempt to establish a new time standard called "Coordinated Lunar Time" or LTC by the end of 2026.

The idea is that the standard will allow ongoing Moon missions to coordinate better.

"As NASA, private companies and space agencies around the world launch missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond, its important that we establish celestial time standards for safety and accuracy," said OSTP deputy director for national security Steve Welby in a statement.

The new standard will also aim to address incredibly exotic timekeeping situations.

"Time passes differently in different parts of space for example, time appears to pass more slowly where gravity is stronger, like near celestial bodies and as a result the length of a second on Earth is different to an observer under different gravitational conditions, such as on the Moon," said Welby.

As SpaceNews points out, these differences are pretty tiny, taking roughly 50 years to make up for a single second of offset between the surface of Earth and the Moon.

Nonetheless, perfectly coordinating future missions to the satellite require an extremely high degree of accuracy when it comes to telling time, something that's only bound to become more important as we launch more missions to the Moon.

A new standard is "critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation, and communications," Welby argued.

Other than coming up with a new time zone for the Moon, NASA is also working on an interoperable network called LunaNet for communications and navigation. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is also working on a positioning system to provide astronauts with the equivalent of GPS, but on the surface of the Moon.

Whether the new Coordinated Lunar Time standard will be established before the first astronauts in almost half a century touch down on the Moon no earlier than September 2026, as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission, remains to be seen.

More on the Moon: NASA's First Artemis Moon Astronauts Will Bring Small Greenhouse to Lunar Surface

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Good News, Sickos! Google Says It’s Deleting Records of Your Incognito Searches – Futurism

It's been a long time coming. Not-So-Incognito

In response to a lawsuit, Google is going to delete billions of data points from users who browsed on Chrome's Incognito mode which is great news for those who have used it for not-safe-for-work purposes.

As theWall Street Journal reports, the settlement in Google's class action lawsuit, which was filed in California in 2020 and settled in December 2023, will require the company to not only delete a ton of old Incognito data, but also to update its disclosures about what data it collects and allow users to opt out of the cookies that do the recording of, say, those nasty PornHub searchesyou end up making.

The company claimed in a statement to the newspaper that its Incognito browser data was never associated with individual users or used to personalize accounts in any way but as the lawsuit itself maintained, Google's marketing of Incognito misled users into thinking that the private browsing mode would include no tracking whatsoever.

In discovery for this newly-settled suit, internal communications between Google employees revealed to the public in 2022 that some at the company were concerned about Incognito's marketing being misleading while others found it to be a laughing matter.

"We need to stop calling it Incognito and stop using a Spy Guy icon," one employee wrote in a 2018 exchange after sharing a study about people discovering the lack of privacy afforded by so-called "private" browsing options. In response, another employee linked to a fan wiki page for "Guy Incognito," a "Simpsons" character who's simply Homer Simpson with a mustache and a suit, pretending to be a spy.

"Regardless of the name," the second employee continued in the damning interaction, "the Incognito icon should have always been [Guy Incognito]... which also accurately conveys the level of privacy it provides."

The misnomer wasn't missed on the C-Suite at Alphabet, Google's parent company, either.

"We are limited in how strongly we can market Incognito because its not truly private, thus requiring really fuzzy, hedging language that is almost more damaging," Lorraine Twohill, Google's chief marketing officer, warned Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in another such email revealed during this suit's discovery.

While the initial class action suit proposed payouts of up to $5,000 for Incognito users whose data was wrongfully collected, the latest settlement doesn't award any individual plaintiffs. It does, however, provide for individuals to sue for their own damages and as the WSJnotes, some of the attorneys who brought the lawsuit have already brought an additional 50 complaints regarding the settlement in California courts.

More on lawsuits: Twitter Caught Selling Data to Government Spies While Complaining About Surveillance

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Alzheimer’s May Spread Through Blood Transfusions, Scientists Find – Futurism

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We still don't know the exact cause of Alzheimer's diseasefor every patient, but research has increasingly pointed to environmental factors such as meat and processed foods and particles in car pollution that seem to lead to the tragic and degenerative condition.

Add another possible culprit to that list: blood.

Results from a new study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports suggest that transfusions and transplants of blood, bone marrow, organs and other biological matter from one person with hereditary Alzheimer's to a healthy person can spread the disease.

Canadian scientists at the University of British Columbia arrived at this conclusion after performing lab experiments with mice and stem cells.

For the study, they bred mice to be carriers of human inheritable Alzheimer's,and specifically a gene that synthesizes amyloid plaques. They then extracted stem cells from their bone marrow and injected this biological tissue into healthy mice that were not carriers.

Within nine months, the normal mice were showing signs of cognitive decline, as well as changes in their brains such as the accumulation of amyloid plaques, fibrous deposits that are classic hallmarks of Alzheimers.

The researchers had several takeaways.

Oneis that Alzheimer's can arise from stem cells outside the body's central nervous system, which overturns some preconceptions abouthow the disease forms.

"One of the potential outcomes of this study is to spur the field to move away from the conventional central dogma of AD [Alzheimer's disease] pathology, which states that the accumulation of brain-derived A [amyloid], specifically produced by neurons, is the cause of the disease," the researchers write. "This study demonstrates the contribution A, generated outside the brain, in establishing the disease."

Another is thatthe pathway to developing Alzheimer's could be similar to how people acquire prion brain diseases like CreutzfeldtJakob's, which can be transmitted. People eating cows with Mad Cow Disease have been known to develop a version of CreutzfeldtJakob disease.

In a nutshell, Alzheimer's could be passed to healthy people through the donation of biological matter. This would mean that potential donors would have to be screened for the condition.

"This supports the idea that Alzheimer's is a systemic disease where amyloids that are expressed outside of the brain contribute to central nervous system pathology," University of British Columbia immunologist and principle author Wilfred Jefferies said in a statement. "As we continue to explore this mechanism, Alzheimers disease may be the tip of the iceberg and we need to have far better controls and screening of the donors used in blood, organ and tissue transplants as well as in the transfers of human derived stem cells or blood products."

More on Alzheimer's Disease: Weird Particle Floating Through Air May Cause Alzheimers

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NASA Recovers Debris That Crashed Through Florida Man’s Roof – Futurism

"It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all." Space Junkie

A sizable cylindrical object crashed through the roof of Alexandro Otero's home in Naples, Florida and experts believe it may have originated from the International Space Station.

While NASA scientists have since recovered the debris and are currently analyzing it, Ars Technica reports, we still don't have confirmation that the 2-pound object came from space.

But given the evidence, there's a decent chance it once belonged to the aging orbital outpost.

Pictures shared by Otero on X-formerly-Twitter show the carnage, with the object punching through wood and drywall with ease.

"It was a tremendous sound," Otero recalled in an interview with local CBS-affiliated news station WINK. "It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all."

According to Ars' reporting, Otero's Nest home security camera recorded the sound of the object crashing through his roof, just minutes after the US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris. Its orbital path also placed it somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, making its way toward Florida, where Otero resides.

Otero may even have a case in trying to make a claim against the federal government to pay for the hole in his roof.

"It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused."

The debris, per the report, may have once belonged to a cargo pallet that was jettisoned from the space station, reentering the atmosphere on March 8. The NASA-owned pallet, however, was originally launched by the Japanese space agency, which could complicate matters.

For now, we await word from NASA.

"More information will be available once the analysis is complete," space agency spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars.

More on space junk: Astronaut Tried to Photograph Mt. Fuji, Snapped Picture of Space Junk Instead

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Scientists Splice Material From Creature That Can Survive Outer Space Into Human Cells – Futurism

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An almost-microscopic creature that's sturdy enough to survive the ravages of space may hold the key to human longevity, scientists have found in new research.

In a new study led by the University of Wyoming, an international team of researchers found that when looking into the incredible durability of the itty bitty tardigrade known affectionately as the "water bear" or "moss piglet" proteins from the creature might help slow aging in humans, too.

Part of what's made tardigrades so famous is that they can survive both boiling and freezing temperatures, which was why in 2007 a team of European scientists sent 3,000 of these half-millimeter-long little guys into space, and weren't so shocked when the majority of them survived.

When they're threatened by temperatures, radiation, or other dangerous conditions, water bears go into a self-protective state of suspended animation known as biostasis and it was that mechanism that interested molecular biologist and UW assistant professor Thomas Boothby, an expert in the field of tardigrades.

In the UW study, published in the journal Protein Science, the molecular biology team looked into a tardigrade protein known as CAHS D, which is key to the tiny animal's suspended animation process. Using lab-grown human kidney cells, the scientists found that when they introduced CAHS D to the human cells, it resulted in a gel-like consistency that could help scientists better understand tardigrade biostasis and eventually,perhaps help humans learn how to hack our own genes into performing better under stress, too.

"Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades," Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, a senior research scientist at UW's molecular biology department and the lead author of the study, said in the school's statement. "Just like tardigrades, when you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades' abilities to the human cells."

Fascinatingly, once the researchers removed so-called "osmotic stress" factors from the human cells, which could include dehydrating or otherwise applying harsh conditions to them, they went back to normal and the gels conferred by the tardigrade proteins disappeared.

"When the stress is relieved," Boothby said in the UW press release, "the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism."

While there's certainly a long way to go before scientists figure out how to produce such biostasis effects in living humans, the findings are intriguing and just might be a pathway to finding how to survive the harshening conditions our of dying planet.

More on cells: Scientist Who Gene-Edited Human Babies Back in the Lab Again After Prison Release

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Pregnant Women’s Diet Affects Facial Features of Their Children, Scientists Find – Futurism

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Do you have a big nose you despise? Or pointy features you find annoying?

Well, blame your mother and her late night pregnancy cravings for chocolate ice cream dusted with Flaming Hot Cheetos.

A new study in Nature Communications suggests that your mother's diet during pregnancy is asignificant factor in how your facial features are shaped due to a complex dance between gene expression and how much protein she ate while you were a fetus swimming inside her tummy putting a new spin on the phrase "you are what you eat."

An international team of scientists came to this conclusion by collecting and transcribing genes responsible for human facial formation, identifying from this cohort protein complexes called the mTORC1 pathway that they surmised could fine-tune the features of your face.

In order to see if the mTORC1 pathway does indeed influence facial features, the scientists took genetically modified mice and zebra fish where they could track mTORC1 activity and fed them varying diets.

From there, they found that a high protein diet influenced mTORC1 activity by leading to more prominent facial features, while lower protein diets led to smaller facial features.In sum, they wrote, material protein intake is correlated to "subtle, but distinct changes in the craniofacial shape of the embryos."

It makes sense, from a high-level view, that a mother's diet during pregnancy would play a role in how babies turn out looking. After all, we already know that when mothers drink alcohol during pregnancy, this leads to infants with certain features that indicate fetal alcohol syndrome.

Needless to say, though: if you're pregnant, just eat a reasonable diet and whatever your doctor recommends. It's not worth risking your health or that of your unborn child for some hypothetical face gains.

More on pregnancy: People Unexpectedly Getting Pregnant on Ozempic and Wegovy

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