Musk says under 5 percent of SpaceX is working on Mars mission, 2024 launch is ‘optimistic’
“Less than 5 percent of SpaceX resources are working on planetary transport stuff,” he said. “So it is very much a secondary or tertiary priority to understanding exactly what happened on the last mission.”

“The pace of progress on Mars depends upon the pace of progress of SpaceX,” he explained. “Our success rate with Falcon 9 is roughly 93 percent — it needs to be a lot better. We need to get Falcon Heavy launched finally, Dragon 2, and make sure we manage the company such that we’ve got sufficient cash flow and funds while it’s developing — and of course, I will supplement that personally.”

SpaceX's plan to colonize Mars, explained
Elon Musk gave the biggest talk of his life in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he detailed his plans to set up a self-sustaining colony of 1 million people on Mars.

Cancer therapy that engineers patient white blood cells to recognize and destroy tumours
47% of the patients experienced a complete remission, 5x better than the current standard of care.
Image

Continue to Next Level?
Prepare yourself for this one...

Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is nestled within a natural basin in China's remote southwestern Guizhou province.

Image
In The Not So Distant Future, Glow-In-The-Dark Trees Could Replace Street Lights
According to Daan Roosegaarde, the future of art and design is awash with spectacular innovation.

From giant vacuum cleaning systems aimed at eradicating smog to “smart” apparel that becomes translucent when the wearer is turned on, the Dutch artist/designer/architect has helped imagine some hair-raising projects that could propel us into a new era of aesthetics.

Image
NASA can't explain the 'impossible' cloud that's been spotted over Titan
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft just spotted a mysterious ice cloud over Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and its appearance challenges everything we thought we knew about the moon’s atmosphere.

First spotted decades ago by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, the cloud has reappeared for the second time, and it's somehow made up of compounds that barely exist in Titan’s atmosphere.

So where did it come from? "The appearance of this ice cloud goes against everything we know about the way clouds form on Titan," said lead researcher Carrie Anderson from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Synthetic blood vessel breakthrough could transform children's heart surgery
A breakthrough in the manufacture of synthetic blood vessels has raised hopes that children born with serious heart defects could be treated in a single operation instead of multiple rounds of open heart surgery.

The landmark work comes from researchers in the US who made synthetic arteries that grow when they are implanted in the body, unlike the standard tissue grafts which are now used to correct faulty blood vessels.

Many children who are born with heart defects face a series of major operations over the course of their lives because the implants - known as conduits - that are used to replace their malformed blood vessels, do not grow in line with their heart and the rest of the body.

Source
@EverythingScience

Scientists testing HIV cure report 'remarkable' progress after patient breakthrough
UK scientists and clinicians working on a groundbreaking trial to test a possible cure for HIV infection say they have made remarkable progress after a test patient showed no sign of the virus following treatment.

The research, being carried out by five of Britain’s top universities with NHS support, is combining standard antiretroviral drugs with a drug that reactivates dormant HIV and a vaccine that induces the immune system to destroy the infected cells.

Antiretoviral drugs alone are highly effective at stopping the virus from reproducing but do not eradicate the disease, so must be taken for life.

Fifty patients are taking part in the trial. Early tests on the first person to complete the treatment show no signs of the virus in his blood, the Sunday Times reported.

Source
@EverythingScience

HIV cure close after disease 'vanishes' from blood of British man
A British man could become the first person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by a team of scientists from five UK universities.

The 44-year-old is one of 50 people currently trialling a treatment which targets the disease even in its dormant state.

Scientists told The Sunday Times that presently the virus is completely undetectable in the man’s blood and if it remains that way it will be the first complete cure.

"This is one of the first serious attempts at a full cure for HIV,” said Mark Samuels, managing director of the National Institute for Health Research Office for Clinical Research Infrastructure.

“We are exploring the real possibility of curing HIV. This is a huge challenge and it's still early days but the progress has been remarkable."

Source
@EverythingScience

Earth's atmosphere may never drop below 400 ppm CO2 again
The world has crossed a major greenhouse-gas milestone, and it may never turn back.

The Manua Loa Observatory in Hawaii has maintained a continuous record of atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels since 1958.

Right now we're at the low point in that cycle, just at the end of September. And, according to a post from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (which we first saw covered over at Motherboard), atmospheric CO2 is holding at 401 parts per million. That's the first time in recorded history that the annual carbon cycle has bottomed out at over 400 ppm. And it means the 2016 carbon trough is about 25% higher than the 1958 peak — just under 320 ppm.

Source
@EverythingScience