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Day: March 10, 2020

Odds and Ends 

Man Asks NASA If They Still Punish Animals By Sending Them To Space, Gets Brilliant Response

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A man actually received a response for a brilliant spoof letter to NASA. Twitter comedian Sir Michael sent a letter to NASA headquarters to ask whether they still send animals to space as a punishment for misbehavior, before including a list of animals (and their crimes) that he thinks should also be banished to space. “Dear sir/madam,” the letter reads, “My name is Michael and I have been reading on Facebook about early NASA missions in which animals were sent to space as punishment for misbehavior. How come you stopped doing…

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is coming to TC Sessions: Space 2020

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This year marks our first-ever TC Sessions: Space event, and what better way to kick things off than with the head of NASA: Administrator Jim Bridenstine will join us onstage on June 25 in LA. NASA has been more open than ever before to working with startups and entrepreneurs, and we’ll hear directly from the administrator why that’s the case, and what kind of opportunities might be open to founders in the future. Administrator Bridenstine took over leading the U.S. science and space agency in 2018, and has been leading…

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DSP Concepts raises $14.5M for its Audio Weaver platform

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DSP Concepts — a startup whose Audio Weaver software is used by companies as varied as Tesla, Porsche, GoPro and Braun Audio — is announcing that it has raised $14.5 million in Series B funding. The startup’s goal, as explained to me by CEO Chin Beckmann and CTO Paul Beckmann (yep, they’re a husband-and-wife founding team), is to create the standard framework that companies use to develop their audio processing software. To that end, Chin told me they were “picky about who we wanted on the B round, we wanted…

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Gentle Giant Lays Down to Let Human Friend Treat His Injured Eye

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A touching moment was caught on film at an Elephant Sanctuary in Botswana, as Jabu lets his human friend treat his injured eye with an antibiotic ointment. Elephants are so majestic. Read more: https://twistedsifter.com/videos/elephant-lays-down-to-let-human-friend-treat-his-injured-eye/

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Just One Trip On Magic Mushrooms Can Improve Long-Term Mindfulness

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Just one trip on magic mushrooms could be enough to experience a long-term increase in mindfulness and openness, according to a new study. Using brain scans, they were even able to pinpoint the serotonin receptor in the brain that appeared to be responsible for these long-term feel-good changes. While only a small study, this new research is one of the first to confirm the long-touted idea that just a single psychedelic experience with magic mushrooms can help to improve peoples’ mindfulness. Reported in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers from Copenhagen…

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Hundreds Of New Viruses With Enormous Genomes Blur The Boundaries Of Life

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Defining life is hard. Plants, animals, and amoebas certainly fit, but what about viruses or prions? For those who put viruses on the non-living side of that division, things just got a bit awkward with the discovery of hundreds of viruses whose genome resembles bacteria. Bacteriophages are bacteria-infecting viruses. Some have been used in place of antibiotics, but their diversity is so great we’ve barely scratched the surface. Now, a study published in Nature has turned up 351 bacteriophage species with genomes at least four times as large as most members of their class, almost four…

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