Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin What are the risks of radiotherapy? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Gary Larson, Board Certified Radiation Oncologist, on Quora: There are multiple potential risks of Radiation Therapy

Two weather-related headlines caught my eye this week. One was about the Polar Vortex. The Polar Vortex is often misunderstood and over-hyped, but all signs indicate that it has split and is likely to open the gateway for frigid temperatures in the eastern United States. Speaking of frigid, the other headline was about the potential for

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Saturn’s rings are one of our solar system’s magnificent sights, but may be a relatively recent addition, according to data obtained from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft before the robotic explorer’s 2017 death plunge into the giant gas planet. FILE PHOTO: These Hubble Space Telescope images of Saturn, shown in this handout composite photo released

A cotton seedling that sprouted on the moon has been left to die as China’s historic lunar lander continues a freezing night-time nap that will last as long as two earth weeks, scientists said. The Chinese space agency announced earlier this week that the seed had germinated inside a special canister aboard the Chang’e-4 probe,

AT2018cow erupted in or near a galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, which is located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. This zoomed-in image shows the location of the ‘Cow’ in the galaxy. Its nature is still debated.Sloan Digital Sky Survey The Universe is an ever-changing place, particularly if you look at it

Pictured here is a man injecting sperm into a capillary tube. (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Here is one way to make your back pain seem less of a problem. Create another medical problem. The Irish Medical Journal included a case report of a 33-year-old male patient who was suffering from continuing severe lower back pain after lifting a

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin A model of a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur, center, and a robotic garbage can stand in the lobby of the Henn na Hotel Maihama Tokyo Bay, operated by H.I.S. Hotel Holdings Co., a unit of H.I.S. Co., during a media preview in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan, on Wednesday, March

Good news for train passengers: the Indian Railways has linked its locomotives via ISRO satellites, making it easy to track trains and automatically feed the control charts about trains’ arrival and departure, officials said. “A new beginning has been made in the new year: the train movement information is acquired and fed to the control charts

GENEVA (Reuters) – A proposed 100-km particle accelerator under Geneva has joined an international quest to develop the successor to the Large Hadron Collider to help unlock humankind’s knowledge of matter. FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment during a media visit at the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in

A USGS map showing the epicentre of the earthquake, as well as how far out shaking was felt.USGS Good morning, California! If you’re reading this from the West Coast, and you happen to live in Piedmont in said state, then you don’t need me to explain that you just experienced an earthquake. For everyone else:

Are we poised to witness the evolution of evolution itself?Depositphotos enhanced by CogWorld Does it seem like only yesterday that you were hearing about smart phones for the first time? How about preparing for Y2K? Before we ever realized it, 2019 snuck up on us. And in less than a year, we will be entering

design thinkingstoryblocks Over the past few years, design thinking has quickly gained momentum in the business world. Some of the world’s leading brands—the likes of Apple, Google, HBO, Samsung, World Bank, and General Electric—have embraced design thinking as a means of optimizing product innovation. At its core, design thinking is a methodology for creative problem

China’s second lunar rover Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit-2), which is the first-ever rover to drive on the Moon’s far side, will face considerable challenges brought by complicated terrain in its future exploration, Chinese space experts have said. On January 3, the Chang’e-4 probe, including a lander and a rover, touched down on the Von Karman Crater

The USS Discovery, NCC-1031, is the first Star Trek ship we’ve seen to be capable of traveling via Spore Drive, which is faster than both impulse engines and warp drive. The idea of the Spore Drive may be physically possible in the Universe if extra spatial dimensions exist, but it probably won’t be powered by

Revolutionary new steam-powered space technology should enable future space probes to hop from asteroid to asteroid; around the surface of the Moon or Mars; or even on a far-flung Kuiper Belt object for decades at a time.  It’s the product of a technology development partnership between Honeybee Robotics, the University of Central Florida (UCF), and

OSLO (Reuters) – Almost 16,000 desalination plants worldwide produce bigger-than-expected flows of highly salty waste water and toxic chemicals that are damaging the environment, a U.N.-backed study said on Monday. FILE PHOTO: Workers walk outside a desalination plant, south of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 2011. REUTERS/Fahad Shadeed Desalination plants pump out 142 million cubic meters

A flock of flying mosquitoes. Drunk blood and hungry mosquitoes. Silhouette, graphic image. Vector, isolated on white background Photo Credit: Getty Royalty-FreeGetty Royalty-Free In many parts of the U.S., the frigid month of January isn’t the time most people think about mosquitoes. However, with the U.S. government shutdown already the longest in U.S. history (as

Elon Musk is prone to tweeting out artistic renderings of the rockets and spacecraft he intends to build, offering his followers a glimpse of the future he imagines for humanity on other planets. So when he recently posted a photo of a launchpad walkway leading out to his rocket and spacecraft, Musk felt compelled to

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Illustration of two black holes merging, of comparable mass to what LIGO first saw. At the centers of some galaxies, supermassive binary black holes may exist, creating a signal far stronger than this illustration shows, but with a frequency that LIGO is not sensitive to.SXS, the

At the high temperatures achieved in the very young Universe, not only can particles and photons be spontaneously created, given enough energy, but also antiparticles and unstable particles as well, resulting in a primordial particle-and-antiparticle soup. Yet even with these conditions, only a few specific states, or particles, can emerge.Brookhaven National Laboratory What is our

See no bad headlines, hear no bad headlines, speak no bad headlines.Free for commercial use, via Pixabay.com Ah, bad science headlines. We’ve all seen them. We all know them. They’re used to drive traffic and eyeballs to otherwise mundane stories and articles. We can’t really blame the journalists or the publishers – they need ad

An international team of astronomers, using NASA telescopes, have captured the first ever image of a star that collapsed to form a compact object, and are debating whether it is a black hole or a neutron star. NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope in Hawaii picked up a brief and unusual burst in the

HBO just reminded us that Winter is here. In its new trailer for 2019, fans of Game of Thrones were only offered a few seconds of what will happen in the coming season, the show’s final one. We see a meeting of fire and ice, dragons and wolves, as Daenerys Targaryen with Jon Snow meets

A view of the Brooks Range from Dalton Highway in Alaska, USA photo credit: GettyGetty In recent years, two fields with different approaches to understanding the past—genetics and archaeology—have been somewhat out of synch with each other in their models for the initial peopling of the Americas. Genetic evidence unambiguously shows that the first peoples

Part of the overall panorama.CNSA NASA astronaut David Scott, the seventh person to walk on the Moon and, funnily enough, the first to drive around on it, is one of four people still left alive that can describe such an experience. Per BBC, he said that he’s often asked about what it was like. “I

India’s maiden manned space mission ”Gaganyaan” is set for December 2021 launch and is likely to include a woman astronaut, Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman K Sivan said Friday. Gearing up for the mission, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ISRO has set up a new centre to facilitate the manned voyage involving a

Not hearing men may seem like a good thing in some cases. But it can also represent actual hearing loss. (Photo: Getty Images)Getty What if you couldn’t hear what men say? You may think that all you will is just some “sup bro’s” and cheesy pick-up lines such ““if you were a transformer you’d be

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Iridium LaunchASSOCIATED PRESS On Friday morning, SpaceX successfully made its first launch of 2019. Later Friday, though, the company also said that it will be laying off 10% of its approximately 6,000-strong workforce in order to become a “leaner company.” This year marks a pivotal time

OSLO (Reuters) – Rapid shifts in the Earth’s north magnetic pole are forcing researchers to make an unprecedented early update to a model that helps navigation by ships, planes and submarines in the Arctic, scientists said. FILE PHOTO: The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) is seen over a mountain camp north of the Arctic Circle, near

Our cognition is under attackMickey McManus and Neta Tamir By Marco Annunziata and Mickey McManus The rise of complexity and the fall of decision-making We have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of complexity that exists in the world. Mickey McManus’s book Trillions noted that as early as 2010, the semiconductor industry had reached the point

The launch of India’s second Moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, is planned for the middle of April this year, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K Sivan announced Friday. ISRO had earlier said Chandrayaan-2 will be launched in a window between January-February 16 this year. The mission, costing nearly Rs. 800 crores, is an advanced version of

Rocket launchSpacebuzz Last December, I published here on Forbes and subsequently on Kinder World an article on why — if we want to tackle today’s global challenges — we need to start thinking of planet Earth as a single entity, beyond the narrowness of national borders. Ruminating over these issues, I bumped into a freshly-launched Dutch organization called

2018 is expected to have been the warmest year on record for Earth’s oceans.Getty The ocean is heating up faster than previously thought, according to new research out this week, and that might help explain the recent spate of historic hurricanes and decline in a number of marine species. Basically, the report published in Friday’s

REM sleep is not fully understood, but a way to think about it is that the visual system is operating on “free-cycling autopilot”, unconstrained by the outside world. Think for a moment about freeform dancing, “dancing like no one is watching.” Or similarly, think about how a baby moves when it is on its back

NASA’s first asteroid-sampling mission OSIRIS-REx has captured an incredible image of the Earth, the media reported. The image was captured on December 19, 2018, days before Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) went into orbit around Bennu on New Year’s Eve, the Daily Mail reported.  Bennu is the smallest ever celestial body to

The National Hockey League team in Tampa Bay is called the Lightning for good reason. Central Florida has long been the lightning capital of the United States, and 2018 was no different (sort of). Vaisala recently issued its Annual Lightning Report, and not surprisingly, Florida had the highest mean cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes per square mile

Hyundai’s Elevate conceptHyundai Cradle I’ll admit I’m one of those people that has looked derisively at the AT-AT Walkers in “Star Wars” and other weird walking vehicles from various science fiction franchises in the past. I mean, walking is mechanically more complicated, slower and less efficient than a rolling wheel – hence the dearth of

Sunrise over an industrial factory. Source: Getty.Getty There is a striking disparity between Eastern and Western Europe- a revitalised Iron Curtain has emerged. Statistics show that Eastern European and Balkan countries suffer the highest air-pollution related deaths in Europe. Multiple efforts to map European pollution confirm the same thing: the former Yugoslavia and Eastern Bloc

Genetic evidence has shown that despite its seemingly harsh conditions, bacteria on the International Space Station (ISS) are adapting to survive, and not turning into dangerous, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, researchers said. The ISS houses thousands of different microbes which have travelled into space either on astronauts or in cargo.  With many space agencies gearing up to

Artificial human heartsNovoheart For decades, pharmaceutical companies have used animal testing and clinical trials to determine the effectiveness and safety of new drug formulas. But these methods have proved to be costly, dangerous and highly inefficient. To fix this, global biotech firm Novoheart has developed the world’s first miniature beating human hearts using stem cells.

GettyGetty Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid slammed into Earth nearby modern day Cancun. The asteroid triggered an unimaginable mile-high tsunami that swept across Earth’s oceans. The Chicxulub asteroid was 9-miles wide and changed the course of life on Earth dramatically. Geologists mark the asteroid impact with a change in

Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Tsunami aftermath in Aceh, Indonesia, December 2004. Credit Wikipedia/AusAID CC BY 2.0.AusAID Geological evidence discovered in 2013 suggested that an earthquake along the Manila Trench caused a tsunami that inundated the coastal areas of China. Geological surveys done by Chinese geologist discovered large boulders on Dongdao,

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a third small planet outside our solar system, scientists report. The new planet named HD 21749b, orbits a bright, nearby dwarf star about 53 light years away in the constellation Reticulum. It appears to have the longest orbital period of the three planets so far identified by

While you are enjoying a freshly poured pint of Guinness, the last thing you might be thinking about is statistics. Statistics is an important branch of mathematics that have recently re-incarnated into fields like data science and artificial intelligence. This is a story about how a brewer in the Guinness factory in Dublin, Ireland inventing

LONDON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – A leading geneticist who ran the conference where a Chinese scientist said he had made the world’s first “gene-edited” babies condemned him on Monday for potentially jeopardizing lives and having no biology training. FILE PHOTO: Scientist He Jiankui attends the International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of

This composite photo shows the moon above various stages of a lunar eclipse.Getty There’s long been anxiety over total lunar eclipses, also referred to as ‘blood moons‘ for the reddish hue that the shadow of the Earth casts on the full moon during the not-really-that-rare event (it happens about every one to three years). Often

Falcon 9 Rocket LaunchGetty Why aren’t NASA and SpaceX collaborating? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by C Stuart Hardwick, Award-Winning Scifi Author, on Quora: Why aren’t NASA and SpaceX collaborating? Never ask “why” until you know “whether.”

People hold placards to protest against claims made by speakers, discrediting theories of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, at the 106th Indian Science Congress in Kolkata, India, January 7, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer MUMBAI (Reuters) – Indian scientists have protested about claims made at a local science conference that rubbish the work of some of the world’s