“Air France announced plans Sept. 26 to begin rolling out free Starlink broadband services across its entire fleet in the summer, becoming the latest major airline to partner with SpaceX’s low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation.
The airline did not provide a timeline for connecting its more than 200, mostly Airbus long-haul and regional aircraft to Starlink in a brief news release.”
From Air France.
“Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt.
The remains are 4,800 to 4,500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as of people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature.”
From Nature.
“Blue Origin is making steady progress toward the second launch of its New Glenn rocket, which could occur sometime this fall.
The company already ignited the second stage of this rocket, in a pre-launch test, in April. And two sources say the first stage for this launch is in the final stages of preparation at the company’s facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida…
This Mars mission was originally supposed to be on New Glenn’s first flight in October 2024 but was taken off that flight due to uncertainty in the debut launch date. The issue was that once the two spacecraft were fueled with hypergolic propellant, they needed to be launched within a certain time period.
Had ESCAPADE launched last October, the spacecraft would now be nearing Mars and beginning scientific operations. However, because they missed the Mars “window” last year, they will have to wait for the next one to open late this year. Thus, the nominal plan involves a launch this fall, with the spacecraft now not reaching Mars until later in 2027.”
From Ars Technica.
Cardiovascular Business | Health & Medical Care
“A team of surgeons with Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston has made history, performing what is believed to be the first fully robotic heart transplant in the United States.
The procedure occurred in March 2025. Kenneth K. Liao, MD, PhD, chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and circulatory support at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, and colleagues completed the transplant using an advanced Da Vinci surgical system.
The patient’s chest did not need to be opened all for the procedure—everything was done through small incisions.”
From Cardiovascular Business.
“From 1 July, researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be required to make their scientific papers available to read for free as soon as they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. That’s according to the agency’s latest public-access policy, aimed at making federally funded research accessible to taxpayers.”
“In a laboratory outside Cambridge sits a remarkable ‘biological computer’. Its 200,000 human brain cells, grown in the lab, lie on silicon circuitry that communicates their synchronised electrical activity on a screen to the outside world.
The CL1 device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed by Australian start-up Cortical Labs with the UK’s bit.bio, in a bid to create ‘synthetic biological intelligence’ — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum…
Early applications of CL1 are in neuroscience and pharmaceutical research, discovering how different chemicals and drug candidates affect the brain cells’ information processing.”
From Nature.
