Short Takes – 8-7-25

Virgin Galactic slips schedule for commercial spaceplane service. SpaceNews.com article. Pull quote: “In additional to using LV-X to ferry spaceplanes, Virgin is exploring what other potential interest there would be in a plane capable of carrying heavy loads to high altitudes for extended periods. Colglazier announced on the call that the company is working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a feasibility study on potential uses of the plane, but said the company will disclose details of that study later.”

The US can get to the moon first — and still lose. SpaceNews.com article. Pull quote: “We need to distinguish between symbolic milestones and strategic ones. If we continue treating space as a collection of individual programs, each meant to do something first instead of a unified strategy, we will defeat ourselves from within. China doesn’t need to out-innovate us. It just needs to outlast our attention span.”

These genes can have the opposite effects depending on which parent they came from. Nature.com article. Pull quote: “The team determined the parental origin of genes for nearly 109,000 people whose genomic data are included in the UK Biobank. Among those, they identified roughly 30 variants that had differing effects on growth and metabolism, including 19 that had a ‘bipolar’ effect, meaning that it would have opposite effects depending on which parent it came from. Around half of these bipolar variants were located on chromosome 11, which hosts a large cluster of imprinted genes associated with controlling growth. One of these variants increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 14% when inherited from the father but decreased it by 9% when inherited from the mother.”

New hope for Alzheimer’s: lithium supplement reverses memory loss in mice. Nature.com article. Pull quote: “The paper reports that analyses of human brain tissue and a series of mouse experiments point to a consistent pattern: when lithium concentrations in the brain decline, memory loss tends to develop, as do neurological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease called amyloid plaques and tau tangles. The study also found evidence in mice that a specific type of lithium supplement undoes these neurological changes and rolls back memory loss, restoring the brain to a younger, healthier state.”

Some probiotics could feed, rather than fend off, infections. ScienceNews.com article. Pull quote: “A single dose of Lactobacillus acidophilus bacteria, a popular probiotic component found naturally in milk and yogurt, can make it easier for Clostridioides difficile to take hold in the guts of mice that were recently treated with antibiotics, researchers report July 21 in mBio. By contrast, another strain of probiotic microbe called Lactobacillus gasseri Lg-36 helped mice resist infection by C. difficile, a pathogen that can cause severe and sometimes life-threatening diarrheal disease after taking antibiotics.”