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QS World Rankings of Top Universities 2021
As you are aware QS is an organization that quantifies the performance of universities across the world and based upon certain categories QS ranks the universities in each category. Of course, on overall score universities are globally ranked as well.
Please find the QS rankings of universities for 2021 in the link below:
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2021
As expected the first 5 universities with the highest ranking as per QS 2021 results are:
- MIT (USA)
- Stanford University (USA)
- Harvard University (USA)
- Caltech (USA)
- Oxford University (UK)
The First Commercial Manned Spaceflight Launches Successfully
The history of mankind has changed forever with the launch of the first commercial manned spaceflight by SpaceX launches successfully into Space. Now 21stcentury will become the century of spaceflight and space exploration. Congratulations to SpaceX and to NASA for making history.
Long Space Flights Can Increase the Volume of the Brain of Astronauts
Astronauts’ brains increase in volume after long space flights, causing pressure to build up inside their heads. This may explain why some astronauts experience worsened vision after prolonged periods in space.
“This raises additional concerns for long-duration interplanetary travel, such as the future mission to Mars,” says Larry Kramer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, who led the study.
Kramer and his colleagues scanned the brains of 11 astronauts before they spent about six months on the International Space Station, and at six points over the year after they returned to Earth. They found that all the astronauts had increased brain volume – including white matter, grey matter and cerebrospinal fluid around the brain – after returning from space.
Under normal gravity, it is thought that fluid in the brain naturally moves downwards when we stand upright. But there is evidence that microgravity prevents this, resulting in accumulation of fluid in the brain and skull.
The astronauts’ brain volume increased by 2 per cent on average and the increases were still present one year after they returned to Earth, which could result in higher intracranial pressure, Kramer says. He suspects this might press on the optic nerve, potentially explaining the vision problems frequently reported by astronauts.
Kramer and his team also observed that part of the brain called the pituitary gland was deformed in six out of the 11 astronauts. These results add to a body of evidence suggesting that brain structure can be altered after space flight.
“This study is important because it provides data, for the first time in NASA astronauts, demonstrating the persistence of structural brain changes even up to one year following return to Earth,” says Donna Roberts at the Medical University of South Carolina.
“We are currently working on methods to counteract the changes we are observing in the brain using artificial gravity,” says Kramer. These methods to pull blood back towards the feet could include a human-sized centrifuge that would spin a person around at high speed, or a vacuum chamber around the lower half of the body.
“Hopefully one of these or other methods will be tested in microgravity and show efficacy,” he says.
First American Manned Flight from American Soil since 2011 to Takeoff on May 27
Since 2011, American astronauts will be launched into space for the first time since 2011 when the Shuttle program was discontinued. Now with NASA and SpaceX Collaboration, American Astronauts will be launched from American Soil on May 27,2020.Russia’s Roscosmos sees no need to postpone ISS crew’s return to Earth over coronavirus
MOSCOW, March 26. /TASS/. Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos considers it inexpedient to postpone the return of the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) to Earth over the coronavirus and the quarantine imposed by Kazakhstan, the Roscosmos press office told TASS on Thursday.
You can read more here at my site Aerospace Lectures News
Old gas remnant from Uranus found in vintage Voyager 2 data
Buried inside data that NASA’s iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet’s gassy atmosphere.
That’s according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the spacecraft’s 45-hour journey past Uranus.
The tiny wobble in the Voyager 2 data represents something much larger since the spacecraft was flying so fast. Specifically, the scientists behind the new research believe the zigzag marks a plasmoid, a type of structure that wasn’t understood particularly well at the time of the flyby in January 1986.
But by now, plasmoids have earned scientists’ respect. A plasmoid is a massive bubble of plasma, which is a soup of charged particles. Plasmoids can break off from the tip of the sleeve of magnetism surrounding a planet like a teardrop.
Scientists have studied these structures at Earth and nearby planets, but never at Uranus or its neighbor Neptune, since Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to date ever to visit those planets.
Scientists want to know about plasmoids because these structures can pull charged particles out of a planet’s atmosphere and fling them into space. And if you change a planet’s atmosphere, you change the planet itself. And Uranus’ situation is particularly complicated because the planet rotates on its side and its magnetic field is skewed from both that axis and the plane all the planets lie in
SpaceX, NASA Aim For Historic Crew Launch In Mid-May Despite Coronavirus Outbreak
The first crewed orbital launch from American soil is scheduled to lift off just two months from now, despite the coronavirus outbreak.
Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, NASA officials confirmed in a media advisory on Wednesday (March 18).
The flight, which will employ a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. KSC was the jumping-off point for the last homegrown orbital human spaceflight — STS-135, whose July 2011 launch kicked off the final mission of NASA’s space shuttle program. (Suborbital flight is a different story: Virgin Galactic has launched two crewed test missions to suborbital space, in December 2018 and February 2019.)