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Submission + - An Unexpected New Lung Function Has Been Found - They Make Blood (sciencealert.com) 1

schwit1 writes: Researchers have discovered that the lungs play a far more complex role in mammalian bodies than we thought, with new evidence revealing that they don't just facilitate respiration — they also play a key role in blood production.

In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals' circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco also discovered a previously unknown pool of blood stem cells that makes this happen inside the lung tissue — cells that were incorrectly assumed to mainly reside in bone marrow.

"This finding definitely suggests a more sophisticated view of the lungs — that they're not just for respiration, but also a key partner in formation of crucial aspects of the blood," says one of the researchers, Mark R. Looney.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Who is wowsignal?

My name is Paul Carr, and I am the writer, producer and host of the Wow! Signal Podcast and the related blog Dream of the Open Channel. We cover topics related to the future of humanity and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Guests on the podcast have included such luminaries as Seth Shostak, David Grinspoon, Nikola Danaylov, and Geoffrey Landis, with many more to come.

Submission + - The Simian Army and The Antifragile Organization (acm.org)

CowboyRobot writes: ACM has an article about how Netflix conducts its resilience testing. Instead of the GameDays used by sites such as Amazon and Google, Netflix uses what they call The Simian Army, based on the philosophy that "Resilience can be improved by increasing the frequency and variety of failure and evolving the system to deal better with each newfound failure, thereby increasing antifragility." While GameDay exercises are like a firedrill, with scheduled exercises where failure is manually introduced or simulated, the Simian Army relies on failure in the live environment induced by autonomous agents known as "monkeys". Chaos Monkey randomly terminates virtual instances in a production environment that are serving live customer traffic. Chaos Gorilla causes an entire Amazon Availability Zone to fail. And Chaos Kong will take down an entire region of zones. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and Netflix hopes that by constantly protecting itself from internal onslaught, they will become increasingly "antifragile — growing stronger from each successive stressor, disturbance, and failure."

Submission + - India's first navigation satellite soars to success

An anonymous reader writes: India’s first dedicated navigation satellite, the IRNSS-1A, developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation, was successfully put in orbit on Monday night.

The launch vehicle, PSLV-C22, bearing the 1,425-kg navigation satellite, blasted off the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here at the scheduled lift-off time of 11.41 p.m. Read more here:

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/indias-first-navigation-satellite-soars-to-success/article4870587.ece

and here:

http://forbesindia.com/article/real-issue/isros-very-own-gps-is-ready/35511/0

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