Gwyneth Paltrow said she has experienced benefits from the ancient practice.
What you’re looking at is a Stanford Torus. It’s one of the many types of designs that have been proposed for future space habitats.
This specific picture is one of the most iconic images of this bit of scientific/engineering speculation. If you have a story about future living in space, chances are this one will be high on the list of images to use. Case in point, I just read a recent NASA news-item discussing their new program to develop future space habitation and propulsion technologies. Of course, they used this image at the top of the article.
A recent study in JAMA reviews data on measles and pertussis cases and previous studies of these cases, finding that vaccine refusal does contribute to outbreaks and puts others at higher risk of infection.
This looks like some particularly nasty room in a torture chamber, doesn’t it? The only thing this stuff tortures though is sound and radio waves perhaps. What you’re looking at is called anechoic foam. It is designed to minimize reflections of incident sound and electromagnetic frequencies. The specific foam in the image above is from
J. Craig Venter is in the news again. He and his team at Synthetic Genomics have created a synthetic organism with a viable genome smaller than anything that evolved the old-fashioned way.