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CAPE CANAVERAL: The first private space station crew was introduced Tuesday: Three men who are each paying $55 million to fly on a SpaceX rocket. They’ll be led by a former NASA astronaut now working for Axiom Space, the Houston company that arranged the trip for next January. “This is the first private flight to the International Space Station. It’s never been done before,” said Axiom’s chief executive and president Mike Suffredini, a former space station program manager for NASA. While mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria is well known in space circles, “the other three guys are just people who want to be able to go to space, and we’re providing that opportunity,” Suffredini told The Associated Press. The first crew will spend eight days at the space station, and will take one or two days to get there aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule following liftoff from Cape Canaveral. Russia has been in the off-the-planet tourism business for years, selling rides to the International Space...

BUENOS AIRES, JANUARY 22 Scientists have unearthed massive, 98-million-year-old fossils in southwest Argentina they say may have belonged to the largest dinosaur ever discovered. Human-sized pieces of fossilised bone belonging to the giant sauropod appear to be 10-20 per cent larger than those attributed to Patagotitan mayorum, the biggest dinosaur ever identified, according to a statement from the National University of La Matanza’s CTYS scientific agency. Sauropods were enormous long-necked, longtailed, plant-eating dinosaurs — the largest terrestrial creatures to ever have lived. Among them, Patagotitan mayorum, also from Argentina, weighed in at about 70 tonnes and was 40 metres long, or about the length of four school buses. Alejandro Otero of Argentina’s Museo de La Plata is working on piecing together a likeness of the new dinosaur from two-dozen vertebrae and bits of pelvic bone uncovered so far. He has published a paper on the unidentified dinosaur for the scientific jour...

BERLIN: German researchers have enabled mice paralysed after spinal cord injuries to walk again, re-establishing a neural link hitherto considered irreparable in mammals by using a designer protein injected into the brain. A paralysed mouse is removed from its enclosure in a lab at Ruhr University, where scientists discovered a way to restore the ability to walk in mice that had been paralysed after a complete spinal cord injury, in Bochum, Germany, on January 21, 2021. Photo: Reuters Spinal cord injuries in humans, often caused by sports or traffic accidents, leave them paralysed because not all of the nerve fibres that carry information between muscles and the brain are able to grow back. But the researchers from Ruhr University Bochum managed to stimulate the paralysed mice’s nerve cells to regenerate using a designer protein. “The special thing about our study is that the protein is not only used to stimulate those nerve cells that produce it themselves, but that it is also c...