MicroRNAs.

Exploring the solar system.

“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

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1. Milton has rapidly intensified into a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, as of Sunday afternoon. The storm is expected to continue to strengthen before making landfall as a major hurricane threat on the west coast of Florida sometime on Wednesday. The National Hurricane Center says that "there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning late Tuesday or Wednesday." (Source: weather.com. italics mine)

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2. NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration broke yet another record for laser communications this summer by sending a laser signal from Earth to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles (460 million kilometers) away. That’s the same distance between our planet and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart. “The milestone is significant. Laser communication requires a very high level of precision, and before we launched with Psyche, we didn’t know how much performance degradation we would see at our farthest distances,” said Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Now the techniques we use to track and point have been verified, confirming that optical communications can be a robust and transformative way to explore the solar system.” (Source: jpl.nasa.gov)