A New Mission

New Year, Historical Mission, New Responsibility.

We remembered Prof. Chuan‐Han Feng, the former Editor‐in‐Chief’s words: “The journal is mainly devoted to international communication, reporting the recent progress and achievements in preventive and clinical medicine and biomedical sciences, with experience characteristic of China in particular, to be shared by the world medical family.”[1] What Prof. Feng said 10 years ago is still the main m...

New Worlds Observer Mission Design

New Worlds Observer is an external starshade mission designed to observe Earth-like planets around nearby stars. A telescope spacecraft operates in the “shadow” cast by a starshade spacecraft, located tens of thousands of kilometers away. We explore the requirements that these two free-flying spacecraft place on the orbital, propulsion, control, and communication systems and some baseline solut...

The Biological Oxidant and Life Detection (BOLD) Mission: An outline for a new mission to Mars

The Viking mission was the only mission to date that conducted life detection experiments. It revealed ambiguous and still controversial results. New findings and hypotheses urge a re-evaluation of the Viking results and a re-evaluation of the evidence for the possible presence of life on Mars in general. Recent findings of abundant water ice on Mars, the presence of liquid contemporary water o...

A Critical Need, An Ambitious Mission, A New Magazine

Gramicidin A: A New Mission for an Old Antibiotic

Gramicidin A (GA) is a channel-forming ionophore that renders biological membranes permeable to specific cations which disrupts cellular ionic homeostasis. It is a well-known antibiotic, however it's potential as a therapeutic agent for cancer has not been widely evaluated. In two recently published studies, we showed that GA treatment is toxic to cell lines and tumor xenografts derived from re...