Lifeboat Foundation

Expensive, risky and elite — that’s space travel in a nutshell ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to be sent to space 63 years ago. Till now, less than 700 astronauts have reached space altitude and a majority among them have been from just three countries. Even commercial space flights remain exclusive to the few who can afford them.

But not anymore. Giving regular folks from around the world a chance to become astronauts and participate in space science, US-based Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA) has partnered with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to develop what they call “a human spaceflight programme for citizens of all nations”. The cost will be borne by SERA, and co-founders Sam Hutchison and Joshua Skurla say they might even be tapping talent from India for their programme.

In line with this mission to make space accessible, SERA has just signed an agreement to send the first Nigerian to space. In June 2022, Victor Hespanha, a 28-year-old civil engineer from Brazil, was selected to travel to space onboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard Rocket (NS-22). He was only the second Brazilian astronaut, and soon became a national hero.

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Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 19,465 (2021) Cite this article.

To capture a broader understanding of memory encoding, we expanded our experiments to include two other stimulus types: colors and face pictures (see Materials and Methods). Both monkeys demonstrated high accuracy in memorizing grating orientations in the “orientation DMTS” task, colors in the “color DMTS” task, and face pictures in the “face DMTS” task [DP: ~94% and DQ: ~87% versus 50%, all P < 0.01 (one-sample t test)] (fig. S1), indicating that they had been well trained.

We implanted a Utah array in each monkey’s V1 area (see Materials and Methods; Fig. 1B) and presented the stimuli onto the receptive field (RF) centers of the recorded neurons (fig. S2, A and D). This enabled simultaneous monitoring of neuronal activity in our experiments. Our analyses focused primarily on neuronal activity before probe stimulus onset.

Representative neuronal responses for two of the VWM content conditions in the orientation DMTS task at a selected electrode are shown in Fig. 1C. During the stimulus period (0 to 200 ms after cue onset), neurons displayed distinct firing patterns between the two content conditions (90° or 180° orientation). An off-response emerged following the cue offset, and activity gradually diminished. During the delay period, defined as 700 to 1,700 ms after cue onset (the thick gray line in Fig. 1C), neurons also exhibited a significant difference in firing rate between the two content conditions (N = 1,810 trials for 90°; N = 1,865 trials for 180°; all marked positions P < 0.01) without any behavioral performance bias (N = 16 sessions, P = 0.94; right panel in Fig. 1C). The difference in response between these two content conditions during the delay period at the same electrode was less prominent in incorrect-response trials and in the fixation task (Fig. 1D).

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