University of Edinburgh

The body of assistant Professor Alexander Kagansky, who had been researching a Covid-19 vaccine, was found under the windows of a multi-story building in the Kalininsky district of St Petersburg. An informed source told the Russian newspaper Interfax on Sunday that the body of Alexander Kagansky has been found in the yard of a 16-story building on Zamshina Street. He had worked in laboratories in St. Petersburg, Washington, Edinburgh, and headed the Centre for Genomic and Regenerative Medicine at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok.

According to preliminary reports, shortly before the tragedy, a conflict arose between Kagansky and a friend he was visiting, which the landlord denies and says that Kagansky committed suicide.

Recent experiments aboard the International Space Station have shown that some microbes can harvest valuable rare-earth elements from rocks, even when exposed to microgravity conditions. Microorganisms are already used on Earth to mine economically important elements from rocks, including rare earth elements, used in mobile phones and electronics.

It's unlikely to be economically viable to mine these elements in space and bring them back to Earth, according to Charles Cockell, a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the project.