Year: 2016

Russia finally approves 10-year space plan

9:31 am

The announcement yesterday that Russia is trimming its space budget by 30% was actually part of the final approval of their ten-year space plan, under discussion and planning for the past two years.

Interestingly, the 30% cut was only the last reduction of many in the budget plan since it was first announced. Initially, they hoped to budget 3.4 trillion rubles for their aerospace industry over the next decade. The final budget approved yesterday is for 1.4 trillion. That’s a 59% reduction.

Considering that the reductions have forced them to abandon any plans for building a re-usable rocket, they will be increasingly hard-pressed in the next decade to successfully compete for business in the commercial market. While Russia stands still with its older designs, others will be developing new less costly ways to launch rockets. The business will go elsewhere, and they will actually have even less money to work with.

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Injected stem cells cure osteoporosis in mice

9:22 am

Scientists have discovered that an injection of stem cells into mice with osteoporosis was able to completely cure them of the bone disease.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and The Ottawa Hospital had previously found a causal effect between mice developing age-related osteoporosis and a deficiency in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). One of the promising attributes of MSCs is that, while they can grow into different cells in the body just like other stem cells, they can be transplanted without the need for a match. “We reasoned that if defective MSCs are responsible for osteoporosis, transplantation of healthy MSCs should be able to prevent or treat osteoporosis,” says William Stanford, senior scientist at The Ottawa Hospital and Professor at the University of Ottawa.

To put this reasoning to the test, the scientists injected MSCs into mice with the condition. Six months later, which is one quarter of the life span of the animal, they observed a healthy functional bone in place of the damaged one. “We had hoped for a general increase in bone health,” says John E. Davies, co-author of the study. “But the huge surprise was to find that the exquisite inner ‘coral-like’ architecture of the bone structure of the injected animals – which is severely compromised in osteoporosis – was restored to normal.”

The importance of this discovery for space travel is that it might eventually allow scientists to use it to somehow prevent the loss of bone density during weightlessness.

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Russians use wooden matches to ignite rocket engines

9:15 am

The March 12th launch abort of a Soyuz rocket occurred because the Russians use the equivalent of a giant wooden match to ignite their Soyuz rocket engines.

Essentially, prior to launch engineers insert large wooden matches into each engine, and these are ignited using an electric spark prior to allowing fuel into the combustion chamber. When mission control sensors all matches are burning, they open the valves and fuel enters the chamber, igniting and incinerating the matches.

This setup is not as simple as a regular match, but it is surprisingly reliable and has worked for six decades on hundreds of rockets. Yet on March 12, during the first attempt to launch the new Russian satellite for Earth observation, one of the “matches” failed to fire after the ignition command was issued. It was enough of a problem for the launch control system, which detected the lack of signal from the failed igniter, to call off the propellant injection into combustion chambers. The launch was aborted just a moment before liftoff, and the fully fueled rocket remained safely on the pad.

To launch the next day, they simply replaced the matches and tried again, quite successfully.

The article makes me wonder how other rockets ignite their engines.

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First step in producing silicon-based life

9:04 am

The Horta live! Scientists have succeeded in creating a bacteria that can produce hydrocarbon compounds that incorporate silicon into their make-up.

To get biology to adopt silicon, Frances Arnold, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, along with postdoctoral assistant Jennifer Kan and graduate student Rusty Lewis, started by isolating a so-called thermophilic bacterium, which grows in hot springs. Like many organisms, the bacterium contains an enzyme called cytochrome c, which shuttles electrons to other proteins, making it widely useful in biochemistry. In some cases, however, enzymes in thermophilic bacteria expand their roles to carry out other reactions on the side. So the Caltech researchers tested their microbe and found that in rare cases its cytochrome c also added silicon to hydrocarbons.

In nature, Arnold notes, cytochrome c’s silicon-adding ability is so feeble that it’s probably just a byproduct of the enzyme’s function—not even close to its primary role. To try to beef it up, the team incubated the bacteria with silicon and carbon compounds and selected the organisms that produced the most hydrocarbons that incorporated silicon. After only three rounds of this artificial selection, the enzymes had evolved to churn out silicon-containing hydrocarbons 2000 times as readily as natural cytochrome c. “The power of evolution really shows up when a new function appears and then is forced to adapt via directed evolution,” Arnold says.

For now, the silicon-spiked hydrocarbon compounds, called organosilanes, probably aren’t useful either to the bacteria or to industry. They’re short and stubby, unlike the long chainlike versions that chemical companies make for uses such as adhesives, caulks, and sealants.

As the article notes, they really are very far from creating a silicon-based life. Still, to get silicon incorporated into carbon-based organic chemistry is a significant first step, as it demonstrates that the theory of silicon-based life might very well have merit.

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South Korea commits almost a billion dollars to AI research

8:56 am

In reaction to the recent Go victory by a computer program over a human, the government of South Korea has quickly accelerated its plans to back research into the field of artificial intelligence with a commitment of $863 million and the establishment of public/private institute.

Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years. It is not immediately clear whether the cash represents new funding, or had been previously allocated to AI efforts. But it does include the founding of a high-profile, public–private research centre with participation from several Korean conglomerates, including Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor, as well as the technology firm Naver, based near Seoul.

The timing of the announcement indicates the impact in South Korea of AlphaGo, which two days earlier wrapped up a 4–1 victory over grandmaster Lee Sedol in an exhibition match in Seoul. The feat was hailed as a milestone for AI research. But it also shocked the Korean public, stoking widespread concern over the capabilities of AI, as well as a spate of newspaper headlines worrying that South Korea was falling behind in a crucial growth industry.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye has also announced the formation of a council that will provide recommendations to overhaul the nation’s research and development process to enhance productivity. In her 17 March speech, she emphasized that “artificial intelligence can be a blessing for human society” and called it “the fourth industrial revolution”. She added, “Above all, Korean society is ironically lucky, that thanks to the ‘AlphaGo shock’, we have learned the importance of AI before it is too late.”

Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to industry rather than the universities. For myself, I wonder if this crony capitalistic approach will produce any real development, or whether it will instead end up to be a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians.

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NOAA head poo-poos private weather companies

10:58 pm

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday the head of NOAA expressed serious doubts about the ability of private companies to provide worthwhile weather data.

At a hearing of the environment subcommittee of the House Science Committee on NOAA’s fiscal year 2017 budget request, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said it was still too soon to determine if commercial sources of weather data, most notably GPS radio occultation systems, could augment or replace existing data sources. “In the weather domain, we believe it is a promising but still quite nascent prospect to actually have data flows from private sector satellites,” Sullivan said. “There have been a number of claims, there’s some hardware in orbit from at least one company that I’m aware of, but really nothing proven to the level that we require for ingesting something into the National Weather Service.”

This so much reminds me of past NASA administrators who repeatedly told us that private companies really couldn’t do the job of supplying ISS or launching humans into space, and that we really needed to leave that job to the government, which really knew better.

As it turns out, those past NASA administrators were wrong. Not only has private space done a very effective job at supplying ISS, they made it happen fast for relatively little money. And they are about to do the same in launching humans into space as well. NASA meanwhile has been twiddling its thumbs for decades in its efforts to replace the space shuttle while spending ungodly amounts of money and accomplishing little with it.

I have no doubt the same will be true with the weather. Allow private companies to compete for profits in providing the world with good weather data, and they will quickly do a far better job than NOAA. And the data will likely not be tampered with for political ends by global warming advocates in the government!

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Roscosmos budget slashed 30%

10:46 pm

How’s that consolidation working out for ya? The Russian government announced today that it will have to cut the budget for its space program by 30 percent over the next ten years due to the country’s deepening economic problems.

In line with its reduced funding, the space agency has agreed to delay a manned flight to the moon by five years – to 2035 from 2030 – and scrap plans to develop a reusable rocket, a potentially valuable cost-saving technology. A Roscosmos spokesman previously said the agency would reassess its plans after 2025.

Essentially, the consolidation of Russia’s entire aerospace industry into a single corporation run by the Russian government has produced a very expensive government program unable to accomplish much of anything for a budget of 1.4 trillion rubles ($20.4 billion) from 2016 to 2025. Sounds kind of like NASA, doesn’t it?

Give me competition over a centralized program any day, and see great things happen. Go with a centralized government program, and watch as the life ebbs from the creativity of everyone.

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Pluto 8 months after fly-by

12:04 pm

The New Horizons science team today published five papers summarizing what they have so far learned from the data obtained during last year’s July 14 fly-by and since downloaded.

Two of the many discoveries are to me the most interesting: The first illustrates Pluto’s strange and very active geology:

Age-dating of Pluto’s surface through crater counts has revealed that Pluto has been geologically active throughout the past 4 billion years. Further, the surface of Pluto’s informally named Sputnik Planum, a massive ice plain larger than Texas, is devoid of any detectable craters and estimated to be geologically young – no more than 10 million years old.

Moreover, the materials that cause Pluto to be geologically active are much more complicated than anything on Earth:

Scientists studying Pluto’s composition say the diversity of the planet’s landscape stems from eons of interaction between highly volatile and mobile methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices with inert and sturdy water ice. “We see variations in the distribution of Pluto’s volatile ices that point to fascinating cycles of evaporation and condensation,” said Will Grundy, from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and lead author of the composition paper. “These cycles are a lot richer than on Earth, where there’s really only one material that condenses and evaporates – water. On Pluto, there are least three materials, and while they interact in ways we don’t yet fully understand, we definitely see their effects all across Pluto’s surface.”

The second discovery that fascinates me has to do with the formation of Pluto and all its moons:

The high albedos (reflectiveness) of Pluto’s small satellites are entirely different from the much lower albedos of the small bodies in the general Kuiper Belt population (which range from about 5 to 20 percent). This difference lends further support to the idea that these satellites were not captured from the general Kuiper Belt population, but instead formed by agglomeration in a disk of material produced in the aftermath of the giant collision that created the entire Pluto satellite system.

In other words, Pluto and its moons are not a collection of different Kuiper Belt objects brought together over time. Instead, they formed together.

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Self-tightening shoelaces!

9:05 am

Science marches on! Nike has unveiled its first pair of shoes that has automatically tightening shoelaces.

The Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 features a sensor inside that detects a heel sliding in, causing the shoe to automatically tighten around the foot. Two buttons on the side then allow the wearer to manually tighten and loosen the shoe until they have themselves a snug fit.

According to Nike, this ability to change tension on the fly solves what is apparently a “typical” problem for athletes: distraction. It does so by allowing precise adjustments to eliminate tight tying and the slippage that results from loose laces. It also imagines a future where a sports shoe can sense the moment you need a tighter fit for a quick mid-game maneuver and adjusts itself accordingly.

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