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Two Notable Space Successes

Concerning space missions, there’s always something happening in space. Most of it is ‘routine’ in the sense that what happens was expected and a normal part of the mission. Re-supply of the International Space Station generally falls into that category (except a couple of weeks ago when the resupply vehicle missed the station on the first try). There are a lot of missions currently underway; some just getting started, others have been at it for years. They all generate events of one kind or another. In the last week or so, there are two pieces of news from space missions that deserve more attention, not only because they represent successes, but because they were difficult first-of-a-kind achievements: The Rosetta flyby of Lutetia, and the IKAROS solar-sail uses photon propulsion.

Lutetia asteroid and Saturn
The asteroid Lutetia with Saturn (the background dot)…..Credit: ESA, MPS Osiris Team

The Rosetta probe flyby of the asteroid Lutetia

The spacecraft Rosetta, launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency (ESA) was maneuvered into position for a flyby of the asteroid Lutetia. The closest approach point was to be 3162 m (10,374 ft) from the surface of the relatively large asteroid. The flyby was unique on several grounds:

1. It was the first flyby of Lutetia and the largest asteroid yet visited (longest axis 126 kilometers, 78.29 miles).
2. The camera used was of exceptionally high resolution (2000 pixel frame), which yielded many extremely fine photographs.
3. The flyby was available through ‘live feed’ on the Internet as it was being observed at ESA headquarters on Earth.

Almost going without mention is the extraordinary accuracy of the celestial navigation and the obvious reliability of the Rosetta probe. One of the images captured by Rosetta during the flyby just happened to also include another heavenly body – the unmistakable ringed planet Saturn. Such juxtapositions are extremely rare. Of more immediate scientific interest will be the crater pocked surface of Lutetia for analysis of the geology and possible history of the asteroid.

Rosetta is now on its uninterrupted way to a rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Much of the next four years will be spent in ‘deep hibernation’ to conserve energy during another very long swing around the sun in order to gain matching speed with the comet. More »

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Physics: A smaller proton, a big challenge

The proton is one of the fundamental components of the atom. For a long time scientists have believed it to be 0.8768 femtometers in size (a femtometer is one quadrillionth of a meter). Now, it looks like they may have been wrong, the size is 0.84184 femtometers. In a way, the discrepancy is very small…as in anything measured in quadrillionths of a meter is already incredibly small…and this discrepancy (an error by another name) is but a tiny fraction of a femtometer. In other ways, this is a big deal: One, because so many have been wrong for so long, and two, because the size of a proton is so fundamental to so many other aspects of nuclear and quantum physics that even so small an error could lead to massive changes in models of atomic dynamics.

But wait. This is the reported result of one paper, based on one type of (novel) experiment. True, the scientists representing a large collegium of institutions and publishing in the journal Nature put the size uncertainty at 0.00067 femtometers, whereas the old uncertainty size was 0.0069. The new one is an order of magnitude better. Nevertheless, whenever something this, well, the word is shocking, comes along the reaction of most scientists is to ask questions: What is the integrity of the experimental setup? Is it possible that mistakes in measurement or calculation were made? Is it possible that while this may seem to contradict or invalidate many theoretical constructs, a small tweak here or there might explain this result? In short, the basic reaction is not “This must be wrong!” It is, “We must question, test, and validate (or invalidate) this result as thoroughly as possible because it is extremely important.” That it is. More »

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Update: Research on ‘old-age genes’ challenged

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis – is a primary pathway of science. Researchers trot out a hypothesis (hopefully backed up with evidence). Other researchers challenge the hypothesis, often through their own research results. Eventually the original hypothesis is confirmed, rejected, or in some way modified. Science moves on. The process may start with scientists presenting a research paper and the results of experimentation – in this case a paper published in the top journal Science that identified a specific set of gene variants indicating with a reported 77% accuracy the potential for people to live to 90 and beyond [SciTechStory: Gene variants for living to 100 identified]. As a rule, the research is peer reviewed before publication, which means it should have gone through one or more rounds of questioning and challenge, especially for a blockbuster result. Sometimes the challenge intensifies after the paper goes public, which is the case here. Almost immediately the results of the study were questioned by a variety of genetic scientists and on several grounds. More »

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The problem with grasping the ocean acidification problem

Sometimes the scale of a problem defies attempts to precisely define its reality and impact. Global warming is one such problem. Acidification of the oceans is another. These both represent tangible changes, one to the earth’s atmosphere; the other to the seas. Scientists have for years taken measurements, made comparisons, and generally (as in a consensus) agree that there are changes occurring – rising temperatures in one case, and increased acidity (lowering pH) in the other. They both share (at least one) cause – increase in greenhouse gasses, especially carbon-dioxide. CO2 reacts with the water of the oceans to form carbonic acid, the main cause for the decrease in pH (that is, somewhat counter intuitively more acid).

However, global warming is a cause célèbre – famous or infamous as the case may be. Acidification of the oceans is one of the ‘problems’ that seemingly few people have encountered except on perhaps a random television program, or read about in a magazine. In some respects, the changing pH of the oceans is just as ‘big’ an event as global climate change. Unfortunately, while global climate change has proven difficult enough to quantify and predict, ocean acidification is very difficult to quantify and especially to demonstrate (or predict) what the effects will be.

A very good (and relatively short) article in The Economist, The other carbon-dioxide problem outlines some of the difficulties of getting a handle on the acidification problem. More »

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Possible Tipping Point: Arctic approaches Pliocene conditions

Scientists have known for decades that the Arctic is a belle-weather for climate change. If evidence is needed for something happening (or not happening) to the climate, the Arctic is just about the best place to find it. Another piece of evidence from Arctic has just been reported in the journal Geology led by a team of researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) and an international network of colleagues. Their work is based on three independent methods of measuring the effects of a warming climate during the Pliocene age (2.6 to 5.3 million years ago), which shows that the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island (Canada) was about 19 degrees Celsius (34F) with CO2 levels only slightly higher than they are today. Their findings indicate that CO2 levels of about 400 parts per million are enough to cause ice-free conditions throughout the Arctic – a condition that will radically change the weather patterns at and around the Arctic. The current levels of CO2 are about 390 parts per million. More »

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Gabon fossils push multicellular life to 2.1 billion years

The more that is learned about how life began on Earth, the more likely it seems life could originate elsewhere. Such is one of the implications of recent news in paleobiology: Fossils of multicellular organisms have been found in Gabon, Africa that date to approximately 2.1 billion years ago. That’s at least 400 million years before scientists previously thought multicellular life existed. The discovery was reported in a paper in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature titled Large colonial organisms with coordinated growth in oxygenated environments 2.1 Gyr ago by Abderrazak El Albani and colleagues of at the University of Poitiers (France).

Determining the age of the rocks containing the fossils was relatively straight-forward using both carbon and sulfur dating; however identifying the fossil material is always difficult. There are no ‘bones’ in this kind of fossil, in fact, there’s no hard shell or other solid material. So identification must come from ‘impressions’ left in the surrounding rock. In this case, the scientists have detected scalloped edges and a radial structure remindful of present day jellyfish or medusa. The important inference from these structures is that these were probably integrated and rather large (1-12 cm) multicellular creatures, and not some sort of cellular colony. More »

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Gene variants for living to 100 identified

Under the heading, “Research Ripe for Over-interpretation” a team of scientists from the Boston University Schools of Public Health and Medicine and the Boston Medical Center have published in the July 1, 2010 issue of the journal Science a paper identifying a suite of gene variants that can be used to predict whether people can live to 90 years and beyond. Actually, the study is quite circumspect. It was based on genome wide analysis of over 1,000 centenarians, people 100 years of age or more; and the identification of 150 significant gene segments (called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) that appear to be associated with people who live to 90 or more. At least, on superficial interpretation, that’s what the study reports. Here, in bullet-points, are other things it says:

- The 150 gene ‘markers’ were accurate in predicting longevity 77% of the time. (That’s pretty good, but obviously not perfect.)
- The oldest people, those at 110 or over, were the most likely to have the best prediction rate.
- The researchers developed new statistical techniques (Bayesian, mostly) that could be used to analyze similar gene variant patterns. (This may actually turn out to be one of the more important contributions of the study.)
- The study also analyzed the data for a correlation between the ‘longevity genes’ and the lack of gene variants associated with diseases, but found that people with longevity variants and the control group had about the same number of disease gene variants.
- The study called for specific research into how (and why) these specific SNPs are related to longevity. (That is a fuzzy area for genome-wide research. It provides interesting correlations, but the explanations will have to come much later after laborious research.)
- The presence of these gene variants does not override the importance of environmental and life-style factors in living to an old age. (If you get run over by a truck, they don’t matter. Ditto for smoking, drinking, and eating to excess.)

The authors of the study are (rightly) careful:

If these findings are confirmed, they would suggest that “predicting disease risk using disease-associated variants may be inaccurate and potentially misleading, without more information about other genetic variants that could attenuate such risk” the authors commented.
..
But they added: “This prediction is not perfect, however, and although it may improve with better knowledge of the variations in the human genome, its limitations confirm that environmental factors (e.g., lifestyle) also contribute in important ways to the ability of humans to survive to very old ages.”

Drs. Sebastiani and Perls also cautioned that they developed this genetic risk model as a way to dissect the complex genetic bases of exceptional longevity and to discover the different genetic paths to age 100 and older. An understanding of the implications of this model’s use in the general population would be necessary before this test is marketed, they said.

[Source: EurekAlert]

Will we someday (soon) ask, “You got gerontogenes?”

Research Spectrum

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The Fourth Kind

Nobody (I hope) thought that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was about real events. The movie was made to be realistic (in a Hollywood sort of way) but it was clearly a fabulous story. The Fourth Kind has other intentions. It resolutely, in-your-face, implies that it’s based on true events. It opens with the lead actress Milla Jovovich announcing that she plays a real psychiatrist, one who really lived in Nome, Alaska and experienced all the events around the year 2000. Yes, but…if she made this announcement sitting on the set of the movie, or at a press conference that would have been one thing, but no, she comes marching down a forested road out of the fog like some apparition from the movie/series Twin Peaks. This sets the tone of the movie. It claims to tell a story based on real events. It presents what appear to be clips of the real people in the story, often with a split-screen technique used in some mockumentaries showing ‘reality’ on the left and ‘dramatization’ on the right. Yet (cue dire music and foreboding green tinted visuals) much of the time it deliberately amps the dramatization beyond melodrama. More »

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Robofish: Leader of the shoal

robofish
Hail robofish…..courtesy University of Leeds

Making lifelike animal decoys is a very old human activity, especially for hunters. Some of the results are surprisingly accurate in appearance – but they don’t move. On the other hand robotic devices move, but making them move in a lifelike way – that’s difficult. Researchers at the University of Leeds (UK) have succeeded in creating the first robotic fish lifelike enough to entice other fish of its species to follow it. Published in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology as A novel method for investigating the collective behaviour of fish: introducing ‘Robofish’” the artificial stickleback was tested one-on-one and in a group of other sticklebacks. The researchers programmed it to swim slightly faster than normal for the species, making it seem like a more aggressive or risk taking fish. This behavior seemed to overcome any deficiencies in the decoy appearance, smell or behavior so that the other fish consistently followed its lead. More »

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Report: Water shortage risk ranked by country

Problems such as the growing shortage of fresh water (drinkable or industrial grade) are not just public or governmental concerns. Agriculture, manufacturing, and general business also require copious, inexpensive and reliable sources of water – so it’s not surprising that research organizations that cater to business needs also take the problems seriously. Such is the case with the Maplecroft Water Security Report, issued annually by the Maplecroft Corporation, a corporate risk assessment firm. The company analyzes data from 165 countries and then ranks them according to the severity of water related issues. The issues covered include the shortage of water, as in the lack of resources, and also factors such as rapid growth in population, increased business demand, and the decrease in useful water caused by pollution. More »

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Quantum entanglement helps keep DNA together

Once in a while science produces theoretical work that has tantalizing possibilities but also raises a strong skeptical response. This is another way of saying that a theory has a certain amount of plausibility but is without experimental evidence. Such is the case with a theory proposed by Elisabeth Rieper and colleagues at the National University of Singapore and submitted in a paper at arXiv.org on June 21, 2010: The relevance of continuous variable entanglement in DNA. They are saying that the stability of DNA is in part the result of quantum entanglement.

It’s a little early to be talking about the ‘field’ of quantum biology, although there is already strong evidence for quantum effects in photosynthesis [SciTechStory: Confirmation of quantum entanglement in photosynthesis] but if the existence of significant quantum effects in DNA can be substantiated (that means with experimental evidence) it would be a foundational discovery. However, at this point the idea is a working hypothesis based on mathematical modeling. It goes something like this… More »

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New for epigenetics: Active pseudogenes and RNA as gene regulator

How is it that the human genome, with about 23,000 protein coding genes, can produce such a complicated organism as the human being, when the laboratory flatworm (C. elegans, a relatively simple organism) has about 20,000 coding genes? It seems fairly obvious that there must be something else at work in more complex organisms that vastly augments the basic genes. Probing that inference has led to a massive expansion of what is loosely called epigenetics, which these days seems headed in the direction of covering everything that transcribes, translates, regulates, and implements the genetic code.

Recently, in work discussed in the June 24, 2010 issue of the journal Nature some possibly major new pieces were added to the epigenetics puzzle. (I call it a puzzle, because though molecular biologists have done a great deal of research in various aspects, it seems the overall picture remains subject to uncertainty and frequent redefinition.) This research, performed by a consortium of institutions led by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Harvard Medical School (USA), focused on the role of RNA in the expression of specific genes and their pseudogenes that are related to cancer. More »

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New telescope technologies, new visions

Looking at the sky with telescopes sitting on the Earth is like looking through a somewhat primitive and dirty window. That hasn’t stopped astronomers from wanting and sometimes getting bigger and better optical telescopes. Even a somewhat distorted window on the universe is far better than human eyesight. Then along came rockets and eventually it was possible to put telescopes in space – the Hubble Space Telescope being the most famous example. That hasn’t stopped optical engineers from continuing to gnaw away on the problems of earth-based telescopes. Their efforts have not been in vain. A new breed of telescope with adaptive optics has been steadily growing mature and more powerful. A new kind of optics based on liquid mirrors is getting started, but shows equal promise. More »

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Update 2: More Moon water

Following headlines such as “Moon Has More Water than the Great Lakes” (astrobio.net) you’d think a new study by the Carnegie Institution Geophysical Laboratory (Washington D.C., USA) has the Moon – once considered one of the driest places in the solar system – to be a veritable swimming pool. Granted, more water in various forms has been found on the Moon. [SciTechStory: Update: More Moon water and On the Moon or elsewhere, follow the water] However the new study is ‘water’ in quite a different sense – geological. More »

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Nanofibers produced like cotton candy

Cotton candy
Think of it as nano-cotton candy.

Even in English the fluffy balls of finely spun sugar have different names: Cotton candy (US), candyfloss (UK), fairy floss (Australia), but world-wide it’s a technique for creating airy, often colored confections. Why not apply this same technique for nanofibers? Why not indeed, thought a research team at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (USA).

The most common way of making nanofibers is to use a high voltage electric charge in droplets of the basic material (typically a polymer plastic). At a high enough charge the droplet erupts into a thin (nanoscale) stream and whipped by electrostatic repulsion into a fiber. The process, called electrospinning, works but is difficult to control and tends to produce uneven results.

The Harvard solution uses a rotary jet spinner, very similar in technique to that used for creating cotton candy. It’s a mechanical process and doesn’t require the use of high voltage equipment. Better still, it’s much more easily controlled. More »

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Advancement: Ultracapacitors as batteries

Call it ‘better batteries’ or simply fulfilling the need to store electrical energy for use ‘off line,’ the technology to improve energy storage goes on apace – step by step. In this case, the step is to solve a problem with ultracapacitors. These are the supercharged versions of capacitors – the long used technology for storing energy temporarily in many kinds of electric and electronic circuits. An ultracapacitor is a double-layer capacitor, typically with two or three orders of magnitude more charge than standard capacitors. However, there is a tradeoff in lower voltage, and perhaps more importantly with drops in voltage as the ultracapacitor loses charge. An ultracapacitor at 25% charge has lost half of its voltage, whereas a standard battery’s voltage remains relatively stable. This flaw tends to nullify the many advantages of an ultracapacitor, such as high energy for small size, rapid recharge, and an unlimited number of recharge cycles.

A solution to the problem of voltage drop has been found by a research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), which involves an array of ultracapacitors regulated by an energy chip. More »

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The Human Genome Project: Ten years later

Ten year retrospectives are a popular form of gazing at near history. So it is with looking at the results of the first complete sequencing of the human genome (first draft released June 26, 2000). The Human Genome Project was a three billion dollar multi-year program that finally achieved the long sought genome-wide catalog of human genes. It was hailed as a mighty achievement (which it was), that it would revolutionize biology (which it did somewhat), and would signal a beginning to a new era of medical cures based on the genomic information (which it didn’t). It’s this last point that’s attracting much of the attention. Sequencing the human genome has had many important effects, but creating new medicines to cure major diseases has not been one of them.

This aspect of the consequences of the Human Genome Project hasn’t been a secret. As the pharmaceutical researcher/blogger Derek at In the Pipeline puts it:

…there was already a deep sense of nervousness among the people searching the sequences for disease clues – not to mention the nervousness among the people who had given them huge piles of money to do so. When the total estimated number of genes came out far lower than most people expected, there was a collective “Hmmm. . .” across the field. That number meant that the simpler possibilities for gene sequence-protein-disease linkage could already be ruled out – complicated things were clearly going on in transcription, translation, and further downstream.

[Source: In the Pipeline]

Now, a June 12th article by Nicholas Wade, A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures in the New York Times brings the issue (if it can be called an issue) to broader public attention.
More »

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A new line of defense: Plastic antibodies

Molecular biologists have been working on making artificial antibodies for over twenty years, which come to think of it, isn’t so long. Nature took many hundreds of millions of years to develop antibodies as the natural defense of living organisms against the onslaught of antigens such as bacteria, viruses, and other damaging invaders. The only problem, at least from the human perspective, is that natural antibodies don’t always do their job; they don’t always produce the right means to attack the type of bacteria or virus. Also natural antibodies sometimes do too well, and become a source of destruction in their own right, for example with organ transplants. It would be medically very significant to be able to produce antibodies artificially, at will, and with various targeted capabilities.

The key to antibodies is the ability of an antibody molecule to have just the right configuration or shape to receive (or imprint) the target. Most invading material, bacteria or virus, has protein structures with distinctive shapes. Think of it like Lego structures with turns, L’s, arms, corners, and pockets. Antibodies have corresponding shapes that can bind (accept or receive) specific bacteria or virus shapes, after which their chemical components go to work to destroy the invader. Artificial antibodies will have to have this same capability. More »

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Microsoft: 3-D is better without glasses

We see the world in three dimensions. Naturally, it would be desirable to see all kinds of images in three dimensions. This is one of those things in science and technology that’s relatively easy to describe, has many ways to accomplish, and has proven to be very difficult to get right. I’ve mentioned this before in connection with 3-D movies, which thanks to James Cameron’s Avatar, are having their third or fourth renaissance. The problem, as has always been the case, is that 3-D movies require special glasses. The glasses are a pain in the retinal nerve. Few people like to wear them and they make some people dizzy.

So what? This is a fair question. We’re talking primarily entertainment, certainly not the most important thing in the world. Yes, it’s true that 3-D vision is associated with movies and now television. 3-D vision is not vital to life as we know it. However, that’s the short sight. Life as we know it is changing. One of those changes is the immersion of human beings in the online world. Viewing the online in three dimensions – the more lifelike the better – will add to that experience and hasten the day when people will find ‘living online’ to be as acceptable as most other kinds of living. It’s part of what is called ‘virtual reality’ or VR. I’m not saying this is a good thing, only that adding realistic 3-D will be a big factor. So yes, the search for viewing images in three dimensions – without using special glasses – may have a lot of impact.

This brings me to a recent announcement by Microsoft. It’s a new type of lens designed and developed by the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group to make 3-D presentation on-screen – no glasses. More »

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Quantum dots do it: The dark pulse laser

Lasers come in many variations of light: Red, blue, infrared, ultraviolet and so on. Now there is a laser that produces non-light – the dark pulse laser. Developed by a joint project of the National Institute of Standards (NIST, USA) and Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA, University of Colorado, USA), the dark pulse laser produces regular periods of non-light (a.k.a. dark) against a background stream of light. Two questions: Why and how? More »

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New publication: Atlas of Biodiversity Risk

Combining the results of 366 authors from 43 countries, the Atlas of Biodiversity Risk is the first publication of its kind – a geographical summary of the major factors that lead to loss of biological diversity (also sometimes referred to as species loss). The atlas is available only in printed form at 99Euro + Shipping & Handling. It can be ordered here. More »

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Nanosponge delivers

Right up there in frequency with using nanotechnology for face powders has to be the myriad ways in which nanotech is, will, or can be used to deliver medicine. Why nanotech? For one thing, the nanoscale is small enough to be effective in attaching to or passing through cell membranes. Nanotech materials can be easier to target for specific cells such as those in cancerous tumors. For another, nanotech materials can be shaped into containers – miniscule pockets to contain drugs, especially those for cancer that are toxic to healthy tissues and need to be encapsulated until they reach the target. Both of these conditions are relevant to a new nanotechnology configuration developed by Eva Harth, professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee, USA). The configuration is called a nanosponge, which is evocative, but not quite accurate as the shape isn’t really sponge-like (spongiform) but more like a network of molecules in three dimensions. The point is though that the nanosponge can use its shape to attach to cancer cells and to contain drugs. More »

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Another new world: Seeing biology at the atomic level

From the first telescope, to the electrocardiograph (EKG), to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), advances in scientific instruments – the tools of the trade – can have a huge impact on the science. With each new technology a window opens to observe things that previously might only have been theory, or guesses. Very often, things are observed that were not considered at all. The first telescopes revealed planets that were unknown. Optical microscopes exposed the world of life beyond the vision of the human eye. Now a team at the University of Southern California Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) have taken a relatively new technology (since the 1980s) – the cryo-electron microscope (cryo-EM) – and used it to view a virus at the level of individual atoms for the first time. More »

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Falcon 9 flies for COTS

Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) sounds like a circumlocution, a long-winded way of saying space-taxi, but the first flight of the commercial rocket Falcon 9 by the Space X Corporation is a milestone in the movement (trend, effort, or struggle) toward private for-profit companies taking at least some of the space flights that have been reserved for governments. Falcon 9, a single stage rocket with a dummy orbiting package on-board, launched successfully from Cape Canaveral in Florida (USA) on Friday (June 4, 2010). Eventually, the Falcon 9 and perhaps other commercial rockets will be engaged to fly cargo and then astronauts to the International Space Station.

At the moment, the transition from government to commercial space flight is highly controversial (at least in the United States). Under the Obama administration’s new plan for space, private industry is to be helped by NASA to begin commercializing routine flights into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This plan is resisted by Congresspeople from states that have existing government space contracts, many of which programs will be cut under the Obama plan. Some of them have contended that private space companies are incapable of providing reliable and safe LEO services. (That remains to be seen, of course, as they should be at least as safe as NASA’s record.) The successful launch of Falcon 9 may have some influence on this line of argument.

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Life on Titan through a hydrocarbon haze

Titan Surface
The hazy methane-red surface of Titan. NASA/JPL

Even before the wildly successful Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its lunar neighborhood, scientists have looked at the largest moon, Titan, studied it with telescopes and other instruments, noted its methane-rich atmosphere, its extreme cold (around 90 degrees Kelvin, -183C or -290F), and wondered if somehow in its vast collection of organic materials – life of some kind might exist. Almost certainly it would not be life as we Earthlings know it. Our life is water based. On Titan water is frozen so solid, it’s more like iron. No, this would have to be life using other basic materials – hydrogen perhaps, or acetylene, and methane.

Scientists are not immune from having imagination (far from it!), but to give scientific imagination shape and form, what does many a modern astrobiologist do? They make a model, a computer representation of whatever it is they imagine. In this case, they imagine life on Titan and try to model what it would be like, given the materials and conditions that are known to exist on that moon. Once the models are constructed – part math, part computer programming, and part art – they then make predictions. “Thus and so will be found to be true on Titan….” And then they wait for information (data) to confirm or refute their predictions. Some of that information has coming streaming back to Earth from the Cassini mission and its many flybys of Titan (and to an extent from the Huygens probe that landed on Titan’s surface).

What two recent papers find in the Cassini data is interesting because it is consistent with some models of possible life on Titan. They do not say there is life on Titan. More »

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