#Spain Considers Release Of Genetically Modified Olive Fruit flies A company involved in creating genetically modified mosquitos has another project nearing outdoor testing.
The flies are a major pest to olive crops. The idea is that the flies all male will mate with wild olive fruit flies.
The new program is less about'does this work?''and more about the first operational roll out of this technology#Oxitec cofounder Luke Alphey told the New Scientist#in September.
So far insects are the only genetically modified animals that companies have released into the wild. U s. officials are
considering allowing a company to sell genetically modified salmon that would be farmed in inland tanks.)The BBC talked with Helen Wallace a spokeswoman from Genewatch an opposing group.
The modified olive fruit flies may have other unwanted genetic traits such as pesticide resistance that they'll spread among wild flies Wallace said.
Oxitec officials say genetically modified olive fruit flies would reduce the need for pesticides which is good for the environment.
The deadly genes should only work in flies unlike pesticides which affect many insect species including ones people may be interested in protecting such as pollinators a
#The next Space shuttle: Hybrid Engines Make Runway-To-Orbit Missions A Reality A disembodied jet engine attached to a hulking air vent sits in an outdoor test facility at the Culham Science Center in Oxfordshire England.
When the engine screams to life columns of steam billow from the vent giving the impression of an industrial smokestack.
Engineer Alan Bond sees something more futuristic. We're looking at a revolution in transportation he says.
For Bond the engine represents the beginning of the world's first fully reusable spaceship a new kind of craft that promises to do
what no spacefaring vehicle ever has: offer reliable affordable and regular round-trip access to low Earth orbit.
The vehicle would have a fuselage reminiscent of the Concorde and take off like a conventional airliner accelerate to Mach 5. 2
Bond's Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket engine (Sabre) part chemical rocket part jet engine will make Skylon possible.
Sabre has the unique ability to use oxygen in the air rather than from external liquid-oxygen tanks like those on the space shuttle Strapped to a spacecraft engines of this breed would eliminate the need for expendable boosters
and two rocket boosters took about two months to turn around (due to damage incurred during launch and splashdown) and cost $100 million.
That price would even undercut the $50 million sum that private spaceflight company Spacex plans to charge to launch cargo on its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.
and then flash-chill it without generating mission-ending frost. David Willetts British minister for universities and science called the achievement remarkable.
The Skylon concept has impressed also the European space agency (ESA) which audited Reaction engines'designs last year and found no technical impediments to building the craft.
The bigger challenge may be securing funding. While ESA and The british government have invested a combined $92 million in the project Bond
and his crew plan to turn to public and private investors for the remaining $3. 6 billion necessary to complete the engine
which they say could be ready for flight tests in the next four years. Building the craft itself would require a much heftier investment:
$14 billion. The quest for a single-stage-to-orbit spaceship or SSTO has bedeviled aerospace engineers for decades.
Bond's own exploration of the topic began in the early 1980s when he was a young engineer working with Rolls-royce as part of a team tasked with developing a reusable spacecraft for British aerospace.
That's when he came up with the idea of a hybrid engine. But the team struggled to figure out how to cool the engine at supersonic speeds without adding crippling amounts of weight.
and extremely difficult to compress Bond says. Rolls-royce and The british government doubtful that an easy and economical solution existed canceled the program's funding.
NASA and Lockheed martin meanwhile had their own plans for a fully reusable spacecraft the Venturestar intended as an affordable replacement for the partially reusable space shuttle.
The Venturestar demonstrator called X-33 (which graced the cover of this magazine in 1996) was a squat triangular rocket that would take off vertically
Eliminating the expendable rockets needed to boost the shuttle into space could theoretically reduce the cost of launches from $10000 per pound to $1000 per pound.
which if true could in its first year recoup the money spent in R&d and construction leaving only expenses like fuel maintenance and overhead.
And Bond's engine technology aside from keeping a launch vehicle intact from start to finish offers another advantage:
supersonic aviation. It could enable an aircraft to fly anywhere in the world in under four hours says Bond.
When air strikes an engine at five times the speed of sound it can heat up to nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bleeding off that heat instantly before the air reaches the turbocompressor and then the thrust chamber was the most onerous technical challenge for Reaction engines engineers.
Bond's solution is a heat exchanger that works by running cold liquid helium through an array of tubes with paper-thin metal walls.
As the scorching-hot air moves through the exchanger the chilled tubing absorbs the energy cooling the air to minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit in a fraction of a second.
If it were in a power station it would probably be a 200-ton heat exchanger he says.
Each pound you put into orbit requires about 10 pounds or so of fuel to get it there says NASA's Dumbacher.
Bond estimates that Skylon would weigh about 358 tons at takeoff and hold enough hydrogen fuel to carry itself and about 16.5 tons of payload about the same capacity as most operational rockets into orbit.
I really think once there is profit in this for private industries such as from astriod mining or space tourism the space industry will explode with so many companies getting into this.
Ya just got to adore a ben engine that can fly to space develop by an engineer with the last name of Bond!
Imagine a fleet of these vehicles whisking payloads to LEO on a daily basis . If multiple countries operate their own fleets there will eventually be multiple payload deliveries per day.
So basically a Ram Air (Oxygen) induction that is super cooled used to ignite/burn rocket/hydrogen fuel.
I am guessing that due to the need for Ram Air at mach 5. 2 that this thing has to stop engine burn at orbit (due to lack of oxygen)
and then dive back into the atmosphere to reach Ram Air induction speed again? Or am I missing something?
Maybe just takeoff requires Ram and not return? Do not try and bend the spoon.
I imagine designing an engine that works with both air with it's content of gasses other than oxygen
and the air intake pointed directly into the air flow. Most aircraft are designed to fly with a nose up angle of attack.
This way the fuselage generates lift. Since the engine inlet is extremely sensitive to the direction of airflow at high mach numbers it is angled down 7 degrees
so that air flows directly into the engine. The nozzle is angled 7 degrees down as well which is purely coincidence.
The trust vector must go through the center of gravity otherwise the air/spacecraft will pitch.
The Ram air stuff does not work at slow speeds. 3. The diagram shows a LOX pump.
4. If LOX is an oxidiser for at least part of the flight where is the tank?
A tile got hit on launch allowing reentry heat to go through one of the wings like a plasma torch!
you can write me at CARTYWILLIAN3@GMAIL. COM. BILLHIMLYNXWIKIPEDIA answers all of your questions. google SABRE (rocket engine)@ wcarty...
Besides there will be no external tank for debris to shed from and hit this vehicle. I read that they had a breakthrough in developing materials for the engines to enable them to survive the intense heat
which would allow prototype engines to be produced and tested. I presume this is the result of those advances.
We dont need a new suborbital launch system for spy satellites or a taxi service to the ISS.
I want to see vehicles that can mine asteroids. Its 2013 and we still havent even dug up that Monolith on the Moon.@
I can not understand. wcartythe air intakes close after the air breathing stage and presumably remains closed through reentry.
so light for its size it will not get as hot as other re-entry vehicles like the space shuttle (1100k vs 2000k).
So they think that a reinforced ceramic skin will be able to handle re-entry temperatures...
I can see a Reaction engines/Rolls royce partnership (I think RR was involved originally in Skylonâ#predecessor project HOTOL) providing the engines a Boeing/Lockheed martin/Any other building the airframe EADS providing the avionics or any other subsystem.
They get more energy out of the liquid hydrogen than you can get just burning it.
They use the temperature difference between the ram air coming in and the liquid hydrogen to run a closed cycle helium turbine.
The turbine powers a compressor takes the cooled air and compresses it to rocket chamber pressure.
It takes 20 kwh/kg to liquefy hydrogen. Hydrogen only releases 50 kwh/kg from burning
so using much of the energy that went into making it a liquid is very effective.
And this you might want to look at just for the eye candy of a second generation Skylon using laser heated hydrogen to get into orbit. http://nextbigfuture. com/2013/09/propulsion-lasers-for-large-scale. html One error in this article
#Thermal Wristband Keeps Your Body At The Perfect Temperature A group of MIT engineering students wants you to get nice and comfy.
Called Wristify the prototype monitors air and skin temperature and then shoots thermal pulses into the wrist to cool
or warm the user according to their needs. Very small quick changes in temperature on parts of the skin with high blood flow can make the whole body feel several degrees cooler
The intent is to save energy by controlling the temperature of an individual person rather than an entire building a goal that anyone who's ever turned on a personal space heater in a frigid office building in July can get behind.
and the algorithms that automate the pulses. MIT News*This article originally referred to MIT's contest as the#Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition.
#In Japan, Eight People With Two Laptops Launch A Telescope Into Orbit A new low-cost highly automated rocket from Japan's space agency launched Saturday with just eight crew members and two laptops on-site.
A large control room could be integrated into a single laptop PC the rocket's project manager Yasuhiro Morita said in a statement in 2011.'
'The new rocket called Epsilon has artificial intelligence to perform its own safety checks. Its computer system reduces the number of people needed at a launch site from the 150 that were standard at Japan's previous space launches.
Japan's space program JAXA developed both its Epsilon Launch vehicle and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope
and then cancelled apparently because of computer glitches. JAXA reported Saturday's launch went fine and that the satellite now in orbit is in good health.
ROFL5 years from now they'll use 2 smart phones. 150 to just 8!!!HAHAHAA!
Police force will be replaced with drone copters that taze you and fly off to prisons without hallways
instead your cell is moved from place to place So basically humans are working for machines now as the AI will direct workers to areas that need maintenance.
That's cool I think I would rather work for a machine than my boss.
It is an amazing read on the battle of Humanity Vs. Technology. Very real. He talks about something I am paraphrasing (more deadly than nuclear chemical or biological war.
Something that hides right in front of us mans need for bigger better and faster. I highly recommend this read:
#Branch-Like Dendrites Function As Minicomputers In The Brain A new paper in Nature suggests that we've been thinking about neurons all wrong.
but are active minicomputers that process information. Researchers from University college London the University of North carolina School of medicine found that in response to visual stimuli dendrites fired electrical signals in the brains of mice.
The spikes only occurred in the dendrite not in the rest of the neuron suggesting that the dendrite itself was doing the processing.
All the data pointed to the same conclusion lead author Spencer Smith an assistant professor of neuroscience
and engineering at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill said in a statement. The dendrites are not passive integrators of sensory-driven input;
It's the equivalent of finding out a bunch of wiring was really a set of transistors according to Smith.
National Monitor r
#Women's Breasts Age Way Faster Than The Rest Of Their Bodies A new technique for identifying the precise biological age of human tissue reveals that not all tissues grow old at the same rate.
Not all parts of the body age alike according to Steve Horvath a geneticist at UCLA's medical school.
Horvath developed a way to determine the biological age of different tissues in the body by looking at DNA methylation a chemical alteration of genes that#has been suggested by#previous studies to be a potential biomarker for a cell's age.
Horvath looked at 8000 healthy samples of 51 different types of cells and tissues and 6000 cancerous samples to examine how the aging process affects DNA methylation levels.
For the most part his method accurately tied the biological age (the age predicted from the person's DNA) to the chronological age of the donor.
Tumors appeared accelerate the tissue aging process by 36 years and healthy breast tissue near breast tumors were an average of 12 years older than tissue elsewhere in the body.
In contrast transforming adult human cells into#pluripotent stem cells which reprograms them to act like embryonic stem cells effectively resets the cells'clock to zero Horvath says.#
#The study is online in Genome Biology o
#Mega-Canyon Discovered Beneath Greenland Ice Sheet A previously unknown canyon has been discovered in Greenland hidden beneath the ice.
In an age when you have Google street view covering the entirety of the inhabited world when virtually every house is mapped.
In this context to discover a geological feature of such scale is astonishing. Timothy James a glaciologist at the University of Swansea agrees.
This is very exciting news he said. Although I'm not really surprised. Considerable effort has been put into collecting bed topography of the Greenland ice sheet recently
and there is a lot of data to be processed and interpreted. Accuracy is difficult if the bed proves to be featured highly
Take the case of the bed data recently released. It has a spatial resolution of 1 km
The data was collected over several decades by NASA and researchers from the UK and Germany.
Radio waves of certain frequencies can travel through ice but bounce off the bedrock beneath. So researchers sent down pulses of radio energy of this particular frequency.
By analysing this radar data the team were able to map the topography of the underlying bedrock.
Of course the area contributes to sea level rise and therefore the findings should help researchers to understand current changes.
The canyon is significant when we think about the movement of the underlying water said Bamber.
If you want to model glacial movement â##something that is ever more crucial due to global warming â##then knowing about such topography is very important.
Global warming is too slow what could we do speed to it up? One nice hurricane over the sheet could do it Adaptation.
A long shot but let's hope!!!Oh yes and an interesting read on past global warming and glacial melt for the non Mand-made GW's!:
http://news. nationalgeographic. com/news/2013/07/130723-east-antarctic-ice-sheet-melt-global warming/Do not try
and bend the spoon. That is impossible. Only try and realize the truth-there is no spoon i
The light enters the water it hands off part of its energy to the medium and inside it exists as light
and a lot more energy is given away than during refraction. The result of that process? As the photons exited the cloud they were clumped together.
So when a photon comes in it excites nearby atoms but when the next photon enters the cloud it would excite nearby atoms to the same degree
(and thinks)# in a normal environment instead of say an MRI chamber. Scary! Mind-reading!##Inception!
#To make it happen the team removed parts of skull from three patients experiencing frequent drug-resistant epileptic seizures then attached a packet of electrodes to their exposed brains.
After that the researchers#let the patients experience their stay in the hosptial as they normally would using the electrodes to record data on the seizures as well as everything else they did during the hospital stay like eating or speaking.
Cameras monitored the patients from their rooms allowing the researchers to determine how the data they got from the electrodes matched up with
true or false questions flashed by on a computer screen and the patients answered them. When the questions dealt with math (Does#2 plus 4 make 5?
#Device Could Harvest Wasted Energy From Wi-fi, Satellite Signals A wireless device developed by researchers at Duke university that converts microwaves into electricity could eventually harvest Wi-fi or satellite signals for power according to its creators.
It could also one day be built into cell phones to let them charge while not in use they say.
Its energy harvesting capabilities come courtesy of a metamaterial a synthetic material engineered with characteristics not found in nature like the ability to bend light the wrong way
or shrink when you stretch it. In this case the microwave-harvesting metamaterial that acts kind of like a solar panel converting microwaves into up to 7. 3 volts of electricity enough to charge small electronics.
It can scavenge stray signals like from appliances or satellites to improve efficiency and make lost energy usable. â##It s possible to use this design for a lot of different frequencies
and types of energy including vibration and sound energy harvestingâ#according to Duke graduate student Alexander Katko one of the inventors. â##Until now a lot of work with metamaterials has been theoretical.
The device is described in the journal Applied Physics Letters c
#Planet Without A Star Found â##We have seen never before an object free-floating in space that that looks like this.
It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars but it is drifting out there all aloneâ#stated team leader Michael Liu who is with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. â
##I had wondered often if such solitary objects exist and now we know they do. â#The planet is about 80 light-years from Earth
Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii This article was republished with permission from Universe Today o
#Here's how it will work. An employee wielding what looks a bit like an iron#will scan the objects customers want.
Pets cars and family members are all scannable Asda wrote in a blog post. Asda sends digital files of the scans to a facility where they're printed then shipped back to the Asda store.
Customers can pick up their mini-mes a week after getting scanned The Guardian reports.##The prints come in color white or bronze-style according to Asda.
#FAA Panel Recommends Lifting Ban On Gadget Use During Flights After receiving countless complaints abuse towards flight attendants who are only doing their jobs
whether electronic gadgets actually are dangerous during a flight's takeoff and landing. A 28-person advisory panel just concluded its study
and says the AP will recommend that the FAA lift or at least loosen its restrictions.
The panel does not recommend the use of cellular networks like 3g and 4G LTE; you won't be streaming Netflix
while taking off if the panel has its way. Not that you probably could; the airplane's speed means that you'll be switching from tower to tower faster than your phone
or tablet can reasonably hope to connect to each one in turn.)Instead devices in airplane mode meaning devices with all their radios (Wi-fi Bluetooth and cellular) turned off would be just fine to use.
So you can't stream#your favorite TV SHOW but if you've downloaded it and flipped your gadget to airplane mode watch away.
Gadget manufacturers have been campaigning for years for a change in the FAA's policy (which currently bans any electronic use
when the plane is below 10000 feet). Amazon especially is annoyed as its Kindle ebook reader suffers a distinct weakness compared with physical books given that you aren't currently allowed to use a Kindle during part of your flight.
Amazon has tested previously interference on its own by testing an airplane packed full of Kindles as an Amazon representative told the AP.#The advisory panel's decision is likely to be implemented by the FAA;
the FAA not only created the panel but also had a hand in selecting some of the members
so it would be surprising if the agency chose to ignore the panel's conclusions.
The AP says that the decision could be implemented as soon as early 2014
#Fruit flies Boost STI Immunity Before Sex Among the promiscuous common fruit fly sexually-transmitted infections run rampant.
Female fruit flies however have a special kind of defense to lower the potential cost of getting down and dirty with another fly according to a new study from the University of Bath in the UK.
When they get in the mood female flies#can ramp up their immune defenses against fungal STIS in
what's called immune anticipation. According to the study female fruit flies regulate certain immune and stress response genes when they hear the courtship song of a male.
This helps them fight off sexually-transmitted infection from the fungus Metarhizium robertsii. One of these genes#Turandot M#(Totm)# specifically protected the flies against STIS.
When the flies were exposed to#a topical infection of the same fungus the#expression of Totm didn't help at all.
The researchers suggest that this immune anticipation is likely to be far more common than currently appreciated in insects#as they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. T he courtship-induced preemptive upregulation of Totm might be representative of a general pattern of immune anticipation
in insects underlining the intimate link between brain behaviour and immunity u
#Gunk-Proof Everything Anyone who's worn waterproof boots knows that although they shed moisture they're magnets for grime.
Once that coat dries (about 20 minutes) they apply an acetone solution with small amounts of silica and other proprietary additives.
#Wii Fit Plus Helps Diabetics Control Blood sugar As you might already know playing Wii Fit is a funny thing.
In a randomized controlled trial older adults with type 2 diabetes had better controlled blood sugar after playing Wii Fit Plus for half an hour a day every day for 12 weeks.
Their blood sugar#level#reductions were on par with study participants who received the â##standard careâ#doctors normally give people with diabetes the U k. s National Health service reports.
This is encouraging because getting set up to play Wii Fit Plus is cheaper than other forms of diabetes care National Health service reports.
if the dropouts left because they weren t seeing any good effects. Out of the 220 volunteers researchers recruited for the study one-third eventually dropped out the BBC reports.
The National Health service has a good breakdown of the study which is one of the first to so rigorously examine the health benefits of active video games.
The bottom line is that there s evidence playing Wii Fit Plus daily can help those with type 2 diabetes though it s not exactly a proven treatment yet.
The research was published in the journal#BMC Endocrine Disorders. NHS BBC o
#Big Pic: A Bright Flash From The Sun At 8: 30 p m. Eastern time yesterday a solar flare peaked on the surface of the sun emitting an intense burst of radiation.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the M9. 4-class event at a wavelength of 131 Angstroms
in order to see the bright flash of heat giving the image its teal hue. M-class flares can cause some space weather effects On earth like disrupting radio signals.
Anything more intense than an M9. 9 flare becomes an X-class the highest category.
#How Technology Will Make Everyone A Great Photographer At the end of May the Chicago Sun-Times laid off all its staff photographers.
and reporters armed with iphones. It was not the first time traditional media turned to untrained photojournalists consider the Instagram photos NBC published after the Boston Marathon bombing
however cameraphone technology needs to support it in ways it currently doesn t. Cameraphones have improved dramatically in the last few years the Nokia Pureview sensor has 41 megapixels
and HTC s newest sensor has larger pixels that grab more light but they still suffer from one great shortfall:
#About a year ago engineers began to address the issue by putting cellular radios inside cameras rather than attempting to cram cameras inside phones.
The 16.3-megapixel Samsung galaxy Camera has a 4g radio and a 21-times zoom lens. And the newer 20.3-megapixel Galaxy NX has an interchangeable lens mount.
The Sony QX100 the newest offering in the lot is the most extreme example. The device is just a lens sensor
and image processor and users attach their smartphone as a viewfinder.##Editors will need software that selects the best images not just the ones from the right place at the right time.
Connected cameras may improve the overall quality of crowdsourced images but they will do little for the editors
whose job it is to sort through them. Current services provide a temporary solution. With Scoopshot a Helsinki software start-up publishers can send photo assignments to the service s network of 300000-plus mobile users.
Stringwire which NBC acquired in August lets video producers request an uplink from anyone who has tweeted near an event of interest.
But to assure quality editors will need software that automatically selects the best images not just the ones taken in the right place at the right time.
That type of computer vision already exists on a small scale. A recent update to Google+analyzes groups of pictures for blurriness aesthetics landmarks
and exposure to pick out the most shareable ones. The Sun-Times to benefit from that type of machine vision the software will need to process larger image batches from multiple sources.
In time those pieces may come together proving that the Sun-Times decision wasn t foolish it was just a bit before its time.#
#This article originally appeared in the November 2013 issue of#Popular Science s
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