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You had a good run Arecibo, but there’s a new big dog in town. China has switched on the massive dish that now officially holds the record for the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. Among other things, researchers hope it will provide a big boost in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.
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Tardigrades, aka ‘water bears,’ are microscopic organisms that survive in harsh environments from the antarctic to oxygenless space. They are so robust that Japanese scientists froze a group of them for 30 years and successfully revived two specimens. But to understand what makes these tiny creatures so impervious, another group of researchers took a closer look at their genes. By mapping the entire genome of a particularly stress-tolerant tardigrade species, Ramazzottius varieornatus, they found a protein that protects DNA from being irradiated — which could be used to shield humans.
As the University of Tokyo researchers describe in the science journal Nature, they took a sample group of human DNA and watched it deteriorate when bombarded with X-rays. But when they allowed some of those to create that tardigrade protein, they only showed half the damage as the control group. Further, those protected cells were still capable of reproducing. As in all specific studies, it’s too early to state how this will translate into treatment, prevention or any dramatic transhumanist strengthening of our species. But the scientists believe more of these proteins, and new applications, are likely lying in wait for more research to uncover.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: University of Tokyo newsroom
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When it’s not taking forever to deliver the F–35 or creating new blimp inspection drones, Lockheed Martin is hard at work finding ways to turn actual trash into useable clean energy. At its Owego, New York facility, where the company builds space-flight gear and military helicopters, the group has partnered with Germany-based Concord Blue to unveil a 250 kilowatt "advanced gasification plant" that will convert 3,650 tons of bio waste into electricity for the facility every year.
Waste-to-energy technology can work in two ways: either by burning bio waste directly or by heating solid waste material until it becomes a gas that can be converted it synthetic fuel. In the case of the Owego plant, the eventual goal is to build a sorting facility that can take municipal waste headed for the landfill, remove the recyclables, and convert the remaining biomass to fuel using Concord Blue’s Reformer technology. Because the biomass fuel is heated in an oxygen-free environment, Lockheed says it far exceeds environmental requirements.
For now, however, the plant has already helped reduce carbon emissions by 9,000 metric tons per year by recycling discarded wood chips from nearby lumber mills into fuel for a wood-fired biomass system. While burning wood sounds like a downright low-tech solution, Lockheed claims this locally sourced energy is carbon-neutral and has saved the facility $1 million per year in heating and cooling costs. The company is also working to install a small-scale version of the system at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in upstate New York, enabling the hospital to provide its own heat and power. Meanwhile, in Herten, Germany, Concord Blue and Lockheed Martin are working together to build a 5 megawatt biofuel power plant that will convert 50,000 tons of feedstock into power for 5,000 homes and businesses.
Source: Lockheed Martin
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Lego bricks have been the foundation of so many awesome and elaborate creations, it’s no wonder people have already had the idea to send them skyward in drone form. But while there are plenty of DIY tutorials around, as well as the odd prebuilt model, we haven’t seen anything quite as accessible and affordable as these new Lego UAV kits from Flybrix.
Available today for an introductory price of $149 (increasing to $189 after a "limited time"), the basic Flybrix kit contains everything you need to build a quad, hexa or octocopter drone in as little as 15 minutes. We’re talking plenty of Lego bricks, eight motors and propellers, a pre-programmed Arduino brain and all the other necessary bits and bobs — even a minifig captain for you to fly around. And if you want a dedicated controller to pilot your creation instead of using Flybrix’s mobile apps, the $189 deluxe kit comes bundled with one (this will jump to $249 after the introductory period).
Also, there’s no need to be apprehensive when getting to grips with the controls. If anything, you’re encouraged to crash the things, watch them disintegrate, then simply pick up the pieces and build a new one. Though Flybrix does include ten games as part of the software package that are designed to hone budding pilot’s skills.
While these drone kits promise to be good clean fun, Flybrix’s founders — MIT, Caltech and UW Madison alums — are keen to stress the educational element. Aimed at kids aged 14 and over, the hope is building and flying these Lego drones will impart basic engineering, technology and physics knowledge, among other skills. But who are we kidding? They look just as appealing to big kids in the market for an affordable starter drone, too.
Source: Flybrix
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The fact that a passenger airliner can disappear without a trace is still pretty difficult to comprehend. Two companies are looking to bring a new satellite tracking solution to market that they say will prevent mysterious disappearances like that of Malaysia Airlines MH370 in 2014. Rather than beaming location info to stations on the ground, those details are sent to satellites with the Aireon GlobalBeacon system. The technology is being developed alongside flight tracking service Flight Aware and the duo is targeting 2018 for the system to be operational.
GlobalBeacon will employ ADS-B low-orbit satellites from Iridium Communications to track flights. The system will provide airlines with near real-time details on planes through a web-based tool. Aireon’s new tech was originally meant to provide air traffic controllers a way to improve efficiency when routing flights, but Flight Aware plans to debut a tracking product next week at the same time the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) meets in Montreal. The ICAO will require a 15-minute standard for location updates on normal flights by 2018 with more frequent pings in the case of an emergency.
This isn’t the first time a company has suggested using satellite tracking for airliners. Inmarsat proposed free global tracking with its satellites for airlines back in 2014, a couple months after MH370 disappeared. Panasonic Avionics is also lending its equipment through AirMap, another web-based tracking tool that offers custom alerts for things like turbulence, sudden drops in altitude or a derivation from the flight path. It also allows an airline to establish contact with a plane via text or voice messages and can provide updates on a minute-by-minute basis.
Source: Reuters
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SpaceX has done its first test of the Raptor rocket engine that will take humans to Mars as early as 2024, Elon Musk said in a series of tweets. It was fired at the company’s McGregor, Texas facility on a stand that can handle the extreme thrust. Pointing out the "mach diamonds" from the test (above), Musk said the "production Raptor goal is a specific impulse of 382 seconds and thrust of 3 MN [680,000 pounds]," more than three times that of the current Falcon 9.
SpaceX propulsion just achieved first firing of the Raptor interplanetary transport engine http://pic.twitter.com/vRleyJvBkx
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2016
The methane fuel-powered Raptor will be more powerful than any current rocket. It’ll eventually lift the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), formerly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, loaded with 100 tons of cargo, toward the red planet. The company plans to launch an unmanned craft to Mars by 2018 and get humans there by 2024. That’s an ambitious target, especially considering its recent launchpad mishap.
Elon Musk will give a speech tomorrow at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico, titled "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species." He’s expected to unveil the design of the Interplanetary Transport System and overall plan for colonizing the red planet. Musk will also reportedly talk about the budget and try to convince government and the scientific community to help pay for the undertaking. After the recent disaster, a successful test-firing of the Raptor will no doubt help his cause.
Update: The Mars Colonial Transporter is now known as the Interplanetary Transport System. The post has been updated with that info, and thanks to the commenters who pointed it out.
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Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, believed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year or two. And, to his credit, that rule pretty much held out between 1965 and 2015, when the laws of physics began to get in the way. Now, researchers at North Carolina State believe that we don’t need to obsess over ever-smaller transistors to make chips even more powerful. Instead, they’ve turned to chaos theory in the hope that mixing things up will provide the performance boost that Intel can’t.
Lead researcher Behnam Kia explains that we are now "reaching the limits of physics in terms of transistor size." If you’ve ever listened to one of Intel’s presentations, you’ll notice that every new production process is getting harder to achieve. It’s not that easy to crank out perfect 14-nanometer chips, and the company has delayed its 10-nanometer chips several times as a consequence. But Kia and the team believe that our obsession with size has obscured a key fact about how chips are currently built.
In the average PC chip, there are a series of circuits that use transistors, and each one is designed to perform a specific function. Imagine a factory where each circuit is an employee holding a calculator, and their job each day is to do a single equation over and over. The first chips had a handful of employees, but over time walls were knocked down, calculators were shrunk and employees lost weight. That means more folks are crammed into the same building, but each one is still just doing one bit of math when required.
That means that plenty of transistors are being left dormant, a quantity of wasted capacity in the system that we could harness. As Kia explains, the new chip design uses "chaos theory — the system’s own nonlinearity — to enable transistor circuits to be programmed to perform different tasks." In our labored metaphor, your factory would stop employing more people, and instead train those already there to do multiple calculations. That way, you could do more work/math with the same number of transistors/employees, and apparently it’s not that hard to implement.
The team at NC State believe that while their idea is currently theoretical, creating a programmable transistor circuit isn’t difficult. The team thinks that these reconfigurable chips could be produced with almost the exact same tools as Intel currently uses on the production lines. If so, then it could offer up a way for CPU power to increase while we wait for the materials scientists to work out exactly how to produce workable chips below 5-nanometers.
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