Month: October 2020

Three new crewmembers arrived at the International Space Station today (Oct. 14) after a record-breaking speedy flight to the orbiting lab. 

The Russian Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov docked with the space station at 4:48 a.m. EDT (0848 GMT), just 3 hours and 3 minutes after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Soyuz rocket.

By coincidence, the rocket launched on Rubins’ birthday (she turned 42), prompting congratulations from Russian flight controllers at the Roscosmos agency’s Mission Control. “I would like to join in and say Happy Birthday to you. It’s a beautiful day and you celebrated it wonderfully,” one official said after the crew entered the station. 

“Thank you so much,” Rubins replied. “It’s been the best birthday I ever had.”

Typically it takes about six hours for a Soyuz spacecraft to chase down the International Space Station, and the Soyuz must complete about four orbits around  the Earth. But the Soyuz MS-17 made it in only two orbits, making it the first crewed Soyuz spacecraft to try the “fast-track” rendezvous method.  

Related: Russia’s crewed Soyuz space capsule explained (infographic)

Russia has previously tested the two-orbit rendezvous method with its Progress cargo resupply spacecraft, which is nearly identical to the Soyuz spacecraft used to transport crew. So far five Progress missions have used the new, two-orbit rendezvous method to reach the space station. The fastest Progress flight so far, Progress 70, arrived at the space station 3 hours and 48 minutes after liftoff, in July 2018. 

Both Soyuz and Progress missions traditionally took about two days to reach the International Space Station. In 2013, the Soyuz spacecraft carrying three Expedition 35 crewmembers to orbit became the first to test out the new six-hour rendezvous. With today’s flight, the Expedition 64 crew slashed that travel time in half.

Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov will spend about six months working on board the orbiting lab as members of Expedition 64. They join NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who arrived at the space station in April, bringing the total population of the station up to six crewmembers.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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DETROIT — Waymo on Thursday relaunched and expanded its fully automated, robo-taxi ride hailing service in Phoenix, rebooting its effort to transform years of autonomous vehicle research into a revenue-producing business.

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle technology unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc, said it will start offering rides in minivans with no human attendant on board to current members of its Waymo One service in Phoenix. Within a few weeks, Waymo plans to open access to anyone who downloads its smartphone app and wants a ride within a 50-square-mile area of Phoenix.

Waymo chief John Krafcik said during a conference call that the company for now will offer only rides in driverless cars. Within a few weeks, Waymo will relaunch service for a larger, 100-square-mile swath of the Phoenix area, using Pacifica minivans made by partner Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

Some of the Waymo vans in Phoenix will still have attendants on board.

Waymo has not said where or when it will expand its robo-taxi business beyond Phoenix. “You can imagine we’d love the opportunity to bring the Waymo One driver to our home state of California,” Krafcik said.

Before the coronavirus pandemic forced Waymo to suspend operations this spring, Waymo was using vehicles with no human attendant on board to provide 5 to 10 percent out of a total of 1,000 to 2,000 rides per week in its Phoenix service zone, Krafcik said. Rides in fully autonomous vehicles were limited to a small, selected group of Waymo customers.

Waymo’s move to expand service using vehicles with no attendant on board puts it ahead of rival robo-taxi companies in deploying a revenue generating service in the United States. Waymo earlier this year raised more than $3 billion, mostly from outside investors.

Cruise, majority controlled by General Motors, is testing vehicles in San Francisco, but has so far not offered rides to the public.

The pandemic has depressed demand for ride hailing services of all kinds. Waymo has stepped up attention to sanitation of its vehicles in response, Krafcik said. Waymo will monitor vans remotely, and employees will remind customers to keep masks on in the vehicles. Vehicles will be cleaned regularly under a maintenance and fleet management partnership with auto retailer AutoNation, Krafcik said.

Fiat Chrysler has engineered a system that can flush the air from a minivan after every ride, he said.

The field of companies trying to develop self-driving vehicles has been consolidating as technology and regulatory challenges pushed the prospects of significant revenue from carrying passengers further into the future. Waymo and other autonomous vehicle technology companies have put increased focus on automating commercial vehicles for goods delivery.

Waymo rival Zoox was acquired earlier this year by Amazon.com. Ride hailing company Uber Technologies was set back by a fatal accident involving one of its test vehicles.

Congress has failed to act on proposals to create standards and safety regulations the industry can rely on as a legal shield when deploying self-driving vehicles.

In Arizona, Waymo said it informs state officials ahead of any change in its service.

The human brain is hardwired to map our surroundings. This trait is called spatial memory—our ability to remember certain locations and where objects are in relation to one another. New findings published today in Scientific Reports suggest that one major feature of our spatial recall is efficiently locating high-calorie, energy-rich food. The study’s authors believe human spatial memory ensured that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could prioritize the location of reliable nutrition, giving them an evolutionary leg up.

In the study, researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands observed 512 participants follow a fixed path through a room where either eight food samples or eight food-scented cotton pads were placed in different locations. When they arrived at a sample, the participants would taste the food or smell the cotton and rate how much they liked it. Four of the food samples were high-calorie, including brownies and potato chips, and the other four, including cherry tomatoes and apples, were low in calories—diet foods, you might call them.

After the taste test, the participants were asked to identify the location of each sample on a map of the room. They were nearly 30 percent more accurate at mapping the high-calorie samples versus the low-calorie ones, regardless of how much they liked those foods or odors. They were also 243 percent more accurate when presented with actual foods, as opposed to the food scents.

“Our main takeaway message is that human minds seem to be designed for efficiently locating high-calorie foods in our environment,” says Rachelle de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate in human nutrition and health at Wageningen University and lead author of the new paper. De Vries feels her team’s findings support the idea that locating valuable caloric resources was an important and regularly occurring problem for early humans weathering the climate shifts of the Pleistocene epoch. “Those with a better memory for where and when high-calorie food resources would be available were likely to have a survival—or fitness—advantage,” she explains.

“This looks like a nice piece of work,” says James Nairne, a cognitive psychology professor at Purdue University, who was not involved in the new research. “Memory evolved so that we can remember things that aid our survival or reproduction—hence, it’s not surprising that we remember fitness-relevant information particularly well, [including] high caloric content.”

We tend to think of primates such as ourselves as having lost the acute sense of smell seen in many other mammals in favor of sharp eyesight. And to a large degree, we humans have developed that way. But the new findings support the notion that our sniffer is not altogether terrible: “These results suggest that human minds continue to house a cognitive system optimized for energy‐efficient foraging within erratic food habitats of the past, and highlight the often underestimated capabilities of the human olfactory sense,” the authors wrote.

One drawback of our spatial skills, as they relate to sustenance, is our modern taste for junk food. With a life span of not much more than 30—as was the case for humans until relatively recently—chronic diseases such as diabetes were not a concern for our ancestors. If you came across a rich grove of fruit trees, you consumed all the sugar you could to help ensure your survival. Now our taste for sweets and fats contributes to a global obesity epidemic and has us reaching for candy over kale. “In a way, our minds (and bodies) may be mismatched to our current ‘obesogenic’ food-rich circumstances,” de Vries says. “We have reason to suspect that the high-calorie spatial memory bias could stimulate people to choose high-calorie foods by making high-calorie options easier or more convenient to find and obtain.”

“We’re more likely to remember sweet things, which was a real plus for most of our evolutionary history,” Nairne adds. “But this is problematic in today’s world…. We’re still walking around with Stone Age brains.”