Month: February 2023

Rolls-Royce Holdings is getting into the nuclear reactor business. The British aerospace engineering company says it’s developing a micro-nuclear reactor that the company hopes could be a source of fuel for long trips to the Moon and Mars.

As humanity begins to venture back into space, with crewed missions scheduled to visit the Moon and Mars within the next two decades, the technology that moves us throughout the solar system will be a pivotal part of that journey. Last week, Rolls-Royce teased the design of its Rolls-Royce micro-reactor for spaceflight with a digital mockup posted to Twitter last week:

As the company explained in a tweet, the reactor will rely on uranium, a common fuel used in nuclear fission. Nuclear fission involves bombarding an atom with a neutron. That atom then splits, releasing energy, and that energy could be used to propel a rocket. Nuclear reactors have been used to power things like submarines, but its use in spaceflight has often been overlooked in favor of chemical-based propulsion.

As to whether the final product will appear just like the mockup shown in the tweet, well, that remains to be seen. In a promo video on the company’s website, Head of Innovation Products and Services Jake Thompson says that the company is in the “concept, design, development, and testing phase” of the reactor, meaning a full-fledged announcement of the final product is still a ways off. That said, Thompson did say that the company is working on a basic prototype.

Rolls-Royce Holdings announced in 2021 its intent to develop nuclear reactor technology, having obtained $600 million in public and private funding to develop its business. Since the nuclear reactor won’t have to carry as much fuel as a chemical propulsion rocket, the entire system will be lighter allowing for faster travel or increased payloads. The company says that the reactor could serve as both a new form of propulsion and a power source for bases on the Moon or Mars, and Rolls-Royce claims that they will have a nuclear reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.

Rolls-Royce is not the only party working on rocket propulsion outside of traditional chemical fuel. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a collaboration to develop a thermal rocket engine that could improve the time it takes to get to deep space. Likewise, NASA had a successful test of a rotating detonation rocket engine, which uses less fuel and provides more thrust than current propulsion systems.

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With summers now warmer than ever, enjoying the great outdoors inside a stiflingly hot tent is becoming less appealing than a vacation spent relaxing in an air-conditioned hotel room. That could soon change, however, as a University of Connecticut researcher has created a new fabric that could potentially cool the inside of a tent by up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

The fabrics currently used to make tents are engineered to block out winds and water to help keep their inhabitants dry and comfortable, but they tend to work both ways, preventing hot air inside the tent from escaping. That’s great when temperatures dip in the evening, but even with plenty of ventilation, on a hot Summer’s day, the inside of a tent can feel sweltering.

You can always pack a portable air conditioner to drop the temperature inside your tent, but those require one ingredient that’s often in short supply at rural campsites: electricity. A solar panel simply isn’t going to generate enough power to keep a portable AC unit, or even a simple fan, running indefinitely, and you don’t want to have to carry a backpack full of batteries.

Inspired by how, “plants wick water from the ground and then sweat to cool themselves,” Al Kasani, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Center For Clean Energy Engineering, created a self-cooling tent fabric. It remains thin and light so a tent can still be easily packed down, but the fabric has been enhanced with titanium nanoparticles that pull water from reservoirs located at the base of a tent and spread it across the fabric’s surface, where it evaporates and creates a cooling effect that drops the temperature inside the tent by up to 20 degrees F.

Kasani estimates that just a gallon of water can keep a tent cool for up to 24 hours, and the effect will work with either water sourced from a faucet at a campsite or pulled from a stream in a more rural setting. In other words, the evaporative cooling isn’t going to stop working if you don’t use purified clean water.

Although it’s going to be a while before we see this upgraded fabric showing up in camping gear—the material is still in the research phases—according to the university, “industry interest in Kasani’s technology has been high,” and in a few years, if it goes mainstream, it could help make roughing it in high temperatures feel not so rough.

In late 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, creating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program (NEVI) to support the creation of a nationwide fast-charging network. There’s much work to do, as a new study from the Great Plains Institute shows a need for more than 1,000 DC fast-charging (DCFC) stations to meet the program’s goals.

The study looked at non-Tesla DCFC stations, of which there are 4,943 in the contiguous 48 states. Among them, only 509 stations meet the requirements laid out under the NEVI program, which include:

• Charging stations must have at least four DCFC ports with CCS connectors and the ability to charge four EVs simultaneously at 150 kW each for a combined capacity of 600 kW or more.
• Stations must be spaced no more than 50 miles apart on designated corridors and located within one mile of the corridor.

Another 1,104 stations are required for there to be a compliant charging location every 50 miles of interstate highway, including a first phase of 1,084 chargers on highways designated as EV alternative fuel corridors and an additional 20 along other corridors. Alternative Fuel Corridors are proposed by states and recognized by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) as part of a network of alternative fuel sources, such as hydrogen, propane, EV charging, and natural gas.

Though the study identifies a need for more charging stations, it notes the possibility that the 4,434 non-compliant chargers could be upgraded to meet requirements. It also identifies 42,212 Level 2 public chargers in the country but did not include them in the data because of their long charging times.

The program set aside $5 billion and puts the buildout of the charging network in the states’ hands. States are expected to use NEVI money to build chargers along the designated corridors before moving on to other highways. The program rules note that a state can propose other non-designated areas, but the designated corridors have to be certified as meeting the two program criteria first. Even with this effort, the study notes that chargers located every 50 miles might not meet demand in high-traffic areas.

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Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it’s received $150 million in new funding to support its “de-extinction” activities.

The dodo was already part of Colossal’s plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150 million, the company’s second round of funding, was led by several venture capital firms, including United States Innovative Technology Fund and In-Q-Tel, a VC firm funded by the CIA that first put money into the company in September.

Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal’s total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company’s first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial.

Colossal’s stated goal is not to simply bring these creatures back for vibes; its contention is that reintroducing the species to their respective habitats would help restore a certain amount of normalcy to those environments.

Mammoths died out about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, off the northeastern coast of Russia. The dodo, a species of flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, was gone by 1681. The last known thylacine died at a zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of all three species—the mammoth’s in 2015, the dodo’s in 2016, and the thylacine’s in 2018.

The latter species were driven to extinction by humankind; humans hunted the dodo, introduced predators and pests to its environment, and contributed to its habitat loss. Humans may have played a role in mammoth extinction as well, but the dodo and the thylacine are classic examples of our ability to wipe out species at extraordinary speed.

Following European colonization of Tasmania, settlers cast the thylacine as a threat to sheep flocks (though this threat was hugely overblown), and the Tasmanian government eventually put a bounty on the marsupial’s head. Some experts believe the thylacine may have persisted in the wild for several decades after 1936, but the writing was on the wall for the iconic species.

Colossal also said it is creating an Avian Genomics Group, which will oversee the efforts to resurrect the stocky dodo. The blue-gray bird weighed as much as 50 pounds and had a distinctive curved beak. Perhaps due to the lack of natural predators on Mauritius, the dodo evolved to be flightless. Europeans encountered the birds in 1507, and by about 150 years later they were extinct.

If the company’s work pans out—and that’s a big if—proxy species of those extinct animals will be brought to bear. That’s because the genetically engineered animals produced by Colossal would not be a bonafide mammoth, dodo, or thylacine.

In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission published a report denoting ground rules for creating proxy species. “Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviourally, ecologically) another entity – the extinct form,” the commission stated, adding that “Proxy is preferred to facsimile, which implies creation of an exact copy.”

De-extinction is something of a misnomer, as this process, if successful, will yield science’s best analogue for an extinct creature, not the creature itself as it existed in the past. De-extinction methods generally rely on using a living creature’s genetics in the resurrection process. That means any 21st-century mammoth will have at least some modern elephant DNA imbued in it, and any nascent thylacine would be produced from the genome and egg of a related species.

Colossal intends to produce its proxy mammoth from an artificial womb, according to National Geographic, rather than using an Asian elephant, which is endangered.

What’s more, behavioral traits of an animal are impossible to extrapolate from a genome alone. How will we know if the mammoth we produce actually acts the way the originals did? Thankfully, there’s some video of thylacines, but other details of the animal—such as the circumstances that may have elicited one of its trademark double-yip vocalizations, of which there are no recordings—are lost to time.

A good reference for the Colossal work is a paper published last year in Current Biology, in which a team of geneticists developed a proof-of-principle model for resurrecting the Christmas Island rat, a species closely related to the extant Norway brown rat.

The team was confident they could reproduce aspects of the extinct rat where areas of the two animals’ genomes largely overlapped; namely genes involving keratin and details like fur color and the shape of its ears. But genes related to the extinct rat’s olfaction (its sense of smell) and its immune responses had little corollary in the genome of the living Norwegian rat. So if the team wanted to bring the rat back in some form, it would need a spoofed immune response and olfactory system.

Similarly, it will be difficult to know whether a proxy thylacine, dodo, or mammoth is behaving as a bonafide version of the animal may have behaved. Lots of animal behavior is taught from parents, but a resurrected mammoth would be alone in the world.

The current plan for the thylacine is to plant the nucleus from a “Thylacine-like cell” into the egg of a genetically engineered Dasyurid egg. Dasyurids are a group of marsupials that includes quolls which the Colossal team deemed the best fit for a thylacine redux. The host Dasyurid’s genome would be engineered to make it more “Thylacine-like,” per Colossal’s website.

Whether or not proxy species are actually produced by startups like Colossal, genetics research done in the name of creating them could help us better understand the relationships between species and how to protect living creatures from threats like disease.

Better understanding species—extinct and extant—on a genetic level is a good thing. How that technology is used, and by whom, is an issue that needs to be handled carefully.

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