A Chinese startup is taking jet-powered steps to landing and reusing rockets.
Chinese commercial launch company Galactic Energy announced in late July that it had recently used a small test article propelled by a jet engine to test guidance software for landing rockets.
The trajectory deviation, landing point deviation, attitude deviation and other indicators all met the design requirements, according to a Galactic Energy statement.
The “Firebird-1” vehicle used for the flight is a small technology verification platform. The company is working towards a “hop test” with Firebird-6 which will be powered by a kerosene-liquid oxygen engine.
The tests are part of the plan to make the company’s upcoming Pallas 1 rocket reusable. Galactic Energy is targeting a first test flight of Pallas 1 next year. The rocket is designed to be capable of carrying 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit.
The first launch will be expendable, but the firm plans to make the rocket capable of being recovered by a Falcon 9-like vertical landing in 2025.
Galactic Energy is one of a number of Chinese launch startups and is one of its most successful, having succeeded with all six of its launches of its Ceres 1 small solid rocket.
China has yet to develop a reusable rocket. Only the U.S. companies SpaceX (orbital) and Blue Origin (suborbital) have so far managed to land and reuse rockets. But Galactic Energy and Chinese counterparts Landspace (with the Zhuque 2 rocket), iSpace (Hyperbola 2), Deep Blue Aerospace (Nebula 1) CAS Space (Lijian rockets) and Space Pioneer (Tianlong 3) are all developing reusable launch vehicles.
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A groundbreaking demonstration by the European Space Agency (ESA) suggests it’s possible to deorbit satellites safely and in a reasonably controlled manner, even for those not originally designed for such maneuvers.
Taking out the Trash (in Space)
As planned, the Aeolus Earth Explorer satellite met its demise above Antarctica on July 28 at around 3:00 p.m. ET, as U.S. Space Command confirmed shortly afterward. The reentry followed a series of complex maneuvers that lowered the defunct satellite’s orbit from approximately 199 miles (320 kilometers) to a mere 75 miles (120 km), ensuring its safe return and eventual incineration in the atmosphere.
Simulating Aeolus’s demise
Simulating Aeolus’s demise
A newly released animation illustrates the possible final moments of the spacecraft. The simulation, made with the SCARAB tool, is based on a model of the Aeolus spacecraft that took the satellite’s shape, size, mass, and materials into consideration, along with the principles of aerothermodynamics. The simulation depicts Aeolus’s reentry in its final moments, showcasing the controlled descent made possible by its “six degrees of freedom,” that is, its ability to move freely in three-dimensional space along the x-, y-, and z-axis.
Importantly, the satellite wasn’t designed to fly at such low altitudes, but the demonstration showed that it’s still possible to deorbit satellites in this particular manner—at least for a similar cohort of satellites with sufficient amounts of fuel remaining.
Aeolus, designed and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), studied global wind patterns prior to its retirement, contributing to our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and enabling more accurate weather predictions. But the satellite had been losing altitude at a steady pace and it was nearly out of fuel. Without intervention, it would continue its uncontrolled descent and eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, with debris falling unpredictably in undesignated locations.
To prevent potential risks to people and property below, ESA decided to deliberately crash the satellite into Earth’s atmosphere, but in a controlled manner. For an entire week, mission controllers guided the satellite to its doom, allowing most of it to burn up during reentry. “This assisted reentry attempt goes above and beyond safety regulations for the mission, which was planned and designed in the late 1990s,” Tim Flohrer, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, explained in a statement.
For the assisted reentry, teams of engineers and flight dynamics experts positioned Aeolus such that any remaining fragments would fall safely within the satellite’s planned Atlantic ground tracks. By successfully executing the controlled reentry, the risk of potential debris falling in populated or undesired locations was significantly reduced. “By turning Aeolus’s original fate—an uncontrolled, ‘natural’ reentry—into an assisted one, they reduced that risk another 42 times.”
This bodes well for similar future efforts, in the ongoing effort to keep low Earth orbit free from all that superfluous clutter.
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There are already so many streaming services out there, but the market is not fully saturated just yet. The space agency NASA has announced its own streaming service, NASA+, and it’s completely free.
“See more rockets, more science, and more space,” NASA said of its new streaming service.
NASA+ won’t have any ads or subscription options, so thankfully this one won’t add to your existing monthly bill. What it will have includes a collection of original video series and live coverage for NASA missions. After all, NASA is putting humans back on the Moon and going to Mars, so now is a good time to get people excited about space again with a new streaming service.
“Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity,” NASA boss Marc Etkind said in a news release.
NASA+ will be available on “most major platforms” through the NASA App on iOS and Android devices. Users can also stream content through Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and via the web.
As mentioned, NASA is sending humans back to the moon. The Artemis program began with the launch of the uncrewed Artemis I in November 2022 that orbited around the Moon but didn’t come down for a landing. Artemis II (November 2024) will take a crew of human astronauts to the Moon, but it won’t be until 2025’s Artemis III–if all goes to plan–that humans will land on the Moon to conduct further research. If all goes to plan, it will be the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972 that humans visited the lunar surface.
After this, NASA plans to send an astronaut to Mars.
NASA’s latest rocket launch took place on August 1, with a ship heading to the International Space Station carrying supplies.
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All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the next week. It required four ingredients, and so far he had access to three.
His followers on X (that is, Twitter, post-rebrand), offered ideas: He could melt down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or try to buy it in pure form off Etsy, where the DEA might not be looking. Others offered connections to Eastern European suppliers. They were deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had learned about a possible superconductor called LK-99 earlier that week through a post on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint in which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, in their words, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was among those racing to replicate it.
Superconductivity—a set of properties in which electrical resistance drops to zero—typically appears only under frigid or high pressure conditions. But the researchers claimed LK-99 exhibited these qualities at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Among the evidence: an apparent drop in resistance to zero at 400 Kelvin (127 degrees Celsius) and a video of the material levitating above a magnet. The authors, led by Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon, proposed that this was the result of the Meissner effect, the expulsion of a magnetic field as a material crosses the threshold of superconductivity. If that were true, it could indeed lead to a new era: resistanceless power lines, practical levitating trains, and powerful quantum devices.
On X and Reddit, large language models went by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets were spun up (the odds: not particularly good). Anons with a strangely sophisticated knowledge of electronic band structure went to war with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an apparent resurgence of technological progress. Their mantra was seductive, and maybe a little reductive: a return to a time of leapfrogging discoveries—the lightbulb, the Manhattan Project, the internet—where the impact of scientific discovery is tangible within the span of a human’s earthly presence. “We’re back,” as one X user put it.
Experts are doubtful. Multiple versions of the LK-99 paper have appeared online with inconsistent data—reportedly the result of warring between the authors about the precise nature of the claim. The researchers aren’t well known in the field, and their analysis lacks basic tests typically used to confirm superconductivity. Spurious claims are also so common in the field that physicists joke about USOs—“unidentified superconducting objects”—a play on UFOs. (Most recent sighting: a room-temperature, high-pressure material from a University of Rochester lab that has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and rigged data.) There are more likely explanations for the levitation, explains Richard Greene, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland, including magnetic properties in the compound in its normal, non-superconducting state. The betting markets probably had it right: Odds are the new era is not yet upon us.
But the claim is still worth checking out, Greene adds. In his long career studying superconductive materials, he’s seen advances come from outsiders with puzzling papers that explored unfamiliar types of compounds. That includes, in the 1980s, a class of materials that exhibited superconductivity above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 degrees C), making way for all sorts of applications, from magnetic resonance imagery to tokamaks for nuclear fusion. Plus, because physicists understand the mechanics of only certain forms of superconductivity, a seemingly strange or inconsistent result can’t immediately be discounted. Perhaps it’s just something nobody has seen before.
For the first time, scientists have used genetic engineering to trigger ‘virgin birth’ in female animals that normally need a male partner to reproduce.
Previously, scientists have generated young mice and frogs with no genetic input from a male parent. But those offspring were made by tinkering with egg cells in laboratory dishes rather than by giving female animals the capacity for virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis.
Earlier research identified candidate genes for parthenogenesis, says study co-author Alexis Sperling, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But her team, she says, not only pinpointed such genes but also confirmed their function by activating them in another species.
No male needed
In mammals, offspring are produced when males’ sperm fertilizes females’ eggs. But many species of insect and lizard, as well as other animals, have also evolved parthenogenesis, which requires no genetic contribution from a male, as an alternative to sex.
To identify the genes that underlie parthenogenesis, Sperling and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of two strains of the fly Drosophila mercatorum: one that reproduces sexually and another that reproduces through parthenogenesis. The researchers then compared gene activity in eggs from flies capable of parthenogenesis with that in eggs from flies capable of only sexual reproduction to identify the genes at work during one process but not the other.
The comparison allowed the authors to identify 44 genes that were potentially involved in parthenogenesis. The researchers altered the equivalent genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which usually cannot reproduce asexually.
After altering various combinations of genes, the scientists hit on a combination that induced parthenogenesis in roughly 11% of female fruit flies. Some of the offspring of these genetically engineered flies were also capable of parthenogenesis.
Although the parthenogenetic flies received genes only from their mothers, they weren’t always clones of their parent. Some had three sets of chromosomes, whereas eggs laid by mothers reproducing through parthenogenesis usually have only two.
Less complicated than sex
“Parthenogenesis is the most effective way to reproduce. In animals, doing sex is very complicated,” says Tanja Schwander, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who has studied parthenogenesis in stick insects. Studying parthenogenesis, she says, helps biologists to understand the benefits and trade-offs associated with sexual reproduction.
The new work could also help biologists to understand the evolution of parthenogenesis itself, says Chau-Ti Ting, an evolutionary biologist at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. She hopes to determine whether other species of fly have genes for parthenogenesis similar to those in D. mercatorum; this could help her to piece together how the behaviour evolved.
Sperling notes that some agricultural pests use parthenogenesis to multiply quickly, amplifying their power to damage crops. In the United Kingdom, for example, a species of moth turned to parthenogenesis because of widespread use of pesticides that disrupt the male moths’ reproduction. Now the moths have become a major pest, Sperling says. She hopes to study which policies and pest-management strategies could trigger pests to rely on parthenogenesis — knowledge that could help to keep pests in check.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 28, 2023.
Keith Thomas from New York was involved in a driving accident back in 2020 that injured his spine’s C4 and C5 vertebrae, leading to a total loss in feeling and movement from the chest down. Recently, though, Thomas had been able to move his arm at will and feel his sister hold his hand, thanks to the AI brain implant technology developed by the Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine.
The research team first spent months mapping his brain with MRIs to pinpoint the exact parts of his brain responsible for arm movements and the sense of touch in his hands. Then, four months ago, surgeons performed a 15-hour procedure to implant microchips into his brain — Thomas was even awake for some parts so he could tell them what sensations he was feeling in his hand as they probed parts of the organ.
While the microchips are inside his body, the team also installed external ports on top of his head. Those ports connect to a computer with the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that the team developed to interpret his thoughts and turn them into action. The researchers call this approach "thought-driven therapy," because it all starts with the patient’s intentions. If he thinks of wanting to move his hand, for instance, his brain implant sends signals to the computer, which then sends signals to the electrode patches on his spine and hand muscles in order to stimulate movement. They attached sensors to his fingertips and palms, as well, to stimulate sensation.
Thanks to this system, he was able to move his arm at will and feel his sister holding his hand in the lab. While he needed to be attached to the computer for those milestones, the researchers say Thomas has shown signs of recovery even when the system is off. His arm strength has apparently "more than doubled" since the study began, and his forearm and wrist could now feel some new sensations. If all goes well, the team’s thought-driven therapy could help him regain more of his sense of touch and mobility.
While the approach has a ways to go, the team behind it is hopeful that it could change the lives of people living with paralysis. Chad Bouton, the technology’s developer and the principal investigator of the clinical trial, said:
"This is the first time the brain, body and spinal cord have been linked together electronically in a paralyzed human to restore lasting movement and sensation. When the study participant thinks about moving his arm or hand, we ‘supercharge’ his spinal cord and stimulate his brain and muscles to help rebuild connections, provide sensory feedback, and promote recovery. This type of thought-driven therapy is a game-changer. Our goal is to use this technology one day to give people living with paralysis the ability to live fuller, more independent lives."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/vDFYqZt
Last spring, Amazon launched its long-rumored live audio-streaming platform, Amp. The pitch was to reinvent radio with “an infinite dial of shows.” Amp offers users access to a vast, built-in music library to create their own DJ sets with. No need to buy songs or flirt with the DMCA, just make a playlist, go live, talk in between tracks, follow the chat and even invite callers. When I wrote about it a year ago, it showed promise, but it was iOS only, light on users and had a limited feature set.
A little over a year later and Amp is reaching an important milestone: It’s finally available on Android. Amp is Amazon’s first home-grown streaming platform and the year-plus stint as an Apple exclusive meant it enjoyed a level of technical predictability and a self-imposed restriction on growth and user numbers. But as the doors open to the other half of the mobile universe, it’s about to be exposed to the full reality of competing in an already busy social-creator landscape.
Growing beyond iOS is an important move for Amp, even if the platform technically remains in beta (and US-only). But the wider reach of Google’s operating system — from TVs to Chromebooks and beyond — will be a decisive step in the process of Amazon proving it can build a viable streaming platform from the ground up (rather than acquire an already successful one).
You can, of course, find DJ sessions and internet radio in myriad places online. Whether it’s big platforms like YouTube and TikTok or more direct rivals like Stationhead or Tidal (via its Live Sessions feature) and even Amazon Music’s own DJ Mode, there are several destinations for live curated music streams. Of course, let’s not forget Amazon-owned Twitch, which is teeming with tune spinners. Oh, and there’s obviously FM radio, too. This obviously begs the question: What makes Amp unique?
Amazon
“It’s very much like Sirius meets YouTube,” Zach Sang, one of Amp’s contracted creators, and former broadcast DJ told Engadget. “It’s real life, legacy career broadcasters mixed with the future of those broadcasters. It’s everybody coming together, it’s radio democratized. It’s a way that radio genuinely should be programmed: for people and not for profit,” he added. From a user’s point of view, Amp’s main differentiator appears to be its focus on radio and radio-style shows specifically. Plus that built-in music library (Stationhead, for example, requires you to have either Apple Music or Spotify at your own cost).
I asked user Christina “Criti” Gonzalez, who hosts her own daily show, how she’d describe Amp. “[It’s] a very unique, weird place where you’re able to listen to all the music you’ve forgotten about, didn’t know about and crave to hear, again with personalities and so many people of all different walks of life that have one common interest – music.”
Amp Co-Founder, Matt Sandler – who used to work at LA’s KROQ FM – explained that he felt all of the existing options weren’t quite giving listeners or creators what they wanted. “If you posted a job for KROQ and an on air position, you’d get hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of submissions and people who wanted to curate music and talk to the community on air,” he told Engadget. “There have been lots of services built around live connection or music or community. One of the things that I think will drive the success of a business like this is really that balance between scale and connection.”
Amp signed deals with celebrities and established presenters such as Nicki Minaj, Joe Budden, Nick Cannon and the aforementioned Sang to give the platform some known-name appeal, and it’s done so without creating much of a barrier around them compared to regular creators. Your show can sit right next to Nicki Minaj’s in the listings. Although the roster covers large genres like hip-hop, sports, country and pop there’s not much in the way of alt/indie or electronic in that lineup right now.
Unlike Clubhouse, which enjoyed an early surge of popularity, Amp has largely gone under the radar since launch. “The thing we’re maniacally focused on every day is making sure that the product is right before stepping out and bigger and bigger fashion,” Sandler said. But many people I’ve mentioned it to aren’t aware of it – and Amp’s not even included on the list of Amazon products/services Wikipedia page.
Amazon
The app is clearly a lot busier than when I wrote about it just after launch, but the average number of listeners for most shows remains frustratingly low for most shows (based on multiple user reports and other publicly visible data). But several users explained they weren’t discouraged. “The community that it has right now, it’s a small enough space for people to feel like they’re connected, even if they don’t know each other.” Gonzalez said.
At the beginning, according to Sandler, even Amp’s leadership was unsure in which direction the platform would unfold. There was the possibility that the big-name artists would dominate while regular users gravitated to being listeners. In reality, it’s the smaller, home-grown shows and the aforementioned community that has made Amp a nice place to hang out.
“The culture there is so inviting.” Gonzalez said. “I feel like other social media sites can turn negative quickly. I haven’t had much experience with that on Amp and I appreciate that.” Adding, ”It’s crazy what the experience on Amp has done, because I truly honestly say to anyone that’s not an Amp to join it, because it really will change your perspective.”
One of the main complaints I had with Amp right after launch was that hosts needed at least one listener to be able to play a song and often that meant… waiting. There was also no way to communicate with any listeners you did have. Today the awkward waits are (mostly) gone and each stream has its own chat room which has switched it from a one-directional platform to the collection of friendly gatherings that it has become today.
Several creators and listeners have told me they’ve created genuine connections and friendships that have spilled over into real life. The chat rooms in shows are a rare mix of positivity, musical discourse and humor. Trolling and negativity is unusually rare and it’s obvious there’s a real sense of commitment to the app. But at some point it needs to expand to stop it becoming a circular economy where everyone is both a host and a listener.
Amp doesn’t share information about user numbers or demographics, but the typical host and listener right now, perhaps unsurprisingly, appears to mirror the generations that were brought up on mix tapes and burning albums to CD. Where sharing music was more tactile and a little bit slower. In the nicest possible way, the community energy often feels like the best bits of early internet chat rooms. Like many music-first spaces online, there’s little in the way of negativity, and while many creators may fall into a similar age group, a variety of backgrounds has been a defining factor since day one.
Amazon
The positive community is Amp’s to lose though. As it opens up to Android, the door to even more users opens, and with that the challenge of scaling up the platform while maintaining what keeps it special. And there’s also the matter of money. Right now, Amp pays out many of its hosts via an opaque creator fund. “One of the things that we’re focused on is making sure that creators can earn through the service over time, not just through the fund, but through other mechanisms as well.” Sandler said. When I asked about subs, tipping and other Twitch-esque ways to earn money he added “Those are all things you could easily imagine in the service.”
For now, the creator fund is helping keep hosts motivated, but Amp will need to provide realistic alternative revenue streams to keep creators around (and, of course, lure in more). But perhaps the bigger investment Amp needs is in itself. It’s hard to find much in the way of outward promotion of the app and the best tool for promoting its best creators are its own social channels. If Amp can make itself more visible, it can grow the user base which in turn makes that creator economy, be it tipping, subs and beyond, more viable.
There are also occasional technical issues that remind you the app is still in beta, which an injection of new users, on a new operating system no less, might exacerbate. Mostly, it’s small annoyances like the chat swallowing your last message. Occasionally, it’s more dramatic like a stream crashing or a host being booted out of their own show.
“The glitchiness causes some frustration. And, sometimes that can change your experience doing the show and with others listening. So once those kinks get ironed out, I feel like the creators will feel more comfortable and less anxious while they’re doing sets” Gonzalez said. Users have even coined the phrase “Amp be Ampin’” as a refrain to the inevitable quirkiness that happens every couple of weeks or after an update.
Where does the app go from here? “I think there’s a big opportunity for amp specifically to move charts and culture around the world. And that means personalities, spinning music, having conversations and developing communities that exist in the app but that have social currency outside of the app as well.” Sandler said. Sang on the other hand thinks it’s a way to keep the spirit of radio going. “It’s not like there’s any major radio stars on the come up. So it’s like, where are they going to come from? Let them come from Amp.”
Or, as Gonzalez was quick to point out, sometimes, it’s just about the music. “There are certain creators that talk through their experience or a memory or something like that. And it completely changes how I looked at the song to begin with” she said. “I love the community so much, but it’s also just the variety, being exposed to certain genres. So I love that and ever since I’ve been really addicted.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/q0S2HXc
