“In the age where the motto “more is better” has almost led the world to the brink of global thermonuclear extinction, it is refreshing to find that the ancient ether metaphysics leads to a “small is beautiful” cosmology. It linkens the miracle of creation more to the germination of a seed or to the blossoming of a flower than that to the denotation of a cosmic bomb” – Dr. Paul LaViolette
Strange, stranger, strangest! To the weird nature of one of the simplest chemical compounds — the stuff so familiar that even non-scientists know its chemical formula — add another odd twist. Scientists are reporting that good old H2O, when chilled below the freezing point, can shift into a new type of liquid. The report appears in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
Pradeep Kumar and H. Eugene Stanley explain that water is one weird substance, exhibiting more than 80 unusual properties, by one count, including some that scientists still struggle to understand. For example, water can exist in all three states of matter (solid, liquid,gas) at the same time. And the forces at its surface enable insects to walk on water and water to rise up from the roots into the leaves of trees and other plants.
In another strange turn, scientists have proposed that water can go from being one type of liquid into another in a so-called “liquid-liquid” phase transition, but it is impossible to test this with today’s laboratory equipment because these things happen so fast. That’s why Kumar and Stanley used computer simulations to check it out.
They found that when they chilled liquid water in their simulation, its propensity to conduct heat decreases, as expected for an ordinary liquid. But, when they lowered the temperature to about 54 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the liquid water started to conduct heat even better in the simulation. Their studies suggest that below this temperature, liquid water undergoes sharp but continuous structural changes whereas the local structure of liquid becomes extremely ordered — very much like ice. These structural changes in liquid water lead to increase of heat conduction at lower temperatures.
The researchers say that this surprising result supports the idea that water has a liquid-liquid phase transition.
August 12, 2011, Mojave, CA
NASA has selected XCOR Aerospace to provide suborbital flight and payload integration services for research and scientific missions in a program that will offer up to $10 million dollars in contracts to match payload customers with flight vehicle services. The awards were announced by NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, a part of NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC that is managed at Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
“Through this award, NASA has recognized XCOR’s Lynx suborbital vehicle as a useful payload platform that will benefit both NASA’s R&D needs and the private research, scientific, and educational communities,” said Jeff Greason, XCOR CEO. “By encouraging and incentivizing frequent, low cost access to space, NASA is helping to ensure America’s future as a leader in space.”
XCOR’s suborbital reusable launch vehicle, Lynx, is capable of up to four flights per day using advanced rapid call-up and turnaround operations. The Lynx will provide three to four minutes of microgravity as well as, if desired, exposure to the harsh environment of space. This will provide opportunities to investigate the largely unexplored regions of our upper atmosphere.
XCOR has partnered with four leading payload integration providers in the US to give NASA and the research community a first-rate experience for the Program’s missions. The Planetary Science Institute (PSI) of Arizona, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Texas, NanoRacks LLC of Kentucky and Washington, DC, and Spaceflight Services of Washington will provide payload processing and related support services based on their multiple areas of expertise. These independent payload service providers specialize in atmospheric science, physics, microgravity research, planetary science, Earth observation, and life sciences, and other areas. XCOR’s partners are among the premier organizations in specialized suborbital and orbital commercial payload development and integration. PSI recently announced their Atsa Suborbital Observatory, a versatile facility that will maintain cameras and telescopes to conduct astronomical observations or remote sensing of the Earth, will fly on Lynx. SwRI is the pioneering national research institute that will be the first Lynx launch customer for broad based suborbital payload integration and research. NanoRacks and Space Flight Services are national leaders in orbital payload integration and science experimentation, with NanoRacks already providing research platforms on the International Space Station and SpaceFlight Services offering stand alone on-orbit research and transport of experiments to the ISS in the SpaceX Dragon capsule.
“We’re building our Lynx suborbital vehicle to accommodate as many of these missions as possible,” remarked XCOR’s COO Andrew Nelson. “By integrating multiple payload spaces both inside the pressurized cabin and exposed to the vacuum of space we can handle a large variety of experiments as well as the researchers themselves. This is currently a very underserved market, with long lead times and no guarantee of payload recovery on conventional sounding rockets. NASA is jump-starting a revolution in the commercial space industry and scientific research by pairing up payload investigators with cutting edge private suborbital vehicle providers such as XCOR.”
XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation located in Mojave, Calif. The company is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket powered vehicles, propulsion systems, advanced non-flammable composites and other enabling technologies. XCOR is working with aerospace prime contractors and government customers on major propulsion systems, and concurrently building the Lynx, a piloted, two-seat, fully reusable, liquid rocket powered vehicle that takes off and lands horizontally, and serves three primary missions: microsatellite launch, research & scientific missions, and private spaceflight. The Lynx production models (designated Lynx Mark II) are designed to be robust, multi-mission commercial vehicles capable of flying to 100+ km in altitude up to four times per day and are being offered on a wet lease basis.
by Bill Steigerwald for Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Aug 09, 2011
NASA-funded researchers have evidence that some building blocks of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions for life, found in meteorites were likely created in space. The research gives support to the theory that a “kit” of ready-made parts created in space and delivered to Earth by meteorite and comet impacts assisted the origin of life.
“People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960′s, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life,” said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space.” Callahan is lead author of a paper on the discovery appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules. For example, previously, these scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.
In the new work, the Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. They extracted each sample with a solution of formic acid and ran them through a liquid chromatograph, an instrument that separates a mixture of compounds. They further analyzed the samples with a mass spectrometer, which helps determine the chemical structure of compounds.
The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases, as well as hypoxanthine and xanthine. DNA resembles a spiral ladder; adenine and guanine connect with two other nucleobases to form the rungs of the ladder. They are part of the code that tells the cellular machinery which proteins to make. Hypoxanthine and xanthine are not found in DNA, but are used in other biological processes.
Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases: purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine; the latter two almost never used in biology. These compounds have the same core molecule as nucleobases but with a structure added or removed.
It’s these nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, which provide the first piece of evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination. “You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they’re not used in biology, aside from one report of 2,6-diaminopurine occurring in a virus (cyanophage S-2L),” said Callahan. “However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical ‘factories’ cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, due to the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid.”
The second piece of evidence involved research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team also analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.64-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found, with the same methods used on the meteorites. The amounts of the two nucleobases, plus hypoxanthine and xanthine, found in the ice were much lower — parts per trillion — than in the meteorites, where they were generally present at several parts per billion. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. One of the meteorites with nucleobase analog molecules fell in Australia, and the team also analyzed a soil sample collected near the fall site. As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analog molecules present in the meteorite.
Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases — both the biological and non-biological ones — were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. “In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial,” says Callahan.
“In fact, there seems to be a ‘goldilocks’ class of meteorite, the so-called CM2 meteorites, where conditions are just right to make more of these molecules,” adds Callahan.
The team includes Callahan and Drs. Jennifer C. Stern, Daniel P. Glavin, and Jason P. Dworkin of NASA Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory; Ms. Karen E. Smith and Dr. Christopher H. House of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa.; Dr. H. James Cleaves II of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC; and Dr. Josef Ruzicka of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Somerset, N.J. The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Goddard Center for Astrobiology, the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, and the NASA Postdoctoral Program.
Watch related videos at NASA Goddard: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10810
by Staff Writers
Paris (ESA) Jun 06, 2011
The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crewmembers have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.
“Wow, it’s already been a year,” begins Diego Urbina, one of the two Mars500 crewmembers from ESA, in his latest diary entry. “One way to visualise it is if you think of what you were doing exactly one year ago, and then picture yourself living in a windowless metal box from then!”
The crew have not actually gone anywhere in those 12 months, but in theory they have been to Mars and are now on the way back.
The crew of six – three Russians, two Europeans and one Chinese – walked from the flashlights of a hectic press conference into their isolation modules on 3 June 2010 and began their virtual mission towards the Red Planet.
The facility faithfully mimics every aspect of an interplanetary flight, as far as it is possible without really flying into space. Their ‘craft’ is composed of four sealed interconnected cylinders with a total volume of 550 cubic metres. They have their own private cabins and they live and work very much like the astronauts on the Space Station.
“The dark side of this routine is that every day for the past year we woke up at the same time to do the same medical controls with the same devices: no weekend or holiday breaks for a year!” writes Romain Charles, another ESA crewmember, in his diary.
To Mars and back
After the first exciting months, life settled into a routine and the crew waited for Mars arrival at the end of January.
They ‘docked’ with a ‘lander’ (in reality, another module connected to their main habitation modules) that had been waiting with supplies in orbit around Mars.
After unloading the cargo, Diego settled into the lander with Wang Yue and Alexandr Smoleevskiy, and ‘landed’ on Mars.
They completed three sorties in Orlan spacesuits into a big hall that was built to look like the martian surface.
During these marswalks they collected samples, set up experiments and drove a rover, like real marsonauts will do one day.
After conquering the Red Planet, the trio ‘flew ‘back to the interplanetary ship, and the crew was reunited to begin their long trip back home on 2 March.
They will ‘arrive’ on 5 November, when the hatch of the isolation facility is opened. The mission will still go on some weeks after that with medical checks and debriefings.
Good spirit
The biggest problem of future exploration flights is not necessarily the technology, but the humans and interactions between the crewmembers. This is the main focus of the Mars500 experiment.
“Our crew has been keeping up the dozens of experiments we have to do constantly, no matter the good times or the hard times, producing data of quality that helps some of Europe’s best scientists to evaluate what the space travelers of the future will go through,” writes Diego.
“We still have 5 months ahead of us a lot of opportunities to make this trip to Mars even more special,” adds Romain.
“We have a great crew and although our backgrounds are significantly different, we never had any conflicts between us. That’s why I’m full of optimism for our last days in the Mars500 modules. We’ll see you on the 5th of November when we’ll land on Earth after our 520 day’s journey to the Red Planet, not before!” read more…
Jelly-fish 45, designed by Giancarlo Zema is a floating dwelling unit for up to six persons. It’s spacious dimensions are 10 metres high with a diameter of over 15 metres. The Jelly-fish 45 would be ideally situated in sea parks, atolls, bays and seas rich in flora and fauna. The Jelly-fish 45 allows the sea dwelling owners to live either above or below sea level in perfect harmony with the ocean environment.
It consists of five levels connected by a spiral staircase. The top level is 5.6 metres above the sea level and has been kept for study rooms. The next lower level is situated at 3.5 metres above the sea level and contains the night time zone while the next lower level at 1.4 metres contains the daytime zone with a kitchen and bathrooms. The lowest living level at 0.8 metres above the sea level is semi-submerged and has been kept for the guest room, bathroom and technical spaces.
The acrylic viewport globe situated at -3.00 mts above the sea level allows the occupants conmplete enjoyment of the submarine world. Its shape comes from the observation of jellyfishes that animate our seas with their transparent and weightless structure. The main carrying structural component of the Jelly-fish 45 is entirely constructed from plastic reinforced by incorporated fiberglass while the submarine globe is made from acrylic with a high compressive resistance.
Technical Characteristics Jelly-fish 45
Maximum diameter – 15 meters
Accomodation – 6/8 beds
Main structure – high density fibreglass
Deck surface – solid teak
Extensible gangway – electro-hydraulic in inox and teak with remote control
External views – electrochromatic system in polycarbonate
Observation bulb – 3 meter o.s.l. with structure in fibreglass at high density, acrylic viewports
Equipment – approved fire extinguishers, navigation spread
Water capacity – 1000 litre with autoclave system
Internal electric system – Two generator of 16.000W for service 24V light throughout, electric outlets for 24 and 220V
Air-conditioning – reverse system (108.000 BTU/h)
Power source options – photovoltaic panels on fibreglass structure
Certification – ABS
Cost – $USD 2,500,000
by Staff Writers
Berkeley CA (SPX) Apr 04, 2011
Simplifying cyborg circuitry using human blood
Could electronic components made from human blood be the key to creating cyborg interfaces? Circuitry that links human tissues and nerve cells directly to an electronic device, such as a robotic limb or artificial eye might one day be possible thanks to the development of biological components.
Writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, a team in India describes how a “memristor” can be made using human blood. Memristors were a theoretical electronic component first suggested in 1971 by Berkeley electrical engineer Leon Chua and finally developed in the laboratory by scientists at Hewlett Packard using titanium dioxide in 2008. A memristor is a passive device, like a resistor, with two terminals but rather than having a fixed electrical resistance, its ability to carry a current changes depending on the voltage applied previously; it retains a memory of the current, in other words.
There are countless patents linking the development of memristors to applications in programmable logic circuits, as components of future transistors, in signal processing and in neural networks. S.P. Kosta of the Education Campus Changa in Gujarat and colleagues have now explored the possibility of creating a liquid memristor from human blood. In parallel work they are investigating diodes and capacitors composed of liquid human tissues.
They constructed the laboratory-based biological memristor using a 10 ml test tube filled with human blood held at 37 Celsius into which two electrodes are inserted; appropriate measuring instrumentation was attached. The experimental memristor shows that resistance varies with applied voltage polarity and magnitude and this memory effect is sustained for at least five minutes in the device.
Having demonstrated memristor behavior in blood, the next step was to test that the same behavior would be observed in a device through which blood is flowing. This step was also successful. The next stage will be to develop a micro-channel version of the flow memristor device and to integrate several to carry out particular logic functions. This research is still a long way from an electronic to biological interface, but bodes well for the development of such devices in the future.
Moon to Mars
Posted: 03/03/11
Author: Jeremy Hsu
Radioactivity lingering in the soil near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident has not prevented life from creeping back at the Ukrainian site. Now researchers have discovered that oil-rich flax plants grown in the highly radioactive soil can apparently adapt and thrive with few problems.
The first generation survived with changes in barely 5 percent of the plant proteins, and researchers have also collected results from a second generation of flax grown in a radioactive plot of land near Chernobyl. But a mystery remains as to how the flax – a source of plant fiber and dietary oil – has adapted biochemically to the highly radioactive environment. Either way, researchers have been surprised to see that “the radioactive Chernobyl area is not a desert, but is full of life,” according to Martin Hajduch, senior scientist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology.
“My favorite speculation is that when life on Earth was evolving, radioactivity was much more present on Earth’s surface than is today,” Hajduch said. “And so the plants are somehow ‘remembering’ it, [which is] what helped them to adapt in Chernobyl’s radioactive area.”
Radioactivity is a clear and present danger for life on Earth since the earliest days. Lesser amounts of atmospheric oxygen meant that the planet lacked its protective ozone layer which blocks out much harmful radiation from the Sun. That in turn gives support for the idea that life originated underwater where it had some protection, researchers say.
Times are changing
Given life’s ability to arise in the more radioactive environment of an early Earth, there’s little surprise that plants and other organisms can adapt to and tolerate radiation. But the recent flax study helps confirm the idea.
The Slovak researchers chose to focus on the proteome array of proteins rather than the DNA of the plant genomes. That’s because past research by Hajduch suggested that transcript levels won’t necessarily translate into the changed plant proteins, which means that altered gene expression may not affect the plant’s physical survival.
As a postdoc, Hajduch had helped Jay Thelen, a biochemist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, compare the differences among the gene expression and proteins of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Their results showed just a slight majority of the proteins and gene expression pairs agreed with one another.
“So even if we will detect some changes on genome levels in plants grown in the radioactive Chernobyl area, there is about 50 percent chance that it will not followed by protein abundance,” Hajduch explained.
Hajduch and his colleagues grew the flax plants in both a radioactive Chernobyl plot and a non-contaminated plot in the local town, before harvesting the flax seeds for analysis. They found just 4.9 percent of proteins changed out of the 720 protein spots which they studied.
The next generation
Despite uncertainty about how the protein changes have helped the plants shrug off the local radiation, researchers identified certain changed proteins related to how plant cells send chemical signals to one another.
The flax study results also compare well to an earlier study which looked at soybeans. In both cases, the plants experienced a low percentage of protein changes – but the flax seeds accumulated 10 times less radioactivity than the soybean seeds.
The flax study was detailed in the Sept. 15, 2010 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
“Now we are preparing the manuscript from the second generation of plants where we compare protein abundances through seed development between plants grown in radioactive and control Chernobyl fields,” Hajduch said.
Going green in space
The radioactivity levels in the Chernobyl soil don’t necessarily compare with the intensity of the radioactivity found in space or in extraterrestrial soil. But the Chernobyl experiments could help define the radiation tolerance among plants which may eventually become crop candidates for space colonists on the Moon or Mars.
Few radiation experiments have been done on plants in space. One experiment currently underway will test the UV resistance of Arabidopsis seeds on the EXPOSE experiment of the International Space Station.
Such tolerance may prove especially crucial if crop seeds must make the long, possibly six-month journey to Mars. The plant seeds could suffer exposure to higher levels of radiation from the Sun and high-energy cosmic rays on the spacecraft, unless the spacecraft has shielding to make up for the lack of protection from Earth’s atmosphere.
Even assuming that the seeds reach Mars without much radiation damage, they would also have to deal with the higher levels of radiation on the red planet’s surface. Knowing that some plant seeds can deal well with certain radioactivity levels could ease concerns about how much shielding is needed.
Yet radiation represents just one concern for future space crops. The lesser influence of gravity is another factor on a planet such as Mars.
But plants seem to do well even in such microgravity conditions – wheat seeds flown on the Russian space station Mir managed to sprout back on Earth. Soybeans and other would-be crops also have thrived on the International Space Station. more…
Perhaps a greater challenge for Earth plants won’t necessarily come from the familiar threat of radiation. After all, researchers still don’t know how well plants can deal with growing in extraterrestrial soil.
By John Gedmark
Commercial Spaceflight Federation
February 28, 2011
Funded agreements announced for 8 to 17 flights on suborbital vehicles.
Washington, D.C., Monday, February 28, 2011 – Three scientists, including a former NASA executive, will become some of the first scientists to fly on a commercial spacecraft — and they will fly multiple times — under the terms of two funded agreements announced between the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute and two commercial spacecraft providers, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace.
The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a nonprofit research institute with annual revenue exceeding $500 million, will purchase a total of 8 to 17 scientific research flights on two vehicles – Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx Mark I – to fly both scientists and scientific payloads to the upper atmosphere and space. The scientists selected for the flights are Dr. Alan Stern, Dr. Dan Durda, and Dr. Cathy Olkin, and the science payloads will include biomedical, microgravity science, and astronomical imaging projects. All three scientists selected have trained for suborbital spaceflight aboard zero-G aircraft, in NASTAR centrifuges and aboard Starfighter F-104 jet fighters in the last year.
Dr. Stern, the former head of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, stated, “We at SwRI are very strong believers in the transformational power of commercial, next-generation suborbital vehicles to advance many kinds of research. We also believe that by putting scientists in space with their experiments, researchers can achieve better results at lower costs and a higher probability of success than with many old-style automated experiments.”
George Whitesides, President and CEO of Virgin Galactic said, “This agreement signals the enormous scientific potential of the Virgin spaceflight system. Virgin Galactic will be able to offer researchers flights to space that are unprecedented in frequency and cost. Science flights will be an important growth area for the company in the years to come, building on the strong commercial success already demonstrated by deposits received from over 400 individuals for Virgin’s space experience.”
XCOR Aerospace’s COO, Andrew Nelson, stated, “When someone issues a commercial contract with their own money, this means something,” and XCOR’s chief executive officer, Jeff Greason, added, “I look forward to the pioneering work this partnership will achieve.”
Commercial Spaceflight Federation Executive Director John Gedmark added, “This is a historic moment for spaceflight — a scientific research institution is spending its own money to send its scientists to space. I expect that these scientists will be the first of many to fly to space commercially. As the scientific community realizes that they can put payloads and people into space at unprecedented low costs, the floodgates will open even wider.” more…
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg Russia which served as a royal residence from 1732-1917.