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Fusion Rocket Would Shoot People To Mars In 30 Days

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Rocket Test Chamber The magnetic chamber for heating deuterium plasma University of Washington, MSNW
One team will be testing fusion propulsion this summer in Redmond.

A research team in Washington state is on its way to making a fusion rocket that could carry people to Mars in 30 days, NBC News reported.

Scientists spent much of the last century trying to harness fusion energy, but never succeeded. NASA funded this latest effort through its Innovative Advanced Concepts program, which the agency describes as a program for creative ideas that may be 10 years or more away from use on a mission. Phase II projects, such as this fusion rocket, received about $600,000 over three years.

The Washington team members include physicists from the University of Washington who say they've demonstrated all of the parts of their technology. They now need to combine the components into one experiment that creates energy.

The team's idea is to use a strong magnetic field to fuse a series of metal rings into a shell around a deuterium plasma. The shell compresses the plasma, creating a fusion reaction that lasts just 25 millionths of a second, NBC News reported. The reaction heats the metal shell and blasts it out of the back of the rocket at 67,000 miles per hour, propelling the rocket. The team hopes that with enough of these brief reactions, they can push a rocket along continually, all the way to Mars.

The team members, led by University of Washington aeronautics researcher John Slough, have heated deuterium plasma up to fusion temperatures. They've also tested their magnetic field. They plan to put the two together late this summer, NBC News reported. The experiment will take place at the University of Washington's Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond.

[NBC News, University of Washington]

    



Researchers Rearrange Nuts In Low Gravity

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Mixed Nuts, Arranged By WeightMelchoir, Wikipedia
Outcome: your Chex Mix will be better dispersed on Mars.

You may or may not have heard of the Brazil nut effect, but you've probably experienced it: open up a can of mixed nuts (or box of muesli, or any other heterogenous mixture of differently sized foodstuffs) and discover that the biggest items (e.g. Brazil nuts) have all migrated to the top. More scientifically, that process is called granular convection, and understanding it has applications far beyond the snack food industry, including developing avalanche safety systems (so you can ride out that avalanche in the top layers of snow) or in geology.

Physicists have a pretty good idea how the Brazil nut effect works, and manufacturers choose shapes of equipment and packaging to limit its impact on food production. But woe betide the space tourist who wishes to eat a homogeneously distributed packet of nuts while in transit to the Moon or Mars. Nobody had attempted to study the Brazil nut effect in reduced gravity--until now. Researchers at Kobe University in Japan and Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany have risked life, limb and lunch aboard an ESA-managed Vomit Comet to determine if reduced gravity conditions will affect granular convection.

The researchers found that dark green 8mm glass beads (ersatz brazil nuts) traveled upward through a matrix of clear 1mm glass beads much more slowly under low-gravity conditions. That is, the Brazil nut effect would be weaker on Mars or the Moon than it is on Earth. This kind of research is of little use to us Earth-bound fools today, but the data could be important for a future attempt to build structures, manufacture goods, or mine ores on other planets. Or, you know, it can help keep the interplanetary Chex mix from getting too lopsided in transit.

    


How It Works: Self-Coiling Cord

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Powerful Reach The RoboReel's 15 amps are enough to run a fridge, air conditioner, or space heater. Trevor Johnston

Coiling up extension cords by hand is tedious. Spring-activated spools aren't much better; the mechanisms break easily and can cause violent snapback at the end of the cord. Engineers at Texas-based Great Stuff motorized the entire process. Using a combination of sensors and circuitry, the RoboReel neatly winds 50 feet of cable in 10 seconds, saving time and frustration.

1) Initiate
The RoboReel's 12-gauge power cord contains four wires, only three of which transmit current. The fourth runs between the circuit board and a button on the outlet head, which the user presses to initiate retraction.

2) Retract
Once the circuit board receives the signal, it starts the motor, which revs at 4,500 rpms. A combo gear transfers the motion to the 8.8-inch-diameter spool, rotating it at about five feet per second.

3) Wrap
Opposite the motor, a worm and helical gear move a cam arm in an elliptical pattern. The cam swings the spool from side to side on rotors. That ensures that the cord winds in the same pattern every time it retracts.

4) Slow and Finish
To keep track of how much cord the spool has reeled in, an encoder counts the number of times a magnet on one side of the spool passes it. For the last two feet, the spool slows to about two feet per second, which prevents snapback.

5) Monitor
The circuit board also contains a pair of thermostats. When the internal temperature surpasses 122 degrees, an internal fan cools the wound portion of the cord. If the temperature exceeds 176 degrees, which could cause the system to catch fire, the circuit board cuts the power.

STATS

Price: $279
Copper Wire: 3.24 pounds
Power Supplied: 15 amps
Cord Length: 50 feet
Retraction Speed: 3.4 mph

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 How It Works section here, and see all of our April issue here.

    


How Thatcher The Chemist Helped Make Thatcher The Politician

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Margaret Thatcher Publicity photo for the 1951 election campaign. The Royal Society
Before becoming Britain's first (and only) female prime minister, Thatcher graduated from Oxford with a chemistry degree.

Margaret Thatcher died today at 87. She'll be remembered as the first (and only) woman to be prime minister of Britain, but what's often missed or only glanced over in her biographies, and now her obituaries, is her career as a chemist.

Thatcher graduated from Oxford in 1947 with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. Her fourth-year dissertation was on X-ray crystallography of the antibiotic cocktail gramicidin, and her supervisor, Dorothy Hodgkin, was working at the time on the structure of penicillin. In the years after, Thatcher worked as an industrial chemist at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons, with a probably apocryphal story circulating that she helped produce a form of soft-scoop ice cream.

It's seldom discussed how much her degree might've affected her politics. A paper by science and technology professor Jon Agar, written for Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London and published in 2010, took a look at that connection, first by examining her as a student:

All of her biographers agree that the future Mrs Thatcher devoted her free time to politics rather than science, and even regretted her choice of undergraduate study. One repeated anecdote has her walking with a friend at graduation in 1947 saying, ‘You know, I oughtn't to have read chemistry. I should have read law. That's what I need for politics. I shall have to go and read law now.' Another repeatedly recalled incident, at an unspecified date, but presumably during her undergraduate years, was a conversation between the young scientist and Norman Winning, the Recorder, or municipal clerk, of her hometown, who had a Cambridge natural sciences degree. Winning advised her to continue with chemistry as a means to getting into law as a patent lawyer. All these anecdotes serve to prepare the narrative for the next stage in Thatcher's career, her training and employment as a lawyer in the later 1950s.

But instead Thatcher took a position at British Xylonite (BX) Plastics in 1947, Agar writes. It's not clear exactly what her work entailed, but she, perhaps unexpectedly, joined a union there. In 1949, after gaining an opportunity as a parliamentary candidate, Thatcher became a food research chemist at "the cakes and teashop business J. Lyons & Co." She likely researched the chemical process saponification, but not much else can be confirmed about her work there.

By 1951, Thactcher resigned from Lyons and switched career paths, studying tax law and passing the Bar in 1953. In 1959, she won a seat in Parliament.

The popular theory, then, is that Thatcher studying chemistry was "incidental," Agar writes. It kept the lights on while she pursued politics. He quotes journalist Hugo Young's summary:

These two jobs, lasting barely three years in all, constitute the totality of Margaret Thatcher's first-hand contact with the world of commerce and industry. . . . In any case, prime minister Thatcher never tried to make political capital out of these fugitive involvements. They were incidental to her political ambition and she has never pretended otherwise. They made her a living, while she devoted most of her psychic energy to the greater and more glamorous task.

But that doesn't mean her career as a chemist and politician never intertwined, Agar argues. In 1971, Lord Victor Rothschild proposed laws to make government funding of science closer to a business proposition: policy would be shaped by market forces. "Basic" research science (or just "cheap" science) wouldn't be affected, but other research would. Thatcher, then Education Secretary, strangely seemed to shift positions in a decisive meeting on the subject, ultimately agreeing that the market should play a role in government funding of science.

It was a controversial decision--121 scientists and doctors signed letters of protest to The Times--but Agar marks this as a defining moment, when Thatcher's hard-line conservative policies first took shape. It wasn't a coincidence that the battle was fought over science, either, Agar writes: "it was precisely because Thatcher knew what scientific research was like that made her impervious to claims that science was a special case, with special features and incapable of being understood by outsiders, and therefore that science policy should be left in the hands of scientists. Such a strategy of persuasion and protection might have considerable purchase on a science minister with no direct experience of the working life of a scientist, but not Thatcher."

Agar sees that moment as the beginning of a slope toward more conservative policies. In effect, she used her chemistry background to test the political water: if she could pull off policies like that in the science sector, she could do it in other sectors, too. Agar writes that Thatcher was fond of this quote, about Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and the physicist Michael Faraday: ‘When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. "Yes, sir", remarked Faraday with prescience. "One day you will tax it."'

    


Do Brain Games Work?

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Exercising the BrainIdaho Commission for Libraries
A few new studies, including one meta-analysis, suggest brain games don't make you any better at anything but playing brain games.

Think you can make yourself smarter with brain-training software? New studies suggest that so-called brain games don't improve players' thinking or IQ, they just make you better at playing the games, the New Yorker reported.

The studies come after of a decade of spotty research suggesting that brain games do work--and the launch of companies such as Cogmed, Lumosity, Jungle Memory and CogniFit that sell brain games for kids, older adults and everyone in between. The New Yorker talked with Cogmed executives, who insisted the new research was flawed. Meanwhile, the researchers involved in the skeptical studies say it's unethical to sell software that doesn't work, especially to vulnerable audiences such as kids with learning disorders or older adults worried about cognitive decline.

The skeptical studies include:

  1. A study comparing dual n-back training--a favorite training program among avid self-improvers in Silicon Valley--with a placebo game and with not playing any games at all in healthy young adults. The researchers, from three different U.S. universities, found the games improved people's ability in the games.. but not in independent tests of fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, multitasking or other capabilities.
  2. A study that tried to replicate previous research showing that certain mental exercises improved fluid intelligence, which is important to learning and is associated with professional success. The newer study wasn't able to reproduce the effects of the previous experiments.
  3. A so-called "meta-analysis" that reviewed 23 previous studies of brain games, weighting the studies by how rigorous they were and how many study participants they included. Like the other skeptical studies, the meta-analysis found that people just got better at the games they played, but their skills didn't transfer elsewhere, such as people's verbal and nonverbal ability, arithmetic, or attention.
  4. The New Yorker covered the objections brain-game company Cogmed had with the studies' conclusions. Neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg, who led a brain-games study in 2002 that showed the games did work for children and is now a paid Cogmed consultant, also said the meta-analysis was poorly done, though reporter Gareth Cook pointed out that it the analysis was published in one of the field's top journals.

    One thing that the New Yorker piece doesn't do is distinguish between how brain games work for normally developing kids, kids with learning disabilities, normally developing adults, and adults with diagnosed cognitive decline. The stakes are different for each group, so it'd be helpful to know if there are differences. It may be that the science doesn't yet exist for such a detailed breakdown: Skeptical Studies No. 1 and No. 2 were performed in normally developing adults, while the meta-analysis looked at studies about brain games performed in all kinds of people.

    [New Yorker]

    


This Weird Fish Has Clear Blood

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Icefish Larvae This is a larvae of the icefish family, which includes about 25 species. Wikimedia Commons
Living at 3,300 feet in one of the most inhospitable habitats on Earth, this fish has evolved in a very peculiar way.

Deep in the Southern Ocean, just off the coast of Antarctica, there lives the Channichthyidae family of fish. These fish are highly unusual, and one of its species, the ocellated icefish (Chionodraco rastrospinosus), was just bred successfully in captivity for the first time.

Deep-sea fish that live near the poles are pretty much exclusively weird; any large-ish animal (the icefish averages about a foot long) that can survive in one of the most extreme environments on the planet is necessarily going to be much different than the animals we see in more hospitable areas. The ocellated icefish, for example, has clear blood. It's not very well understood how or why this is. The red color of most blood is given by hemoglobin, a protein that carries oxygen along through the bloodstream to the organs that need it.

The ocellated icefish ("ocellated" refers to the eye-like spots that make up the fish's coloration) does not have any hemoglobin. Its circulatory system gets along without it: oxygen, rather than being transported by the hemoglobin, is fully dissolved in the plasma (the main liquid element of blood). At those cold temperatures, oxygen dissolves into plasma more easily, and the muscles of the fish's circulatory system are able to absorb oxygen directly from the plasma.

That's all helped along by the fact that the ocellated icefish has an extremely strong circulatory system. It's got a much larger and stronger heart than most other fish, and pumps blood through its body at a rate five times greater than the average fish. That, and the fish's relatively low metabolism, helps make up for the loss in efficiency the fish suffers without hemoglobin.

Krill fishermen brought Tokyo Sea Life Park in Japan a male and female specimen, and a few months ago, the two fish spawned--a world's first for this species. Having captive specimens will help scientists figure out the most pressing question with the ocellated icefish: we know they can survive without hemoglobin, but why in the world did they evolve this way in the first place?

[via Agence France Presse]

    


Yes, Your Mind Can Control Your Body Temperature

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Sirikit Dam ThailandTevaprapas Makklay/Wikimedia Commons
Tibetan nuns prove the physical effects of spiritual activity.

You don't have to look far to find the (mostly) positive and surprisingly powerful effects of meditation. But one of the more unexpected effects was just recently published: Tibetan nuns can change their core body temperatures with a certain form of meditation, which could keep them warm and help give their immune systems a boost.

Tibetan nuns practice "g-tummo" meditation, a spiritual practice they believe harnesses "inner energy." Using EEGs and temperature measurements, a team of researchers recorded the internal temperature of nuns in the freezing cold of the Himalayas. The nuns, the researchers found, were able to increase their core body temperature with this technique--up to almost 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Westerners were also able to increase their core body temperatures slightly when taught the process.

Two techniques, specifically, caused the change. "Vase breath" is a breathing technique that causes heat production, and visualization--in this case, of flames near the spine--also accounted for the increase. Useful if you're out in the cold, but the technique, researchers say, could also be helpful in strengthening the immune system. Some folks in the remote parts of Tibet can give you some lessons, if you're interested.

[Science Daily]

    


The Science Of Sports Fandom

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Go TeamChuck France / KU University Relations)
Win or lose, watching sports changes you. What research says about being a fan.

Whether you're lamenting the devastation of your March Madness bracket or gearing up for the excitement of a baseball-filled spring, sports fandom can be an emotional roller coaster.

There's more to being a fan than just buying tickets and turning on the TV: Scientists study sports fans to look into everything from group dynamics and social bonds to brand marketing and brain function.

"The game itself doesn't mean anything, but the attachment to it certainly does," journalist Eric Simons writes in his new book The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession. "Watching sports is insanely complicated--and very personal--but underneath the layers of personality and culture lie the biological and psychological roots of a universal obsession."

Here are some of the things being an intense sports fan does to you:

It gives you higher self-esteem.
Your team's failure is a threat to your self-image.
It makes your neurons mirror those of the players in the game.
It increases your testosterone levels.
Unless you're losing.
Or unless you're a woman.
No, it happens to women too.
It makes you an aggressive, chanting mess.
It can help communities rebuild after disaster.
It improves your language skills.
It gives you unhealthier eating and drinking habits.
But exercise programs at stadiums can improve men's health.
It gives you schadenfreude.
It makes you enjoy despair, kind of.
It messes up your sense of distance.
It might make you a riskier driver.
It can increase suicide rates when a team relocates.
It might kill you.
Even if your team wins.

    



Penis Size Matters, Study Says

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Take Your Pick A sample of the computer-generated images researchers asked heterosexual women to rate for attractiveness. Brian S. Mautz et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Size works in combination with a couple other physical traits, a team of biologists found.

Despite what some people say, penis size does matter to dude-loving ladies, according to a new study.

In a study of 105 heterosexual Australian women, flaccid penis size, height, and shoulder-to-hip ratio all affected the women's attractiveness ratings of life-size, computer-generated male figures. The traits worked together in complex ways; for example, penis size mattered more in taller men.

The penis effect was so strong that that the study's authors, an all-male team of Australian biologists, wrote in their paper that it may have driven the evolution of bigger penises in humans, especially if in prehistory, men didn't do as much to hide their penises in clothes. However, the authors didn't offer a way to test this idea beyond these attractiveness ratings.

Of course, the study used a limited sample of pretty specific women. And, not to worry, it's unlikely to have any real-world applications. Attraction takes into account myriad characteristics, and is unlikely to be well mirrored in a study with weird, white CGI male figures.

To conduct the study, the biologists created 343 male figures with all possible combinations of height, shoulder-to-hip ratio and penis size within a natural range. (I must note that the figures are kind of creepy-looking, although I understand they were created to keep other traits, such as skin color and facial attractiveness, constant.) The biologists then asked women who volunteered for their study to view a random sampling of 53 of the figures and to rate the figures' attractiveness. Statistical analyses of the women's answers yielded such gems as:

  • Shoulder-to-hip ratio mattered the most, while both penis size and height mattered about the same amount, and less than shoulder-to-hip ratio.
  • Penis size had a greater effect on attractiveness rating in taller men than in shorter men.
  • Penis size also had a greater effect on attractiveness rating in men with higher shoulder-to-hip ratios than in men with smaller shoulders compared to their hips.
  • There were diminishing returns for everything. That is, how much more attractiveness the figures gained for added height, penis size and shoulder-to-hip ratio decreased as those traits increased. So the attractiveness difference between at 6'1" man and a 6'2" man is less than the difference between a 5'1" man and a 5'2" man. For penis size, the dropoff in attractiveness gains started at about 7.6 centimeters, or three inches.
  • Women's ages did not affect their attractiveness ratings, but women's heights did. Taller women made height more important in their ratings than shorter women did.
  • Women took longer to rate figures they found more attractive. Previous studies have found that people generally spend longer gazing at things they find attractive.
  • The biologists published their work today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    


Watch Rich People Earn More Money Than You In Real Time [Infographic]

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Sixty Seconds Of SalaryBård Edlund/CNNMoney
How much Kobe Bryant and others make in a minute compared to a minimum wage worker.

CNNMoneyhas published an awesome visualization by artist Bård Edlund showing how much various people make in one minute. On the chart (and quickly moving past it) are Kobe Bryant and Exxon Mobil Corporation CEO Rex Tillerson. Also included are median and minimum wage workers, President Obama, the average teacher, and the average doctor.

No surprises here: some professions make a lot more than others. But apart from the difference in wages between professions, a second-by-second breakdown of wages is fascinating. How long, for example, does it take Tillerson to make enough dough for a cup of coffee? Less than 10 seconds, probably. Considering how long it takes to order a cup, he's still going to be making money while waiting in line. So is Kobe (natch), and so is Obama, likely.

There's a wide enough variety of people and careers on the visualization that you can probably guess where your own expanding circle would fall, too.

[CNNMoney]

    


The Top 50 Navigation Innovations Of All Time

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Jepp Chartvia Flying

Our friends over at Flying have a great slideshow up walking us through the 50 greatest innovations in navigation of all time. It's really fun to see how primitive but effective navigation used to be--celestial navigation and bonfires are on the list--and how far we've come, using microwaves and satellites and autopilot and man, so much other cool stuff. Read the article over at Flying.

    


You've Never Seen Chickens Look This Human

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Black Japanese Bantam Cock Black Japanese Bantam Cock Class: Single Comb Clean Legged Other Than Game Bantams Origin: Japan Tamara Staples
Peculiar portraits of championship chickens, by award-winning photographer Tamara Staples


Click here to enter the gallery

Who's the fairest fowl of all? In her new book The Magnificent Chicken, Brooklyn-based photographer Tamara Staples makes a strong case for the purebred Gallus gallus domesticus, from the ultra-dignified Black Langshan Cockerel to the eccentric Beaded Buff Laced Polish Frizzle Bantam Hen. If you have never been to a poultry show, you've probably never even imagined chickens as diverse and stunning as the ones in Staples' portraits.

The book begins with an interview and essay by This American Life host Ira Glass. "What happens when you try to treat a chicken they way we treat humans, even if it is just for the length of a photo shoot?" Glass writes. "What happens, it turns out, is you learn just what the thin line is that divides human beings from birds."

See the gallery for 11 prize-winning barnyard beauties from The Magnificent Chicken.

    


Dinosaurs Could Doggy Paddle Long Distances

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A swimming theropodNathan E. Rogers
New evidence suggests some two-legged dinos were strong swimmers.

Most people still have a very last-century idea of what dinosaurs were like. No, T. rex didn't stand upright; lots of dinos were actually feathered, not leathery; and they may have been killed by a comet, not an asteroid.

Now there's some new research to further muddle your mental image: Some of those clumsy-looking land dinosaurs, like the early tyrannosaur, may have actually been strong swimmers. Scott Persons, a researcher at the University of Alberta, examined fossilized claw marks on a river bottom in China's Szechuan Province. Persons found that the scratches, which cover a distance of nearly 50 feet, suggest coordinated left-right, left-right paddling.

"What we have are scratches left by the tips of a two-legged dinosaur's feet," Persons says. "The dinosaur's claw marks show it was swimming along in this river and just its tippy toes were touching bottom."

The claw marks were probably left by a carnivorous theropod dinosaur that stood just over 3 feet at the hip-possibly an early tyrannosaur or a Sinocalliopteryx, Persons says.

The study appeared April 8 in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.

    


Climate Change May Lead To Bumpier Airplane Rides, Study Finds

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The first study of global warming's effects on clear-air turbulence offers some uncomfortable predictions.

By 2050, plane trips between the U.S. and Europe could take longer, use more fuel and be subject to more turbulence, according to a new study.

The study investigated clear-air turbulence, or turbulence that occurs in clear sky instead of inside clouds or near mountains. Clear-air turbulence is impossible for pilots to spot or radar to detect, but models do exist to predict where and when it will occur. Two climate researchers in the U.K. combined different models to come up with a calculation for how a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, compared to pre-industrial levels, could affect clear-air turbulence. (In one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's four possible future scenarios for climate change, carbon dioxide levels double by the middle of the 21st century.)

In the new hybrid model, twice as much carbon dioxide in the air would increase median clear-air turbulence strength along common transatlantic routes by 41 percent. Turbulence of at least moderate severity would happen 40 percent to 170 percent more often. Carbon dioxide increases strengthen jet streams, which are a major driving factor in clear-air turbulence.

Airline passengers won't necessarily feel these exact numbers, as what passengers feel is mostly that stomach-dropping, up-and-down turbulence, which doesn't always increase linearly with overall turbulence. Nevertheless, New York-to-London will probably get bumpier. The U.K. researchers cited two observational studies that suggested that transatlantic flights are already more turbulent than they used to be.

The researchers said avoiding increased turbulence spots could account for increased passenger jet fuel use and flight times.

This is the first time anyone has studied how global warming will affect clear-air turbulence, the researchers wrote in their paper, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

    


How It Works: The Star-Mapping Spacecraft

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Gaia DiagramKevin Hand

From the outside, galaxies appear as a mass of stars orbiting a dense center. But inside, they are more complex, with some groups of stars moving at different speeds or directions, in part because they originated from separate galaxies that collided billions of years ago. To untangle these disparate components of the Milky Way, the European Space Agency plans to launch Gaia in October. The two-ton craft will map a billion of our galaxy's more than 100 billion stars, collecting data on all three dimensions of each star's position as well as its speed, direction, color, and brightness. Knowing where stars are located and headed will help astronomers determine where they came from. And that could shed light on how our galaxy formed and evolved.

STABILITY AND POWER

The key to Gaia's success will be its stability: A steady position and temperature translates into an accurate galactic map. The craft's payload is the first to be made entirely of silicon carbide, a stiff ceramic relatively insensitive to heat and cold. A 33-foot insulated sunshade keeps the payload in shadow, and the thermal tent helps block stray radiation from the sun and from deep space. The power system includes a lithium-ion battery, which briefly runs a set of thrusters after the spacecraft disengages from the Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket that will launch it from Earth. Not long after launch, Gaia's battery will shut down, and the system's 140-square-foot gallium-arsenide solar arrays will take over, powering the craft.

DATA COLLECTION

The main data-capture instrument on Gaia is a 3-by-1.5-foot focal array made up of 106 charge-coupled sensors that total one gigapixel. Imagine it as 106 cameras joined together, with groups of cameras capturing different kinds of information. For example, 14 space-mapper cameras tag the information from each star to show which telescope spotted it, while 62 sensors in the astrometer map the star's transit around the galaxy. Additional sections of the focal array capture radial velocity and photometry information.

The data from the focal array routes to seven computers housed in the electronic service module. The computers process the data, which is transmitted back to the agency via an antenna for the eight hours a day that Gaia communicates with Earth-based antennas. Over its mission, Gaia will generate 200 terabytes of data. Another computer controls the power system and thrusters.

SKY COVERAGE

Gaia rotates around its axis [blue] every six hours.

As it spins, the axis changes direction like a gyroscope toy. It loops around every 63 days.

Between the rotation and the loop-and the craft's orbit around the sun-Gaia's telescopes follow a path [yellow] that covers the whole sky.

Over Gaia's five-year lifespan, the craft will capture information from each of one billion stars an average of 70 times. As each star passes into the view of two telescopes, mirrors relay images of the star to dedicated sections of detectors in Gaia's focal array. The scopes are mounted 106.5 degrees from one another on the nine-foot-diameter hexagonal optical bench and are made of six mirrors apiece, two of which they share.

Cold-gas micropropulsion thrusters keep the craft spinning on its axis and control its attitude, or the direction it points in space. A chemical propulsion unit maintains Gaia's orbit around the sun.

BILLIONS OF STELLAR MEASUREMENTS

1) The astrometer identifies the position and movement of up to 8,000 stars per second. The stars' images drift across the detector as Gaia spins. Electrical signals in the detector trace the path of each star.

2) Two photometers measure light from each star. Prisms filter the blue and red light coming into each photometer. This spectral data contains information on the physical and chemical properties of each star.

3) The radial velocity spectrometer clocks the rate at which each star is moving toward or away from Earth by measuring its red or blue shift.

STATS

Diameter: 33 Feet
Weight: 4,475 pounds
Lifespan: 5 Years
Distance from Earth: 930,000 miles
Time to Reach Destination: 1 month
Launch Date: 2013
Cost to Build: $900 million
Stars to Map: 1,000,000,000

See the rest of the articles from our 2013 How It Works section here, and see all of our April issue here.

    



The 10 Coolest Machines From The 2013 Sea-Air-Space Expo

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Aeros AeroscraftKelsey D. Atherton
Robots, railguns, and... a Guinness World Record holder?


Click here to enter the gallery

I got to see a lot of shiny new military technology at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Exposition yesterday. The show--the largest largest maritime expo in the United States--is part trade fair, part science fair, and 100 percent geared toward government buyers. Defense researchers, contractors, suppliers, and companies eager to join their ranks arrived to show off their fanciest wares. Here's a gallery of the 10 coolest things I saw.

    


U.S. Navy To Guard Old Ship With A Freaking Laser

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Naval LaserU.S. Navy
The best defense is a good offense, unless you have lasers, in which case the best defense is lasers.

One of the U.S. Navy's oldest ships is about to get a lot more futuristic, thanks to a laser.

The Navy plans to retrofit the USS Ponce, first commissioned in 1971, with a laser weapons system early next year. The system works by using heat to blast through boats and deflect unmanned drones.

The advantages? It's fast, deadly, and incredibly cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it is estimated to cost about $1 a shot. That's less than a third the wholesale price of a .50 caliber bullet used in Navy machine guns. (The laser system itself is the result of $40 million in research and development, so that part isn't cheap. But the projectile sure does cost virtually nothing.)

Why the Ponce? Ponce spends time near Iran working as a base and might be particularly vulnerable to swarming attacks by small, fast Iranian boats. That all changes, of course, if it is guarded by a freaking laser.

Watch a video demonstration below:

    


Join the Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge And Do Something Amazing

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The Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge
Submit your project before June 15 for a shot at crowdfunding with the help of Popular Science and RocketHub.

Popular Science has celebrated the world-changing work of scientists, thinkers, and makers for more than 140 years. We're always tickled to learn how many of these great minds read the magazine, yet are bummed to hear how often sparse funding impedes their progress.

So starting today, we're trying something different: We're going to help crowdfund our readers' best ideas through the #CrowdGrant Challenge.

#CrowdGrant is a brand-new partnership with RocketHub-a premiere crowdfunding platform-that's now accepting the best and brightest project proposals in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and other future-shaping fields. Whether you're a bathtub geneticist or an amateur hydroelectric engineer, a weekend chemist or a microelectronics master, we want to see your big idea in our queue for review.

Submissions are due Saturday, June 15, by 11:59 p.m. EDT. Start planning your project now-it can take a couple weeks to polish an appeal to crowdfunders, as each submission requires a thorough description, a compelling video, rewards for those who decide to chip in, and more. Visit RocketHub's Success School to learn and master the art of successful crowdfunding campaigns. And if you have any questions about how RocketHub works, its FAQ is a great starting point.

Editors at Popular Science and experts at RocketHub will review, vet, and select all #CrowdGrant finalists. Winning submissions will attempt to make the world a better place while embodying the innovative spirit that Popular Science greatly values. Submissions should be related to science, technology, mathematics, or engineering.

To help grease the wheels, we've provided a handful of hypothetical submissions below:

  • Angela is an engineer who wants to develop an open-source system to monitor a dog while someone is away from home and, if the dog gets into trouble, calls the owner to intervene. But Angela doesn't have the money to buy the tools and parts to bring her idea to fruition.
  • Brian, a gardener-cum-rooftop farmer, recently completed a prototype for an affordable rooftop farming system designed to fit slanted roofs. To make a commercial product, so any homeowner can easily grow food (and lower energy bills), he requires money to line up factories to build and ship the parts.
  • Cathy is a biological sciences professor who thinks people should have access to a low-cost kit to test themselves for genetic disorders-and keep the sequencing results private for life, no matter which company sequences the DNA. Now all she needs is cash to make it happen.
  • Doug, a Coast Guard dispatcher, spent a year developing autonomous drone software that tracks and follows a rescuer and can deploy lifesavers from the air with a simple hand gesture. All that's missing are the financial resources to launch a pilot program at his local beach.
  • Evelyn is an astronomer looking for habitable exoplanets. She's designed a system to allow backyard astronomers to help with the search, but she needs funding to both license her software and mass-produce a custom robotic tripod attachment.

We'll announce #CrowdGrant finalists on July 15, when project leaders can start their 45-day crowdfunding campaigns (all campaigns close on August 30).

Unlike other crowdfunding platforms, there's no requirement to hit a goal to receive funding. Yet most of the hard work of successful crowdfunding campaigns-rallying support through circles of people you know, frequent updates to funders, social media promotion, delivering on rewards, etc.-falls on project leaders.

To that end, we've created the #CrowdGrant hashtag. Use it to follow the conversation or spread the word about projects on Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and more. (And again, we encourage you to click through RocketHub's Success School before submitting a project.)

So what are you waiting for? Do something amazing and submit your idea today.

The fine print: #CrowdGrant is not a contest, lottery, raffle, or anything left to chance with the promise of a cash prize. Submitting a project idea costs nothing and also guarantees nothing. RocketHub's standard commission structure applies to the money donated to support projects, and Popular Science will share this commission to cover community management, marketing, and other costs associated with our involvement. Just like a typical RocketHub project, this means no additional fees for anyone (hooray!). See RocketHub's FAQ for complete details about their crowdfunding platform, commission structure, and more.

Questions? Email us at crowdgrant@popsci.com

    


4 Things You Need To Know About The Future Of Defense Technology

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Aeryon ScoutWikimedia Commons
Trends spotted at the 2013 Sea-Air-Space Exposition

The Sea-Air-Space Exposition opened in Maryland yesterday. It is one of the U.S. defense industry's largest trade shows--a place where government agencies and private-sector companies gather to peruse the shiniest and most fearsome new military equipment. It is also a good barometer of where the industry is headed. Here are the four most important trends I spotted:

Cameras. Everywhere.
The sheer number of cameras, sensors, sonar systems, and other surveillance equipment was overwhelming. I was expecting to see a lot of weapons here; I was not expecting the guns and missiles to be outnumbered by fancy new cameras. That's a little creepy in an Orwellian kind of way, but a lot of really accurate cameras means more precise targeting with existing weapons and probably fewer mistakes in targeting. That's not a bad trade-off, and it's a real sign of the times that people here talking about "payload" were more likely to mean "cameras and sensors" than "fancy explosives."

Software is secretly king.
The secret sauce that made all the machines on display work was proprietary code, which is pretty hard to take pictures of on an exhibition floor. It also shows how much computers run everything; gun mounts, ship diagnostic tools, missile targeting systems, and self-adjusting cameras all combine hardware with fancy code to make much, much better systems compared with the individual parts alone.

The platform is the market.
Expositions like this are places for the Department of Defense to do some window shopping, maybe make a few impulse buys, and make or break the fortunes of small companies. With DoD as the biggest customer in the house, the market narrows dramatically. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter needs weapons that fit its physical constraints, and the Littoral Combat Ship needs add-ons and attachments to live up to its potential as the workhorse for the future Navy. A lot of new technology on display was specifically designed for these two sort-of customers.

Everyone has a quadrotor.
It's a simple, stable shape, usually built small and operated with a tablet interface. My favorite on display was the Aeryon Scout, but there were several others, and a giant spider-like octo-rotor operating on the same premise. Commercial drones are expected to hit U.S. airspace in 2015, and you can bet quadrotors will dominate the market.

    


Bogus Academic Conferences Lure Scientists

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The Wisdom of Admiral Ackbar
Because fake scientific journals weren't gnarly enough.

If you build it, they will come. And someone, somewhere, is going to try to scam some money out of it.

The "it" in this case is open-access journal publishing. Open-access means that anyone can read them without having to navigate a paywall. Part of the deal here is that authors also pay to publish the paper, in a bid to offset the editorial costs of running a well-organized peer-reviewed journal.

Seeing the success of legitimate open-access journals such as those published by the Public Library of Science gave some unscrupulous people ideas: why not start up a company and solicit submissions to journals that never publish the articles, or never peer-review the submitted articles, or even one that might peer-review, but charges way more money than what one might pay at another journal?

Research librarian Jeffrey Beall has assembled a depressing list of some 243 predatory publishers (most publishers have more than one journal) and 126 independent predatory journals. Beall estimates that at least 25 percent of all open-access journals follow a predatory publishing model that does nothing for actual scientific scholarship -- they act solely as vanity presses for credulous or desperate (or both) researchers looking to pad their resumes.

This trend has been clear for a while now, but what surprised me in a recent NYT article about the phenomenon was the existence of entire fake scientific conferences. According to Beall, these same predatory publishers spam the email inboxes of scientists -- frequently using the names of more-prominent colleagues without consent -- and then charge these dupes a fee for the privilege of speaking at a conference. And if the conference gets canceled (they frequently are), the researchers are out the money because the companies don't give out refunds. Young and desperate researchers agree to speak at these bogus meetings as an opportunity to pad their CVs (I've seen some admit to as much in the comments of various blogposts on the phenomenon), and the organizers just rake in the cash.

The scourge of the fake conference has spawned a number of websites dedicated to outing the false, some sites more-legit-looking than others. A couple of thoughtful blogpost by a researcher at University of Minnesota covered the unsavory news that IEEE has been sponsoring dubious conferences for awhile. On the other end of the credibility scale, someone with a lot of time on their hands (and a poor grasp on web formatting) started a number of Blogspot blogs with the same information posted over and over again lambasting IEEE and a couple of researchers in particular. Just google "fake conferences" and fall down the rabbit-hole. Set a timer for 10 minutes lest you disappear for a day in that interlinked pit of despair.

Why is this a problem? Aside from a general dislike of greedy chicanery and liars, the biggest problem with bogus journals and conferences is the total lack of oversight and quality control. Most of these places do not peer-review and do not reject sub-standard scholarship. By flooding the market with crap, finding legitimately good research becomes that much harder. And, as Beall said in a letter in the journal Nature a few months ago on the phenomenon:

Honest scientists stand to lose the most in this unethical quagmire. When a researcher's work is published alongside articles that are plagiarized, that report on conclusions gained from unsound methodologies or that contain altered photographic figures, it becomes tainted by association. Unethical scientists gaming the system are earning tenure and promotion at the expense of the honest.

The key to not falling for a hustle is that age-old piece of advice that so many people choose to ignore: If something seems too good to be true, it probably isn't.

    


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