Drones can't fetch a taco for you, but they can lift cameras into the sky and return impressive aerial video and photography. Trouble is, today's flying machines require a human pilot to manipulate their complex controls.

Sameer Parekh wants do away with remotes and have intelligent drones simply do his bidding. So he quit his day job as a Wall Street quant and launched an autonomous flying robot company, called Falkor Systems. (Note: It recently merged with I Heart Engineering, a company that builds and sells open-source robotics products.)

Parekh's early Pet AR.Drone prototype uses artificial intelligence algorithms to track a person, follow him or her around from a safe distance, and film the journey.

In the video below, the drone is trained to follow a graphic on a T-shirt. Within the next few years, however, Parekh hopes to refine his intelligent drone software and hardware enough to sell them to extreme athletes, such as BASE jumpers. "They'll be able to track [them] autonomously as they jump off the cliff," he says.

We stepped inside Parekh's Brooklyn, New York workshop to get an early look at the future -- one in which flying drones may be commonplace enough to be pets. And maybe fetch that taco.

The way people work is changing quickly. About two thirds of workers use at least two devices-tablets, smartphones, computers-every day. Trouble is, standard office chairs are built for people who sit in front of a monitor: back straight, elbows down, feet firmly on the floor. When a person leans, lifts, or hunches, the chair's armrests and back don't move with him, causing discomfort. So furniture designers at Steelcase built Gesture, the first chair that supports the slouched backs and roving elbows of mobile-device users.

The designers began by creating a seat and backrest that move in tandem to ensure that the lower back remains supported. The bottom of the backrest connects to a large hinge; reclining forces the hinge closed, which lifts the bottom of the backrest to meet the user's lower back. Hunching forward lets the hinge open, holding the backrest upright. The team also built the armrests on top of four pivot points so that users can move the arms through a complete orbit-up and in for reading a tablet, for instance-without losing stability. Kicking back with cat videos has never been so comfortable.

Steelcase Gesture

Max Recline: 128 degrees
Price:$979
Available: November

The limit to how fast a human can run is 9.48 seconds for the 100-meter race, 0.10 seconds faster than Usain Bolt's current world record, according to Stanford biologist Mark Denny. That is, if you are talking about natural human beings.

In a 2008 study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Denny modeled the fastest human running speed using records of men's 100-meter race results going back to the 1900s. Denny plotted the annual best times in the race into a graph and used computer programs to come up with an equation whose curve best models the behavior of the actual graph he obtained. The curve showed humanly achievable time for the 100-meter race would level off at 9.48 seconds. "They haven't plateaued yet, but you can definitely see the data are bending a little towards that plateau," Denny says.

There's been little improvement in the Kentucky Derby since the 1950s.Denny, who also modeled the best times for racing thoroughbreds and greyhounds in the same study, found there's a speed limit for these races as well, with little improvement in the Kentucky Derby since the 1950s and dogs' performances leveling off in the 1970s.

"If you look at other species - ones that we're trying to breed to run faster and faster - it's not working," he says. "There's no reason to think that human beings are any different from the other species, that somehow these things don't have limits."

Statistical models do not explain the mechanics behind running. So Peter Weyand, a biomechanics professor at Southern Methodist University, has taken a different approach to the question.

A leading expert in human locomotion, Weyand says the primary factor influencing speed is how much force sprinters hit the ground with their feet.

When athletes run at a constant speed, they use their limbs like pogo sticks, Weyand says. Once a sprinter hits the ground, his limb compresses and gets him ready to rebound. When he's in the air, the feet get ready to hit the ground again.

When a runner hits the ground, 90 percent of the force goes vertically to push him up again, while only 5 percent propels him horizontally. In that regard, sprinters behave a lot like a super ball, Weyand says. "What they do is they bounce a lot," he says.

Our body naturally adjusts how fast we run by changing how hard we hit the ground. The harder we hit the ground, the faster we go.

So just how hard can humans hit the ground while they run?

In a 2010 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Weyand and four other scientists had runners running on treadmills at a constant speed in different gaits -- running forward, backward, and hopping. Their study finds that when we hop, our limbs hit the ground with 30 percent more force than when we run, primarily because the foot stays much longer in the air. Based on that information, Weyand and his team calculated that in theory, human beings can run as fast as 19.3 meters per second - that is, if they hit the ground with the maximum force physiologically possible. If a sprinter were to run at that speed throughout the 100-meter race, he would finish in 5.18 seconds.

Maximizing running speed requires a tradeoff between hitting the ground hard and maintaining stride frequency.But that's not the end of the story. In a new study to be published this year, Weyand and his team have found that maximizing running speed requires a tradeoff between hitting the ground hard and maintaining stride frequency. Hitting the ground with maximum force requires the sprinter to spend more time in the air, which slows down the strides he can make per second. The optimal combination of stride frequency and ground force varies with individuals depending on their size, leg length, and the speed they run, Weyand says. There is no golden ratio.

So what's the fastest human running speed possible under this new model? Weyand is reluctant to give a definite number. "Science is not good at making predictions of extremes," he says.
Nonetheless, he says he wouldn't take 9 seconds for men's 100-meter race off the table. "Something in the low 9s is definitely possible, perhaps faster," he says.

That speed still won't allow us to outrun an adult cheetah, the fastest land mammal, which can cover 100 meters in less than 6 seconds.

Science and technology are changing the limits to human running speed.Science and technology are changing the limits to human running speed. Athletes nowadays can take hormone doses to change the mechanical properties of muscles, and scientists have succeeded in tweaking mice's DNAs to alter their muscle fibers.

"We're sort of moving into a Brave New World in athletics where there are many many different types of performance enhancement avenues available," Weyand says. "What's happening is that identifying what's natural and what's not natural is becoming increasingly blurry. To me, (to answer) what's the ultimate speed somebody can run, we now have to go through a list of 10 different conditions: are we talking about no gene doping, no special technology, no pharmaceutical agents … But as we go further and further along there's even potential for tracking shoe design to change speed. It starts to become a horribly complicated question."

This story was produced in partnership with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. For more FYIs, go here.

Mechanical engineer Jason Bell has helped people throw themselves off the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayetteville, West Virginia, for more than a decade. About 400 BASE jumpers each year, in fact, leap from the 876-foot-high span before deploying their parachutes at Bridge Day, an annual extreme sports event Bell helps run. But two years ago, he decided to build a new thrill for spectators and jumpers alike: a catapult that hurls daredevils head over heels into the chasm below.

Bell's creations include an electric go-kart and an automated towrope to pull his kids up their backyard sledding hill; he even built smart features into his home. (He can remotely adjust lighting, audio, security, and video camera systems.) But he had never attempted to build anything quite as daring as a human catapult. "Very few have been built, and many have resulted in disaster," he says. "That just made it all the more challenging."

The basic elements, at least, came together easily. Every October on Bridge Day, local authorities allow Bell to co-opt a 20-foot-deep section of the bridge for BASE jumpers, which means his catapult could be no longer than that. Bell spent a year drafting the structure-a sturdy base and an arm made of steel tubing-using a 3-D design software called SolidWorks. He eventually settled on a rotating arm 12 feet long, which a local workshop agreed to machine to his specifications. Meanwhile, Bell spent nights and weekends in his garage constructing a compressed-air launching system.

In the first tests, Bell and his friend Joe Caulfield launched stuffed animals, laundry bags, and 200-pound sandbags across his front lawn. The catapult hurled even the heaviest objects more than 50 feet. At one point, however, the stress forced a bearing to shoot out of the catapult's arm joint like a bullet. (On Bridge Day, two of the caster wheels even cracked from the strain exerted by the 2,500-pound machine.) Bell created and installed a custom bearing, added spring-loaded shocks to cushion stress on the casters, and tweaked a few other features to handle the abuse.

Last summer, Bell towed the catapult to a local lake to try it out with some friends. He sat in the chair as a buddy threw open a ball valve, retracting a piston with compressed air. The arm sprang up within a second, hurling him high above the lake. "This smooth but sudden sensation launches you upward, and then, all of a sudden, you say, ‘Hey, I'm not in the chair anymore,' " he says. "I came out of the water hootin' and hollerin' like a teenager." Bell says the catapult's official debut at Bridge Day later that year was just as big a hit among BASE jumpers. "It's something I'll remember for the rest of my life," he says./>

THE MACHINE

An 11hp gas motor [1] turns a belt to drive an air compressor [2], which feeds a 120-gallon steel holding tank [3]. When Bell turns a ball-valve handle, air pressurized to 130 psi rushes into a pneumatic cylinder [4] attached to the base of a forward-swinging arm. The bucket seat that Bell installed at the top of the arm [5] can accommodate a BASE jumper's parachute pack. When the cylinder's piston retracts, it yanks the arm's base and-like a lopsided seesaw-pivots and flips the chair from horizontal to nearly vertical in less than a second.

THE TECHNIQUE

Tests at the lake proved sitting upright in the seat wasn't ideal for deploying a parachute-Caulfield and other volunteers flew headfirst into the water. They solved the problem by sitting upside-down, which flipped them into a stable vertical position.

THE FUTURE

Although the catapult can launch a person 20 feet high and 50 feet away, that's not good enough for Bell. He plans to retrofit the device with lightweight aluminum parts so its piston can fling people higher and farther. "I'm also looking into buying a big airbag so I can launch people onto that," he says.

Time: 2 years
Cost: $25,000

WARNING
We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

Citing "people familiar with the strategy," the Wall Street Journal posted an overview of Google's ambitious plans to bring high-speed wireless internet to Africa. The specifics are all fuzzy, since Google hasn't announced anything, but almost everything here makes sense--it's in Google's best interest to expand into Africa.

The plan seems to be a multi-pronged approach to bring internet access to sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the parts of southeast Asia that aren't already well-covered in hotspots. In certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the primary challenge to development is infrastructure: the lack of reliable roads, transportation, and essential services hookups (water, electricity) can make things very tricky.

Google won't implement one top-down strategy, says one of the WSJ's sources; instead, there'll be lots of different strategies sewn together into a warm quilt of Wi-Fi. In some cases, Google will have to work with existing wireless carriers or whoever else owns the spectrum Google will need to lease. In some cases, Google will have to overcome the difficult ground infrastructure by simply flying above it, using "special balloons or blimps, known as high-altitude platforms, to transmit signals to an area of hundreds of square miles." Satellites are also named as possible solutions.

Why is Google doing this, at great expense? Google is one of the rare companies that makes so much money that it can afford to use some of that money to play around with ideas with low chances of becoming monetary successes. (There's a separate spot for those that's actually called Google Playground.) But this is not one of those: this is an experiment that, if it succeeds, will result in bonkers money. Google could well be the exclusive internet provider for tens of millions of people, feeding ads and collecting data to its heart's content.

More info over at the Wall Street Journal.

This has been in the freezer for a long time. You think it's still good?

Kids, it is most definitely still good. Researchers have regrown mosses and other simple plants that were originally buried in a glacier 400 years ago.

The in-lab resurrection means such plants might be growing in the wild, wrote the re-growing team in a paper they published yesterday. The team, including biologists and an earth scientist from the University of Alberta, had long noticed green growth atop blackened mosses uncovered by the Teardrop Glacier in the Canadian Arctic, which they visit for research every year. Until they performed their lab study, however, they weren't sure if the green really was new growth from ancient plants.

The regrowth shows the resilience of mosses, liverworts and other simple plants known as bryophytes, they wrote. Bryophytes are especially important to polar environments, where few plants grow. Ancient bryophytes, alongside their fresher cousins, might be recolonizing land uncovered by retreating glaciers, the researchers wrote.

The Teardrop Glacier, located on Ellesmere Island just west of Greenland, has shrunk at an accelerated rate since 2004. In 2007 and 2009, the University of Alberta team both set stakes to measure the Teardrop's shrinkage and collected plant pieces from its retreating edge.

The researchers took the plants back to Alberta, ground up the stems and leaves they collected, and sowed the material in a few different growth media, including some potting soil like you'd buy at the hardware store. They spritzed their charges with autoclave-sterilized water every few days for a year. Thirty percent of their petri dishes grew new plant material that they were sure weren't newer contaminants, they wrote. The regrown plants included four different species.

The researchers also asked a lab in California to carbon-date three plant bits from their original collection. They found their bryophytes could be anywhere from 404.5 to 614.5 years old, dating from the Little Ice Age that gripped the Earth between 1550 and 1850.

Many previous studies of mosses uncovered by retreating glaciers have found the mosses were dead, the University of Alberta team wrote. One other team of researchers has been successful in reviving a frozen plant, however. Last year, Russian scientists reported growing this cute Arctic flower-a plant that's much more complex than bryophytes-from a seed buried 31,800 years ago. The flower regrowing process was much more complicated, requiring the researchers to clone tissue from the seed.

Bryophytes have a couple of characteristics that may help them with their Rip Van Winkle-style reawakening. Their cells are able to go into a stem cell-like state, so they can re-start development. They are also able to shut down when they're dried out, and revive when they're exposed to water again. Long-frozen bryophytes might be a previously unknown source of genetic diversity among plants on Earth, the researchers wrote.

The newest bryophyte paper was published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team of alchemists scientists say they've just figured out a process that turns cement into a metal semi-conductor using lasers.

Metal sidewalks! Metal buildings! Metal everything!

Well, no. But it could have make its way into one of your gadgets.

The team--led by researchers from the Department of Energy and Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute/SPring-8--took liquid cement and transformed it into a glass-metal hybrid. A glass is a solid with a non-crystalline chemical structure that can be turned into a molten, liquid state when heated. A glass-metal, or amorphous metal, is a type of metal with a similar structure and properties to a glass, which makes it conductive, less brittle than glass, and easily molded. The researchers were able to change the liquid cement--a not-so-conductive material with characteristics of both a crystalline and non-crystalline structure--into a glass-metal through a process called "electron trapping": basically, holding electrons down in a chemical structure.

The researchers melted a cement ingredient, mayenite, with 2,000-degree Celsius lasers, and lifted it with an "aerodynamic levitator." The levitator kept the material suspended, ensuring that it didn't touch a surface and form crystals. By zapping the floating liquid in different artificially created atmospheres, the scientists altered its structure, "trapping" free electrons and making it conductive.

That means the researchers made an effective semiconductor out of a glass, which could be useful in your smartphone, TV, computer, and a lot more. The same levitate-and-laser technique, the researchers say, could be used to turn other materials into semiconductors, too.

Chinese hackers have compromised designs for more than two dozen U.S. military weapons and technology programs, according to the confidential section of a Pentagon report on cyber security obtained by the Washington Post. These programs include the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship, and a really awesome laser, among others. Combined, these represent decades of research and billions of dollars in development costs.

The list of compromised system designs and technologies comes from the nonpublic version of a Pentagon military and cyber security report. The Department of Defense released the public version of the report in January.

More stolen tech on the list: the vertical takeoff and landing V-22 Osprey, which spent decades in development. Drones (including the Global Hawk), armor, missiles, and torpedoes were also among the compromised systems. Some list items are sweeping categories-"electronic warfare" refers to multiple technologies and an entire doctrine of shutting down electronic communication and functionality in war.

Because the list of compromised systems is so long, and because "compromised" is a maddeningly imprecise term for looking at what exactly the hackers were able to glean from the system, security implications from the espionage are vague. But three things are certain: Any data on a weapon helps a researcher figure out how to counter it. It is far easier and cheaper to develop new technologies when piggy-backing on decades of expensive work. And a breach of this breadth and depth is profoundly troubling for American cybersecurity assets.

The story of how humans evolved from knuckle-walking primates to upright bipeds is still a matter of great debate among anthropologists. One of today's leading theories suggests that our forest-dwelling ancestors began walking on two feet as climate change stripped away the trees they lived in, forcing them to move to the ground. Another explanation for our bipedal evolution is that walking on two feet helped us carry babies, though that theory has been debunked.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, researchers from the University of York and the Parisian Institut de Physique du Globe present yet another theory: that bipedalism evolved as a response to complex topography--places with active tectonics and rough, rocky terrain--in eastern and southern Africa during the Pliocene Epoch up to 5 million years ago.

The presence of hominins, our early human ancestors, has been linked to regions with active tectonic and volcanic regions in Africa.

Somewhere along the way, hominins developed big toes and foot arches, both structures that help us stride and run upright, but could've also helped us climb up rocky terrain. The development of shorter arms and dexterous hands would also have assisted in the climbing process. In turn, that dexterity would have facilitated tool use.

"The broken, disrupted terrain offered benefits for hominins in terms of security and food, but it also proved a motivation to improve their locomotor skills by climbing, balancing, scrambling and moving swiftly over broken ground - types of movement encouraging a more upright gait," lead author Isabelle Winder explained in a press statement. Rocky terrain would have provided more protection than forests, since many large African carnivores can't climb.

The researchers call for further study of ancient landscapes to support this theory, though ancient conditions in active tectonic regions like the East African Rift can be difficult to reconstruct because they have changed so much over time.

This pictorial tidbit from our friends at NASA shows a Soyuz rocket awaiting launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The plane in the front of the rocket is a wind vane.

Three astronauts from NASA, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, are scheduled to take off in the Soyuz rocket at approximately 4:30 p.m. Eastern time today. They're heading to the International Space Station, where they'll stay until mid-November.

One of the astronauts on board is Karen Nyberg, a NASA flight engineer, who has been touted by National Geographic as having the potential to fill the Twitter-sized hole in our hearts created by Commander Chris Hadfield's departure. (She's apparently great on Pinterest.)

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new, subtle way for evildoers to take control of your smartphone: through ambient sound and light. Eep.

This isn't a hack so much as a trigger; for it to work, malware already has to be installed on your phone. But the research finds that, once certain kinds of malware is installed, it can be triggered or controlled with hidden messages, undetectable to humans, embedded within innocuous sounds or lights. Music, music videos, and light from the TV could call previously-installed malware to action or tell it what to do.

The method relies on one of the primary strengths of smartphones: they're always on, always connected, and always feeling around with audio and visual sensors. The researchers found that they could trigger malware with music from a distance of 55 feet, sending a brief message that the smartphone owner might not even notice, but that the phone certainly will.

Sharms Zawoad, who presented the paper recently at a conference in China, said "This kind of attack is sophisticated and difficult to build, but it will become increasingly easier to accomplish in the future as technology improves." The point of the paper is to bring attention to a possible weakness, so that future phones can have protection against this kind of trigger.

Read more over at the University of Alabama's site.

A group of graduate students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program have developed an open-source API that can allows you to move someone else's arm remotely using a keyboard, a joystick or even an iPhone.

Open Limbs, "a platform for controlling human arms over the internet," uses electric pulses to fire the nerves connected to muscles, making them contract, in conjunction with the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an orthopedic device designed to help people with weak muscles move their arms.

For their demonstration at the ITP annual spring show, Will Canine, one of the creators, attached electrodes to his arm to cede control over his nerves to a computer. When someone moved a model skeleton's arm nearby, the electrodes caused his muscles to contract and his arm to mimic the movement of the skeleton. Alternately, the electrodes were attached to an infrared finger-tracking sensor, so that Canine's arm could be moved just by moving a hand up in down in front of the sensor.

"We've been really interested in non-autonomous body control, so other people controlling your body," Canine told Yahoo! News. "Usually people are really scared of this idea but we think it has some really interesting implications for people with paralysis or who can't control their own bodies."

Right now, the system is only effective at curling forearms and biceps--legs are too heavy--but the students hope it can be further developed to help people who can't move their limbs autonomously.

See a demonstration below:

Open Limbs Demonstration from Carl Jamilkowski on Vimeo.

[Yahoo! News]

Scientists on a research mission sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found what could be the U.S. Atlantic Coast's largest methane cold seep near Virginia.

Cold seeps are regions in the sea floor where fluid rich in compounds like methane flows out at the same temperature as the surrounding ocean water (in contrast to the hot water that seeps from hydrothermal vents).

Methane seeps allow life to flourish in otherwise fairly barren deep sea environments. This is the third seep documented on the Atlantic Coast, and is much bigger than previously discovered sites, with areas up to a kilometer long and hundreds of meters wide. Mussels can survive in seeps through chemosynthesis, a process that utilizes bacteria in their gills to turn methane into energy. The seep's surrounding ecosystem also contained sea cucumbers, shrimp and fish, some of which exhibited what the researchers call "unusual behaviors," though they did not elaborate.

Studying these undersea ecosystems can help us understand how life exists in harsh environments, including potentially other planets, researcher Steve Ross explained in a press statement. It could also enhance our understanding of gas hydrates, a potentially huge alternative energy source.

[Consortium For Ocean Leadership]

Here's yet another way drones may find their way into domestic life. Germany's national railways company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test drones as a deterrent to people who tag trains with graffiti, the BBC reported.

The drones will patrol train depots, carrying infrared cameras to spot people in darkness. They'll be sophisticated enough to capture images with which Deutsche Bahn can identify perpetuators and prosecute them. But they may not be a sure deal, considering Germany's history of opposition to projects that seem to violate privacy, including Google's "Street View" cameras, the BBC reported.

Deutsche Bahn reported 7.6 million euros ($9.8 million) in losses last year from cleaning up graffiti. The drones it wants to use come from a German company called Microdrones, which sells test units for 60,000 euros, the Associated Press reported. Each Microdrones machine is able to stay in the air for 80 minutes and range over an area 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter on autopilot.

[BBC, Associated Press]

An iPhone app that reads urine sticks for you will now have to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. The administration sent Silicon Valley-based Biosense Technologies a letter asking for data that shows its uChek app works as advertised. Bloomberg called the letter the first of its kind.

Could this be the start of more FDA oversight into medical smartphone apps? The agency first announced it would regulate medical apps in 2011, but officials are still working on final guidelines. They intend to finalize the guidelines this year, agency spokeswoman Synim Rivers told Bloomberg. In the meantime, health apps have proliferated without clear rules about what tests they have to undergo and whether they fall under the FDA's purview at all.

UChek is designed to use a smartphone's camera to automatically read colors on home urine dipsticks that are made by other companies and are already FDA-approved. The sticks detect 10 characteristics in urine, including pH, the presence of glucose, levels of different kinds of proteins and the presence of blood. Such measurements may help people manage conditions including diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver. They may also provide clues the user is pregnant, according to the uChek website.

Normally, people eyeball the sticks themselves. UChek standardizes that "is-this-dark-green-or-medium-green?" judgment. It also provides extra descriptors and information about the colorful results, Wired reported in February. Popular Science covered uChek earlier this year, after one of the Biosense founders gave a TED Talk.

Biosense staff plan to work with the FDA to keep their product on the market, one of Biosense's co-founders, Abhishek Sen, told Bloomberg. The company has 30 business days to respond to the FDA's request, according to the letter.

[Bloomberg]

The crew of Expedition 36 aboard the Soyuz TMA-09M set a record for the fastest trip ever to the International Space Station. From launch to docking, the trip took 5 hours and 39 minutes. That's six minutes faster than the previous Soyuz that used the new "fast track" four-orbit rendezvous.

Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano docked their Soyuz to the station's Rassvet module at 02:16 UTC on May 29 (10:16 p.m. EDT on May 28).

"Thank you for the best spacecraft, finer than the best pocket watch!" Yurchikhin radioed to Mission Control in Moscow after docking.

Launch took place at 20:31 UTC (4:31 p.m. EDT) Tuesday (2:31 a.m. May 29, Baikonur time).
The new abbreviated rendezvous with the ISS uses a modified launch and docking profile for the Russian ships. It has been tried successfully with three Progress resupply vehicles, and this is the second Soyuz crew ship that has used it.

In the past, Soyuz manned capsules and Progress supply ships were launched on trajectories that required about two days, or 34 orbits, to reach the ISS. The new fast-track trajectory has the rocket launching shortly after the ISS passes overhead. Then, additional firings of the vehicle's thrusters early in its mission expedites the time required for a Russian vehicle to reach the Station.

After the hatches open at 11:55 p.m. EDT, the new trio will join Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA and Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos who have been on board since March 28. All six crew members will then participate in a welcome ceremony with family members and mission officials gathered at the Russian Mission Control Center in Korolev near Moscow.

This article was republished with permission from Universe Today.