Elon Musk unveils new Mars rocket prototype, expects missions in months

 

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled the latest iteration of his space company's newly assembled Starship, outlining a speedy development timeline for the centerpiece vehicle of SpaceXs quest to launch humans to the moon and Mars.
Mr. Musk showed a crowd of space enthusiasts and reporters at SpaceX’s rocket development site late on Saturday in the remote village of Boca Chica, Texas, animations of Starship landing on the moon and Mars and predicted that the rocket's first orbital flight could come in the next six months, followed by missions to space with humans aboard the next year.
“This is basically the holy grail of space,” Mr. Musk said, standing between a towering, newly assembled Starship rocket and Falcon 1 the company's first vehicle whose debut orbital mission was celebrated by SpaceX 11 years ago.

 

The Boca Chica village, a few miles north of the Mexican border, is ground zero for SpaceX’s three-year experimental test programme for Starship, whose rocket engine tests have rattled the nerves of residents living in a remote hamlet of roughly two dozen homes a mile away.
“I think the actual danger to the Boca Chica village is low but it's not tiny,” Mr. Musk said during a question and answer session. “So probably over time it had be better to buy out the villages, and we have made an offer to that effect.”
Some residents have rejected SpaceX’s non-negotiable offer to buyout their homes for three times the market value.
A three-legged prototype of the rocket named Starhopper has test launched in the village twice since July, most recently flying as high as 500 feet (152 metres) and landing on an adjacent slab of concrete to trial Mr. Musk’s next generation rocket engine dubbed Raptor.
Mr. Musk’s mission to the moon aligns with NASA’s goal of sending humans there by 2024 under its Artemis programme, an accelerated deep-space initiative spurred by the Trump administration in March that aims to work with a handful of U.S. space companies in building a long-term presence on the lunar surface before eventually colonizing Mars.
The space agency has tapped SpaceX to figure out how to land vehicles on the lunar surface and help develop a system for refueling rockets like Starship in space, an important technology to aid sustained exploration efforts on the Moon and Mars, NASA said in a release on Friday.
NASA has awarded SpaceX and Boeing Co. a total of $6.8 billion to build competing rocket and capsule systems to launch astronauts into orbit from American soil for the first time since 2011. Development of both astronaut capsules have been beset by delays and testing mishaps.
“I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow. In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a September 27 night statement. “NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It’s time to deliver.”


Shailesh k shukla
directoratnarvim@gmail.com

www.narvim.com

Researchers have developed a tiny nano laser that can function inside of living tissues without harming them.

Just 50 to 150 nanometers thick, the laser is about 1/1,000th the thickness of a single human hair. At this size, the laser can fit and function inside living tissues, with the potential to sense disease biomarkers or perhaps treat deep-brain neurological disorders, such as epilepsy.
Developed by researchers at Northwestern and Columbia Universities, the nanolaser shows specific promise for imaging in living tissues. Not only is it made mostly of glass, which is intrinsically biocompatible, the laser can also be excited with longer wavelengths of light and emit at shorter wavelengths.


"Longer wavelengths of light are needed for bioimaging because they can penetrate farther into tissues than visible wavelength photons," said Northwestern's Teri Odom, who co-led the research. "But shorter wavelengths of light are often desirable at those same deep areas. We have designed an optically clean system that can effectively deliver visible laser light at penetration depths accessible to longer wavelengths."
The nanolaser also can operate in extremely confined spaces, including quantum circuits and microprocessors for ultra-fast and low-power electronics.
The paper was published today (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature Materials. Odom co-led the work with P. James Schuck at Columbia University's School of Engineering.
While many applications require increasingly small lasers, researchers continually run into the same roadblock: Nanolasers tend to be much less efficient than their macroscopic counterparts. And these lasers typically need shorter wavelengths, such as ultraviolet light, to power them.
"This is bad because the unconventional environments in which people want to use small lasers are highly susceptible to damage from UV light and the excess heat generated by inefficient operation," said Schuck, an associate professor of mechanical engineering.
Odom, Schuck and their teams were able to achieve a nanolaser platform that solves these issues by using photon upconversion. In upconversion, low-energy photons are absorbed and converted into one photon with higher energy. In this project, the team started with low-energy, "bio-friendly" infrared photons and upconverted them to visible laser beams. The resulting laser can function under low powers and is vertically much smaller than the wavelength of light.
"Our nanolaser is transparent but can generate visible photons when optically pumped with light our eyes cannot see," said Odom, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "The continuous wave, low-power characteristics will open numerous new applications, especially in biological imaging."
"Excitingly, our tiny lasers operate at powers that are orders of magnitude smaller than observed in any existing lasers," Schuck said.
The study, "Ultralow-threshold, continuous-wave upconverting lasing from subwavelength plasmons," was supported by the National Science Foundation (award number DMR-1608258), the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense (award number N00014-17-1-3023) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231). Angel Fernandez-Bravo and Northwestern's Danqing Wang are the paper's co-first authors.
Odom is a member of Northwestern's International Institute of Nanotechnology, Chemistry of Life Processes Institute and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.


Shailesh kr shukla
directoratace@gmail.com
www.narvim.com

Manned mission to Mars by 2030 actually possible

A panel of experts has claimed that a manned mission to Mars could be feasible by the 2030s.

A workshop group of more than 60 individuals representing more than 30 government, industry, academic and other organizations has found that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars is feasible if the space agency's budget is restored to pre-sequestration levels.

Putting the first humans on the Red Planet would also require international cooperation and private industry support.

There is a growing consensus among the space community that a manned mission to Mars should be a priority worth working toward in the coming years, according to Chris Carberry the executive director of Explore Mars Inc., the organization that hosted the workshop with the American Astronautical Society.

Carberry told SPACE.com that to be able to make it feasible and affordable, you need a sustainable budget that is consistent, which you can predict from year to year and that doesn't get canceled in the next administration.

While Carberry said that it is possible to launch a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s under pre-sequestration budget levels, a NASA-led human mission to Mars will probably never launch under current budgetary constraints, he added.

Shailesh shukla

directoratace@gmail.com

Contact lens as a diagnostic tool

Advances in mini and microcomputers are turning science fiction into reality. A couple of months ago, we had a visitor from MIT to our lab who was wearing a strange kind of spectacles. When I asked him about it, he said it was actually a wearable computer called Google Glasses, made by Google. And of course we now know of a wrist watch computer made by Samsung. Last week Google announced the introduction of a wearable contact lens which would monitor the sugar levels in your tears and let you know if you are a diabetic or not. With this, you no longer need to ‘invade’ or prick your finger to draw blood and wet it on a litmus-type paper to read your sugar levels. And we all thought that a contact lens is worn to correct your eye sight to normal.

So, with the Google contact lens, there is literally more than what meets the eye! We have come a long way since 1508 when the great Italian Leonardo da Vinci thought up the idea of slipping a glass piece over the eye to correct vision, and 1823 when the British physicist John Herschel thought up a practical design.

Fifty years later, such a glass was made, though it covered the entire eye. With the advent of plastics, the first lightweight contact lens was made in the year I was born, 1939, and was made to cover not the whole eye but the corneal surface.

But it was Drs. Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim in 1959 who introduced the hydrophilic ‘soft’ contact lens. Currently we have contact lenses that you can wear and sleep, lenses that are disposable after each use, and those meant for fashionistas.

A typical contact lens is lighter than feather, has a diameter of about 14 mm, curvature of about 8.7 mm, fitting smug over the cornea and held in place thanks to the surface tension of the tear fluid that wets it.

And it is this tear fluid that holds the key for the diagnostics. Produced by the tear glands on the outer surface of the eye, it contains hundreds of proteins and metabolite molecules, and thus an indicator of the health of the body.

Non-invasive

And since one does not have to pierce the body to collect blood but simply collect it or study it as it is held between the cornea and the contact lens, it becomes an attractive diagnostic fluid.

All that one needs to do is to fit the contact lens with an appropriate sensor which measures chosen properties or levels of any component in it.

This last sentence is easier said than done; and it is here that innovation has played a role. Early enough, in the 1990s and 2000s, Drs Matteo Leonardi and Rene Goedkoop from Switzerland, supported by ‘Sensimed’, used the contact lens to measure the pressure within the eyeball, also called the intraocular pressure (IOP), which is an indication of the pressure that the optic nerve feels.

If the IOP becomes higher than normal, the optic nerve can become inefficient over time, thanks to this higher than normal pressure and can eventually lose its activity, leading to loss of vision. This condition is termed glaucoma, a silent stealer of vision.

What the duo did was to put together a circular strain gauge on the edges of the contact lens in order to measure the changes in the circumference of the outer surface of the eye due to IOP, and read out as electrical signals. This was an alternative to the conventional method of using a pressure sensor (tonometer) with which the eye doctor would contact and slightly press the curved corneal surface (applanation) and measure the intraocular pressure.

Any change beyond the accepted ‘normal’ range of IOP would be diagnosed as possible glaucoma.

The Leonardi-Goedkoop machine, termed Triggerfish, does this in a more convenient way. Likewise, Drs Stodtmeister and Jonas Jost of Germany devised a method to measure the systolic and diastolic pressures of the ophthalmic artery, and have used it as a method to make blood pressure measurements.

And in all this the main function of the contact lens (to correct the refractive ‘power’) was not affected so that it does double duty.

What Drs Brian Otis and Babak Parviz of Google have done is to put in a sensor on the edges of the contact lens, which measures the level of glucose in the tear fluid which bathes the contact lens, and thus monitors diabetic status in a continuous manner.

Currently it has been tried out on a series of subjects, and awaits FDA clearance for marketing and widespread use. Dr Parviz, who was earlier at the University of Washington, Seattle, had already used the contact lens as a GPS device to let the wearer know where he/she is going. This was done by putting in a tiny integrated circuit, powered by a cell phone in the pocket, and which contains a GPS set up and can voice- announce directions.

This bionic lens has wireless communication system, rf power, and transmission capability. The use of this to the visually handicapped is obvious. Such use of the contact lens as a multifunctional device would certainly have pleased da Vinci.

Shailesh shukla

directoratace@gmail.com

A new method for growing Shiitake mushroom

Among various cultivated species of mushrooms, Shiitake variety has a good demand among consumers for its taste. Particularly in Northern India consumers prefer this mushroom since it is believed to be medicinal in quality. Presently, China and Japan are the bulk producers of this prized mushroom variety.

Till some time there was no proper technology to grow this variety on a successful commercial scale but recently the Directorate of Mushroom Research (DMR), situated at Chmabaghat in Solan district and Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR), at Hassargatta near Bangalore have developed new techniques for growing this crop.

A farmer, Mr. Vikas Banyal, from Solan district, Himachal Pradesh, has further refined the growing technology by using willow wood as a substrate. He is the first farmer in the country to use willow tree wood as a substrate to grow Shiitake variety. According to Mr. Vikas this method gives a better and greater yield.

Initially Mr. Vikas was growing Shiitake on sawdust but was not able to get a good production. He got some scanty reference in literature about using willow tree logs as a medium for growing. He contacted the University which provided him willow logs for trying this as substrate.

“The substrate that is the medium is very important for mushroom cultivation. Just as a healthy soil helps good plant crop a good medium alone can help get a good yield.

“My initial attempts failed because I used sawdust that was poor in quality. It was then that some mushroom cultivation experts from the U.S. visited my farm and while interacting with them I got to know that they use logs from trees to grow mushrooms. They also advised me to try out the method on some popular growing trees in my region,” he says.

The farmer started his search for the same through several literatures and got in touch with Dr. Y. S. Parmar of the University of Horticulture and Forestry in his region.

Official help

The University was quite impressed by his dedication and perseverance and supplied him about 100 willow logs initially. From then on there was no looking back for Mr. Vikas. With an investment of just Rs, 6,000 some years back today he has established a company worth nearly Rs. 4 crores all earned from mushroom cultivation.

Explaining the procedure the enterpreneur says, “willow logs of 40 inch length and three to four inch diameter are ideal. Holes are drilled into the logs and spawns (in the form of bullets) are inserted into the holes and sealed with wax. The logs are kept in the open under shade. Fruiting of shiitake starts in just three months and continues for four to five years. The technique is cost effective and also consumes less time.”

In addition to the logs he also used the sawdust of the willow tree to grow the mushroom which proved even more effective as harvesting of the crop started in just 45 days.

He could harvest on an average 750 gm of mushroom from one kg of willow sawdust. The harvested mushrooms are fresh and fetch Rs. 200-500 per kg in the local market.

“This mushroom has a good shelf life and dried Shiitake is fetching up to Rs 2,000 per kg in the market. It can be grown in those places where temperature remains below 25 degree celsius. It can be easily grown in the hilly regions of northern, eastern and southern parts of the country.

In southern parts, cultivation can be done at Ooty, Coonoor, Chickmagalur, Kodagu and Kodaikanal. Munnar, Vagamon, Kudremukh,” says Dr. Harender Raj Gautam , Senior Scientist, Department of Plant Pathology, Dr. Y. S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni, Solan, Himachal Pradesh

Dr. N.B. Singh, Director of Extension says: “Mr. Vikas has been into mushroom cultivation since the last 25 years and has a multi-storeyed building in two acres in which he grows different varieties of this mushroom.

We had supplied the willow logs as medium for growing the shiitake mushroom. Shiitake mushroom grown on 1,000 Kg sawdust of willow gives an income of Rs 2 lakh a year.

The farmer’s income comes from selling the seeds of different varieties, compost to several farmers in Himachal Pradesh and many parts of northern India. In fact he is considered to be an authority in the state on this technology.”

Shailesh shukla

directoratace@gmail.com

Massive investments, emission cuts needed: U.N. climate science panel

The U.N. climate science panel’s yet to be released report will come up with a dire warning that the world would have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70% below 2010 levels by 2050 in order to have a fair chance to keep the rise in the global temperature below 2 degree Celsius.

This warning is one of the key summations in the Fifth Assessment report of Working Group III of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Hindu accessed the final draft of the report’s summary for policymakers, which works like a synopsis of the voluminous science on how the world can reduce emissions. The summary is going to be an integral input into the climate negotiations for the 2015 global deal. The final draft is to be negotiated once by the government representatives before it is released to public in the later half of 2014.

In contrast to the drastic reduction required in emissions to keep temperatures below dangerous levels, the report notes, emissions have grown by 2.2% on average during 2000-10 and the recession has not abated the growth of emissions which clocked at 3% growth during 2010-11 and 1-2% during 2011-2012.

Tight control

The summary says that maintaining global temperature rise below 2 degree Celsius would require the concentration of greenhouse gases between 430-480 parts per million (ppm) of Carbon dioxide equivalent by the turn of century and keeping peak concentration levels below 515 ppm. The concentration of emissions has already breached the 400 ppm limits and is growing rapidly. With such tight control on emissions, the chances of keeping the temperature within safe range would be between 66-100%.

The report notes that keeping the emission concentration levels under this limit would require tripling or even quadrupling of the renewable and other clean energy production by 2050 compared to 2010 levels.

Considering the low ambition the countries have shown to take action in the short run, the report warns that delaying mitigation through 2030 will increase the challenges and reduce the options for keeping emissions within the dangerous levels. The world might be forced to deploy yet-untested technological changes which tamper with natural climatic processes at a large scale.

Consumption losses

The report acknowledges that such massive transformation of economies will come at great costs. Even under what would be ideal conditions, the actions to keep emissions within check would lead to global consumption losses by 1-4% in 2030, 2-6% in 2050 and 2-12% in 2100 compared to business as usual emission rates.

The varied levels of growth of economies have made the authors of the report also put the question before the countries of how the burden of reducing emissions would be shared. A majority of accumulated GHG emissions so far have originated from the rich countries that have relatively low population levels but the spurt of economic growth in emerging economies is increasing current emissions. The ratio in per capita emissions between developed and poor countries is 9 times for the median value. At the same time, these developing countries such as India and China are building up massive new infrastructure where the potential to reduce emissions exists at lower costs. To be able to do so, the report says, “The financial transfers to ameliorate this asymmetry could be in the order of hundred billions of USD per year before mid-century to bring concentration in the range of 450 ppm of Carbon dioxide equivalent by 2100.”

What it has to say about the current level of commitment by countries to fight climate change is not new but the U.N. climate science panel officially admitting it promises to get these figures used in the political negotiations. The IPCC says in its reports, “The Cancun pledges are broadly consistent with scenarios reaching 550-650 ppm Carbon dioxide equivalent ppm by 2100.” The Cancun pledges refer to the commitments countries made to cut the emissions between 2010 and 2020. The 550-650 ppm emission concentration mark refers to the levels where the chance of preventing dangerous climate change is less than 33%. The scientists’ panel notes, the pledges ‘correspond to scenarios that explicitly delay mitigation through 2020 or beyond relative to what would achieve lowest global cost.”

In other words, the pledges are so weak that the countries are basically delaying taking the level of action required to fight climate change.

Shailesh shukla

directoratace@gmail.com

‘Artificial cannabis’ may be used to reduce pain, joint inflammation of arthritis patients

Scientists have developed an artificial cannabis-like molecule that could reduce pain and joint inflammation in osteoarthritis. Researchers from the University of Nottingham developed the synthetic compound which inhibits a pain-sensing pathway in the spinal cord known as the cannabinoid receptor 2 (CB2). Although cannabis can effectively relieve pain, its use in medicine is limited because of its other psychological effects. 

The compound, called JWH133, is completely synthetic but is designed to selectively target CB2 in a similar way to the drug. Levels of the CB2 receptor in the spinal cord have been shown to be closely linked to the severity of pain among osteoarthritis sufferers, ‘The Telegraph’ reported. Osteoarthritis occurs when the cartilage at the ends of bones wears away, causing joint pain and stiffness. There is no effective drug treatment to slow the progression of the condition, but interventions include pain relief, exercise, physiotherapy, weight loss and joint replacement. “This finding is significant, as spinal and brain pain signalling pathways are known to make a major contribution to pain associated with osteoarthritis,” said Professor Victoria Chapman, who led the study. “These new data support the further evaluation of the selective cannabinoid-based interventions for the treatment of osteoarthritis pain,” she said. The study was published in the Public Library of Science ONE journal.

Shailesh shukla

directoatace@gmail.com