Blue Origin: Successful Reusable Rocket Test
November 24th, 2015Via: NPR:
It started with a boom and ended with a touchdown: Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has sent a craft past the edge of space and then landed its rocket safely – and vertically — in Texas.
The flight of the New Shepard spacecraft was the second full test of Blue Origin’s system that’s designed to take six humans into space before returning to Earth. The company plans to reuse both the capsule and rocket assemblies – and it calls the rocket’s safe return today a “historic” achievement. In a similar test in April, the rocket failed to land safely. The craft’s capsule lands via parachute.
In Monday’s test, the vehicle reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 kilometers) before landing back on Earth in a controlled descent. The craft went just over the Karman Line, which designates anything over 100 kilometers above sea level as space.
China Opening “The World’s Biggest Animal Cloning Factory”
November 24th, 2015Via: Telegraph:
The world’s biggest animal “cloning factory” is due to open in China, producing one million calves a year, sniffer dogs and even genetic copies of the family pet.
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The factory, which will include a 15,000 square metre laboratory, an animal centre, a gene bank and an exhibition hall, is currently being built in the port city of Tianjin, near Beijing, and is due to open in the first half of next year.
BoyaLife will operate the facility with its South Korean partner, Sooam Biotech, that runs a centre that can clone dogs for customers willing to pay $100,000 (£66,000), and has already produced more than 550 puppies.
Turkey Shoots Down Russian Warplane
November 24th, 2015Update: Shot Down Over Syria
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Via: Guardian:
A furious Vladimir Putin labelled Turkey “accomplices of terrorists” and warned of “serious consequences” after a Turkish F-16 jet shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday morning, the first time a Nato country and Moscow have exchanged direct fire over the crisis in Syria.
Putin, speaking ahead of a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan in Sochi, said the plane had been shot down over Syrian airspace, and fell 4km inside Syria. Putin said it was “obvious” that the plane posed no threat to Turkey.
“Our military is doing heroic work against terrorism … But the loss today is a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists. I can’t describe it in any other way,” said the Russian leader. Putin suggested the Turks were shielding Islamic State terrorists from Russian attacks: “Do they want to make Nato serve Isis?”
Ankara and the Kremlin gave conflicting accounts of the incident, which appears to have occurred in an area near the Turkish-Syrian border straddling Iskenderun and Latakia.
The Turkish military said it scrambled two F-16 fighter jets after a plane entered Turkish airspace in the province of Hatay at 9.20am on Tuesday, warning it to leave 10 times in five minutes before shooting it down.
A government official said: “In line with the military rules of engagement, the Turkish authorities repeatedly warned an unidentified aircraft that they were 15km or less away from the border. The aircraft didn’t heed the warnings and proceeded to fly over Turkey. The Turkish air forces responded by downing the aircraft.
Truck Apparently Carrying Nuclear Weapon Rear Ended by Vehicle in Security Convoy
November 24th, 2015Via: YouTube:
More: DailyMail
Research Credit: ottilie
Dominican Republic Issues Warrants Over Fugitive French Pilots
November 24th, 2015Via: BBC:
A judge in the Dominican Republic has issued arrest warrants for three Frenchmen accused of helping two French pilots flee drug convictions.
One of the three, Aymeric Chauprade, is an independent right-wing member of the European parliament.
The pilots were arrested in 2013 preparing to take off in a plane carrying 26 suitcases of cocaine.
They were sentenced to 20 years but during the appeal process fled to the French Antilles and then on to France.
Private jet
Announcing the warrants for Mr Chauprade and fellow French nationals Christophe Naudin and Pierre Malinowski, Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito alleged the trio had helped organise the escape from the Dominican Republic of pilots Pascal Fauret and Bruno Odos.
The pilots were convicted in Santo Domingo in August in the so-called “Air Cocaine” drug-trafficking case.
They had been arrested in March 2013 at the resort of Punta Cana on a privately hired jet carrying 680kg (1,500lb) of cocaine.
After their conviction they were freed under the judicial review process and barred from leaving the country.
But they reportedly escaped by boat to the French Antilles and from there by plane to France.
French media earlier said the pilots had worked previously for the French navy and had been helped by former intelligence agents.
The French government said it had nothing to do with their escape.
The pilots say they are innocent and have vowed to clear their name.
They were arrested earlier this month in Lyon but legal experts say an extradition is unlikely.
DNA ‘Vaccine’ Sterilizes Mice, Could Lead to One-Shot Birth Control
November 24th, 2015Mice and cats… *wink*
Via: Science:
Animal birth control could soon be just a shot away: A new injection makes male and female mice infertile by tricking their muscles into producing hormone-blocking antibodies. If the approach works in dogs and cats, researchers say, it could be used to neuter and spay pets and to control reproduction in feral animal populations. A similar approach could one day spur the development of long-term birth control options for humans.
“This looks incredibly promising,” says William Swanson, director of animal research at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio. “We’re all very excited about this approach; that it’s going to be the one that really works.”
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Biologist Bruce Hay of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues took a different approach to blocking GnRH. Rather than rely on animals’ immune systems to create antibodies, he and his colleagues engineered a piece of DNA that—when packaged inside inactive virus shells and injected into mice—turned their muscle cells into anti-GnRH antibody factories. Because muscle cells are some of the longest lasting in the body, they continue to churn out the antibodies for 10 or more years. Both male and female mice with high enough levels of the antibodies were rendered completely infertile when Hay’s team allowed them to mate 2 months later, the team reports online today in Current Biology.
“That 2-month delay is because of how long it takes the muscle to start producing enough antibody,” Hay explains. “Going forward, one goal is certainly to try other systems that wouldn’t have that time lag.”
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For now, the question is how effective the drug will be in animals other than mice. “The challenge is always moving between species,” says Swanson, who is already planning to test out Hay’s approach in cats. If it works, he says, it could change the way communities deal with feral cat populations. “We have to figure out how to control these populations without being harmful to individual cats,” he says. “And this kind of lifelong contraception might be a safe, effective way to do that.”
Research Credit: tal
Animal Magnetic Sense Comes from Protein That Acts as a Compass
November 23rd, 2015Via: New Scientist:
Quick – can you tell where north is? Animals as diverse as sea turtles, birds, worms, butterflies and wolves can, thanks to sensing Earth’s magnetic field.
But the magnet-sensing structures inside their cells that allow them to do this have evaded scientists – until now.
A team led by Can Xie’s at Peking University in China has now found a protein in fruit flies, butterflies and pigeons that they believe to be responsible for this magnetic sense.
“It’s provocative and potentially groundbreaking,” says neurobiologist Steven Reppert of the University of Massachusetts who was not involved in the work. “It took my breath away.”
There used to be two competing theories about magnetic sense: some thought it came from iron-binding molecules, others thought it came from a protein called cryptochrome, which senses light and has been linked to magnetic sense in birds.
Xie’s group was the first to guess these two were part of the same system, and has now figured out how they fit together.
UW Team Refrigerates Liquids with a Laser for the First Time
November 23rd, 2015Via: University of Washington:
The discovery could help industrial users “point cool” tiny areas with a focused point of light. Microprocessors, for instance, might someday use a laser beam to cool specific components in computer chips to prevent overheating and enable more efficient information processing.
Scientists could also use a laser beam to precisely cool a portion of a cell as it divides or repairs itself, essentially slowing these rapid processes down and giving researchers the opportunity to see how they work. Or they could cool a single neuron in a network — essentially silencing without damaging it — to see how its neighbors bypass it and rewire themselves.
U.S. Air Force Created Thermal Breaching Tool That Liquefies Metal in Seconds
November 23rd, 2015Hmm.
Physicists Achieve Quantum Entanglement at Room Temperature
November 23rd, 2015Via: SciTechDaily:
Previously, scientists have overcome the thermodynamic barrier and achieved macroscopic entanglement in solids and liquids by going to ultra-low temperatures (-270 degrees Celsius) and applying huge magnetic fields (1,000 times larger than that of a typical refrigerator magnet) or using chemical reactions. In the November 20 issue of Science Advances, Klimov and other researchers in Prof. David Awschalom’s group at the Institute for Molecular Engineering have demonstrated that macroscopic entanglement can be generated at room temperature and in a small magnetic field.
The researchers used infrared laser light to order (preferentially align) the magnetic states of thousands of electrons and nuclei and then electromagnetic pulses, similar to those used for conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to entangle them. This procedure caused pairs of electrons and nuclei in a macroscopic 40 micrometer-cubed volume (the volume of a red blood cell) of the semiconductor SiC to become entangled.
