Who Believes The Lava Tubes In Question Haven't Already Been Extensively Prospected?

CNN | The study published this month in the journal Earth-Science Reviews.

The lava tubes beneath the surface of the moon have also remained largely intact due to low gravity. Any collapsed lava tubes on the moon are likely due to asteroid impacts, the researchers said. And those skylights could actually provide access to the tubes. 

These lava tubes could help shelter astronauts, as well as provide new information about the moon and Mars. 

"The existence of stable huge voids below the Moon subsurface, potentially accessible through skylights, could change the paradigm on how we approach planetary exploration in terms of mission design, planetary human outposts and scientific research," said Pozzobon and Franceso Sauro, study author and professor in the department of biological, geological and environmental sciences at the University of Bologna. 

"Accessing these caves and (analyzing) this type of subsurface environment will present new technological challenges but also could provide unexpected scientific discoveries."

For astronauts exploring the harsh environments and fluctuating temperatures of the moon and Mars, the lava tubes could provide natural shelter from radiation, impacts by micrometeorites and unstable temperatures.  

Micrometeorites pose a danger not only to astronauts, but the habitats and life support equipment they'll need on the moon and Mars. The caves could be used to live in and store equipment. 

It's even possible that the tubes could provide access to water ice reservoirs, the researchers said.

"But the challenges in order to access these caves and sustain human activity are nonetheless massive," the researchers said.

About These Lava Tubes....,

Forbes |  Lava tubes on the moon and Mars may be large enough to fit city center-sized groups of astronauts living on these other worlds, a new study finds.

Lava tubes are an underground tunnel that happens due to the flow of molten rock during a volcanic explosion. We get lava tubes on Earth as well, but the ones on the moon and Mars are likely much larger — allowing huge communities of people to work, live and explore on other worlds.

A typical tube on Earth will be roughly 30 feet to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters) in diameter. But one on Mars could be the height of the Empire State Building, with a diameter 10 times that of Earth. If that sounds big, consider the moon, where its even lower gravity produces a tube up to 1000 times larger than Earth’s — much taller than the massive Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

It’s an exciting find because these small, cramped spaces on Earth would instead open up into vast caverns of space on other worlds. Rather than imagining future astronauts working shoulder to shoulder all the time, these space explorers could easily stroll through otherworldly boulevards, all sheltered from deadly outside radiation (and in the case of Mars, fierce dust storms).

 "These [lava tubes] represent ideal gateways or windows for subsurface exploration,” said study lead author Francesco Sauro in a statement. While we’ve known about these lava tubes for a while, the new study shows just how large they are — able to contain the same space as the city center of Padua, Italy in at least one case, Sauro said.

The Davos Degenerate Breakaway No Longer Has Any Use For You Left Behinds

Forbes |  NASA is about to begin building its latest spacecraft. Called “Psyche” it will explore a 140 miles/226 kilometers-wide asteroid called “16 Psyche.” Today it’s passed a major milestone. 

Why is NASA going to ‘16 Psyche?’ 

Located in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, metal-rich 16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic iron, nickel and gold core of a protoplanet. Most asteroids are rocky or icy. 

The Psyche mission is part of NASA’s Discovery Program of low-cost robotic space missions.

16 Psyche’s core is tantalisingly similar to Earth’s, which means that it could be the heart of a dead planet that lost its rocky outer layers or suffered from violent collisions.  

 The metals that make-up this one-of-a-kind asteroid could, according to some, be worth $10,000 quadrillion. 

 Due to launch from Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2022 on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, fly-past Mars in 2023, and begin orbiting the asteroid in January 2026, Psyche has just passed its “critical design review” stage. 

Now the mission moves to actually making the space hardware. 

“It’s one of the most intense reviews a mission goes through in its entire life cycle,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the Psyche mission. “And we passed with flying colors. The challenges are not over, and we’re not at the finish line, but we’re running strong.”

The team now has to build its three science instruments:

• a magnetometer to measure the asteroid’s magnetic field.
• a multispectral imager to capture images of its surface and data, about what its made of, and its geological features.
• spectrometers that analyze the neutrons and gamma rays coming from the surface to reveal what the asteroid is made of.

Assembly and testing of the full robotic spacecraft begins in February 2021, and everything has to be in the clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by April 2021. 

The main spacecraft chassis is now being built at Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California.

I Want To Live Under The Sun And High In The Clouds...,

mashable |  “We have better topographic data from Pluto than we do from Venus,” says Darby Dyer, the current chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Advisory Group, with a frustrated chuckle. “NASA and the majority of planetary scientists have bought into the notion that Mars is the most likely place to have water and evidence of life. Overturning that paradigm is a tough battle, but we’re fighting it.”

Dyer is 62; the days when Venus was thought to be a swamp planet are within her living memory. She also remembers being in grad school at MIT in the 1980s, on the day Ronald Reagan canceled a NASA mission that was going to take an orbital radar to Venus. 

“There were people crying in the corridors,” she says. “Ph.D.s whose whole theses vanished in an instant.” The Venus community gathered its energy and pushed back enough to create one final mission, planned for 1986, which was delayed by the Challenger shuttle explosion until 1989. That was Magellan. 

Still, even with that Magellan data and our limited Earth-based spectroscopy, what wonders and mysteries we’ve been able to uncover. There are the strange dark patches, large enough to affect the planet’s weather, which may be where those microorganisms are hanging out. A 2020 study says that Venus’ volcanoes are still active, erupting as we speak.

And it’s only been four years since a groundbreaking study that suggested we might have been right all along about Venus being covered in liquid water; we just got the wrong era. Turns out Venus had oceans between 4 billion and 1 billion years ago — way longer than liquid water existed on Mars, and more than enough time for it to develop life. 

“If you had water for 3 billion years, life probably arose on Venus before it did on Earth,” says Dyar. “Maybe they had trilobites in those oceans; maybe they got as far as whales.” 

We may raise CO2 in the atmosphere to the point where it threatens the threads of human civilization, but only a growing sun can boil the oceans and burn the land, creating enough CO2 to dominate the atmosphere for a full-on runaway greenhouse effect. 

But! It’s also possible that Venus was slammed by multiple impacts, including a possible former moon, which might explain why the whole place is spinning upside-down and so slowly. You know what would help us figure it out? More data. 

Right now we don’t even know what Venus’ core is made of, or whether it has tectonic plates like Earth, or whether there’s evidence of old oceans to be found in the atmosphere, or exactly what kind of organisms have clung to it like mushrooms thriving in the radioactive ruin of Chernobyl’s old reactor. 

It won’t be dinosaurs, but life on Venus may well have, uh, found a way. 

The question is: How soon can we?

Knuckleheads Have No Place In The Endless Ocean Of Space

popularmechanics |  Is NASA really working on . . . a warp drive? An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu. 

The Alcubierre drive works like a physics version of a classic party trick. The spaceship sits in spacetime while science pulls the fabric from in front of it to behind it, like a tablecloth pulled out from under a full spread of dishes. White explains:

“The concept of operations as described by Alcubierre is that the spacecraft would depart the point of origin (e.g. earth) using some conventional propulsion system and travel a distance d, then bring the craft to a stop relative to the departure point. The field would be turned on and the craft would zip off to its stellar destination, never locally breaking the speed of light, but covering the distance in an arbitrarily short period of time just the same.”

Alcubierre’s theory dates to 1994, and physicists have used it as a jumping-off point for further discussion ever since. By creating a kind of pocket world where a spaceship can operate seemingly outside of physics, the laws of physics can be sidestepped—or so the theory goes. 

What’s the paradox? White describes it this way: “When the energy density is initiated, the choice in direction of the +x-axis is mathematically arbitrary, so how does the spacecraft ‘know’ which direction to go?” Sci-fi has solved this paradox by inventing a “stable wormhole,” but White can’t fly a deus ex machina to Alpha Centauri.

Once Thought Impossible Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines A Fait'Accompli

eurekalert |  A University of Central Florida researcher and his team have developed an advanced new rocket-propulsion system once thought to be impossible.

The system, known as a rotating detonation rocket engine, will allow upper stage rockets for space missions to become lighter, travel farther, and burn more cleanly.

The result were published this month in the journal Combustion and Flame.

"The study presents, for the first time, experimental evidence of a safe and functioning hydrogen and oxygen propellant detonation in a rotating detonation rocket engine," said Kareem Ahmed, an assistant professor in UCF's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who led the research. 

The rotating detonations are continuous, Mach 5 explosions that rotate around the inside of a rocket engine, and the explosions are sustained by feeding hydrogen and oxygen propellant into the system at just the right amounts. 

This system improves rocket-engine efficiency so that more power is generated while using less fuel than traditional rocket energies, thus lightening the rocket's load and reducing its costs and emissions.

Mach 5 explosions create bursts of energy that travel 4,500 to 5,600 miles per hour, which is more than five times the speed of sound. They are contained within a durable engine body constructed of copper and brass. 

The technology has been studied since the 1960s but had not been successful due to the chemical propellants used or the ways they were mixed.

Ahmed's group made it work by carefully balancing the rate of the propellants, hydrogen and oxygen, released into the engine.

"We have to tune the sizes of the jets releasing the propellants to enhance the mixing for a local hydrogen-oxygen mixture," Ahmed said. "So, when the rotating explosion comes by for this fresh mixture, it's still sustained. Because if you have your composition mixture slightly off, it will tend to deflagrate, or burn slowly instead of detonating." 

Ahmed's team also had to capture evidence of their finding. They did this by injecting a tracer in the hydrogen fuel flow and quantifying the detonation waves using a high-speed camera.

"You need the tracer to actually see that explosion that is happening inside and track its motion," he said. "Developing this method to characterize the detonation wave dynamics is another contribution of this article."

Charles Lieber Is The Father Of EXTREMELY Wuhan Relevant Technology

Harvard |  Two of the world’s biggest threats may someday be reduced by wires thousands of times thinner than a hair but capable of detecting a single virus. The specter of worldwide viral epidemics is always with us, so detecting them quickly offers the possibility of saving thousands of lives. The pathogens also can be stealthy biological weapons, making their positive detection a vital national defense requirement.

“We want to find a single virus before it finds you,” says Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Tests recently completed in his laboratory show that these unimaginably thin nanowires can sense and distinguish between viruses that cause flu, measles, and eye infections. Lieber believes future versions will be able to spot HIV, Ebola, SARS, West Nile, hepatitis, bird flu, and other dangerous viruses.

“Viruses are among the most important causes of human disease and are of increasing concern as agents for bioterrorism,” Lieber says. “Our work shows that nanoscale silicon wires can be configured as detectors that turn on or off in the presence of a single virus particle. Such detectors could be fashioned into arrays capable of sensing thousands of different viruses, ushering in a new era for diagnoses, biosafety, and quick response to viral outbreaks.”

“Nano” refers to a “nanometer,” one billionth of a meter, four hundred billionths of an inch, or about 10 atoms in size. One hundred thousand wires, each 20 nanometers long, would fit on the head of a pin.

The Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, and National Cancer Institute all supported Lieber’s research, and at least two commercial companies have shown interest in manufacturing nanosensors.

In his office, Lieber shows visitors a two-inch-square silicon and metal chip containg an array of nanowires and two pinhead-size entry ports through which blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids can enter. Air samples put into a fluid solution would also be tested this way.

World Health Organization Never Held China Accountable

WaPo |  As a mysterious virus spread through Wuhan last month, the World Health Organization had a message: China has got this.

And as the coronavirus swept across the Chinese heartland and jumped to other nations, WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, applauded the “transparency” of the Chinese response.

Even as evidence mounted that Chinese officials had silenced whistleblowers and undercounted cases, Tedros took a moment to extol the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Now — more than a month into an escalating global health crisis — there are questions about whether the WHO’s praise in the early weeks created a false sense of security that potentially spurred the virus’s spread.

Some experts have defended the comments as sound strategy.

“WHO has really tricky balancing act,” said Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “If that means praising China publicly, that’s what he has to do.”

Others worried that it could shake faith in the U.N. body.

Praising China’s leaders “is not a bad idea, but do you want to do it in a professional and credible way,” said the Council on Foreign Relations’ Huang.

For now, WHO seems to be sticking with the strategy.

At a new conference on Thursday, Tedros was asked, again, about China, including the death of one of the Chinese doctors who sounded the alarm on the virus, only to be detained by police. (He later died of the virus.)

He first deferred to a colleague, then took the chance to speak again, defending China’s handling of the epidemic. “It is very difficult, given the facts,” he said, “to say that China was hiding.”

Human Supremacy Alert : Urgently Repeating Myself for Slow Cats...,

PNAS |  Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.  

ABSTRACT

Living systems are more robust, diverse, complex, and supportive of human life than any technology yet created. However, our ability to create novel lifeforms is currently limited to varying existing organisms or bioengineering organoids in vitro. Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with the predicted behaviors. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in future would pave the way to designing and deploying unique, bespoke living systems for a wide range of functions.

Most modern technologies are constructed from synthetic rather than living materials because the former have proved easier to design, manufacture, and maintain; living systems exhibit robustness of structure and function and thus tend to resist adopting the new behaviors imposed on them. However, if living systems could be continuously and rapidly designed ab initio and deployed to serve novel functions, their innate ability to resist entropy might enable them to far surpass the useful lifetimes of our strongest yet static technologies. As examples of this resistance, embryonic development and regeneration reveal remarkable plasticity, enabling cells or whole organ systems to self-organize adaptive functionality despite drastic deformation (1, 2). Exploiting the computational capacity of cells to function in novel configurations suggests the possibility of creating synthetic morphology that achieves complex novel anatomies via the benefits of both emergence and guided self-assembly (3).

Currently, there are several methods underway to design and build bespoke living systems. Single-cell organisms have been modified by refactored genomes, but such methods are not yet scalable to rational control of multicellular shape or behavior (4). Synthetic organoids can be made by exposing cells to specific culture conditions but very limited control is available over their structure (and thus function) because the outcome is largely emergent and not under the experimenter’s control (5). Conversely, bioengineering efforts with 3D scaffolds provide improved control (6⇓–8), but the inability to predict behavioral impacts of arbitrary biological construction has restricted assembly to biological machines that resemble existing organisms, rather than discovering novel forms through automatic design.

Meanwhile, advances in computational search and 3D printing have yielded scalable methods for designing and training machines in silico (9, 10) and then manufacturing physical instances of them (11⇓–13). Most of these approaches employ an evolutionary search method (14) that, unlike learning methods, enables the design of the machine’s physical structure along with its behavior. These evolutionary design methods continually generate diverse solutions to a given problem, which proves useful as some designs can be instantiated physically better than others. Moreover, they are agnostic to the kind of artifact being designed and the function it should provide: the same evolutionary algorithm can be reconfigured to design drugs (15), autonomous machines (11, 13), metamaterials (16), or architecture (17).

Here, we demonstrate a scalable approach for designing living systems in silico using an evolutionary algorithm, and we show how the evolved designs can be rapidly manufactured using a cell-based construction toolkit. The approach is organized as a linear pipeline that takes as input a description of the biological building blocks to be used and the desired behavior the manufactured system should exhibit (Fig. 1). The pipeline continuously outputs performant living systems that embody that behavior in different ways. The resulting living systems are novel aggregates of cells that yield novel functions: above the cellular level, they bear little resemblance to existing organs or organisms.

These Are Novel Living Machines

telegraph | The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’

Dubbed ‘xenobots’ because they are constructed of biological material taken from the Xenopus laevis frog, the little bots are the first to be constructed from living cells.

Researchers are hopeful they could be programmed to move through arteries scraping away plaque, or swim through oceans removing toxic microplastic.

And because they are alive, they can replicate and repair themselves if damaged or torn.

“These are novel living machines,” said Dr Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research.

“They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

Living organisms have often been manipulated by humans in the past, right down to their DNA code, but this is the first time that biological machines have been built completely from scratch.

Scientists first used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont to create an algorithm that assembled a few hundred virtual skin and heart cells into a myriad forms and body shapes, for specific tasks.

Based on the blueprints, a team of biologists from Tufts University, Massachusetts, then assembled the cells into living bots, just one millimetre wide. 

Lottery Underway for One Hundred Doses of the Most Expensivist...,

thescientist |  SMA occurs from having two copies of a mutated version of the survival motor neuron 1 (SMN1) gene, which is responsible for the proteins that maintain neurons related to muscle movement. Without proper signals from the brain to move, muscles begin to atrophy and cause a host of related problems, such as decreased mobility and an inability to swallow. Many patients die by age two, and applicants for the lottery must be under two years old. The drug, given intravenously, provides the brain with a functional copy of SMN1 through a viral vector.

Pharmaceutical giant Novartis has begun accepting applications for a lottery-based program to give away 100 doses of a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, a sometimes-deadly muscle-wasting disease that affects about 1 in 10,000 births. The initiative will provide access to children with SMA living in countries where the intervention, Zolgensma, has not yet been approved. But there are far more than 100 patients who could be eligible.

The company has cited production limitations as the reason for high treatment costs and limited doses for the lottery. An independent bioethics committee worked with Novartis to develop the terms of the lottery.

“It’s a difficult situation,” Ricardo Batista, the father of an infant with SMA who lives in Canada, tells The Globe And Mail. “It’s a lottery where we’re leaving children’s lives up to chance. I don’t think it’s a game that any of us want to play.”

Biologics Global Market Opportunities And Strategies To 2021

Shortly before I went on "hiatus" last year, I posted about the Nobel given for "directed evolution" and what I casually referred to as "Mubabs" - you know - all those newfangled biologic medicines that have become pervasive mainstays of broadcast and print advertising. I thought it was amusing just how many oddly named mubabs there were and began collecting the oddly named drugs and what they were prescribed for summer before last.

reportlinker  |  The biologics industry comprises companies manufacturing biological products that are derived from genetically modified proteins and human genes.Biologics products include a wide range of recombinant therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and monoclonal antibodies.

These products are isolated from natural sources such as human, animal, and microorganisms by biotechnological methods and other cutting-edge technologies.

Executive Summary
The global biologics market was worth $221 billion in 2017 and is essentially segmented into monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines. Biologics are very large complex molecules manufactured in a living system such as microorganisms, animal cells or plant cells. They are produced using the recombinant DNA technology and are composed of sugars, proteins, nucleic acids or a combination of these substances. In 2017, 12 biologics were approved in the USA, 10 in European Union and 7 in Japan. There are over 1000 biologics under development which will drive the biologics market in the future. Cancer is the therapeutic area with maximum number of biologics under development and Alzheimer’s has the least number.

Of the total biologics market across the globe, Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) accounted for a share of 43% in 2017 and was worth $94 billion. North America had the highest share in 2017 at $39.2 billion followed by Western Europe with a market value of $26.4 billion. Asia-Pacific was the third largest market with a share of 12% and a market value of $11.4 billion. mAbs are biological drugs that recognize and bind to a specific antigen that causes various chronic health conditions such as arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis. mAbs can be further segmented based on the presence of different amounts of murine (mouse or rat origin) sequences in the variable region. The segments consist of murine mAbs, chimeric mAbs, human and humanized mAbs. Of these, humanized mAbs accounted for 43% share in the monoclonal antibody market with a market value of $37.6 billion followed by human mAbs and chimeric mAbs at $32.9 billion and $18.8 billion respectively. Murine mAbs accounted only for 5% of the total mAbs market and was worth $4.7 billion in 2017.

Therapeutic proteins or recombinant proteins are engineered in the laboratory and works by targeting therapeutic process which compensates for the deficiency of an essential protein. Therapeutic proteins include cytokines, peptide hormones and enzymes. The market for therapeutic protein was worth $80 billion in 2017 accounting for a share of 36% of the global biologics market. North American market for therapeutic proteins was worth $33 billion in 2017 followed by Western Europe at $17.3 billion. The market in Asia Pacific was worth $11.3 billion and the markets in South America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa accounted only for 4%, 6%, 9% and 4% respectively. Based on the segmentation of therapeutic proteins into cytokines, peptide hormones and enzymes, peptide hormones accounted for 45% of the market followed by cytokines at 18% and enzymes at 10% share. Other blood factors also had a share of around 27% in the total therapeutic proteins market globally.

We'll Pretend You Cats Knew We Had Hypersonics Like We Had Ion-Drives 50 Years Ago....,

nationalinterest |  No country has ever possessed a reliable defense against a long-range strategic weapon. Instead, nuclear states count on the threat of atomic counterattack -- "mutual assured destruction" is the Cold War term -- in order to deter a nuclear attack.

Avangard could become just another strategic weapon that that United States counters with strategic weapons of its own. "Our response would be our deterrent force, which would be the triad and the nuclear capabilities that we have to respond to such a threat," Hyten said.

Hypersonic weapons might be more useful, and more effective, if they do not carry nuclear warheads. In July 2018, Michael Griffin, the U.S. Defense Department's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, warned about the "tactical capability that these sorts of weapons bring to theater conflicts or regional conflicts."

Griffin characterized hypersonic vehicles as "very quick response, high speed, highly maneuverable, difficult to find and track and kill."

With Avangard reportedly combat-ready, Russia competes with China to be the first country to deploy a hypersonic weapon. China in October 2019 publicly debuted its DF-17 hypersonic surface-to-surface missile during a military parade in Beijing.

It’s unclear whether the DF-17 actually is operational. It’s also unclear how many DF-17s China possesses and how it plans to use the missiles during wartime. Most importantly, it’s not obvious that China has built a sensor network capable of selecting targets for the DF-17.

Look Here Red Shirt, Maybe Your Purpose on this Planet isn't on this Planet!

airforcetimes | Air Force officials on Friday told reporters that people are clamoring for information on how to join the military’s latest branch. The short answer is, they’re going to have to wait a while.

President Trump officially signed the Space Force into law Friday, but for now, all that means is everyone at Air Force Space Command will now be assigned to Space Force. Over the next 18 months, officials said, the finer details of manning and training the new branch will be hammered out and set in motion.

“It’s going to be really important that we get this right. A uniform, a patch, a song ― it gets to the culture of a service,” said Air Force Gen. Jay Raymond, the head of Air Force Space Command and U.S. Space Command, who will lead Space Force until a chief of space operations is confirmed by the Senate. “There’s a lot of work going on toward that end. It’s going to take a long time to get to that point, but that’s not something we’re going to roll out on day one.”

For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen, wearing, Air Force uniforms, subject to that service’s fitness program, personnel system and so on.

defensenews |  All the fun cultural details — the Space Force emblem, what personnel will call themselves, whether they wear Star Trek uniforms — are still being formulated. 

“It’s going to be really important that we get this right. A uniform. A patch. A song. It gets to the culture of a service,” Raymond said. “So we’re not going to be in a rush to get something, and not do that right. There’s a lot of work going on towards that end. I don’t think it’s going to take a long time to get that done, but that’s not something we’re going to roll out on day one.”

Air Force bases centered around space operations — specifically Peterson, Buckley and Schriever AFB in Colorado; Vandenberg AFB in California; Patrick AFB in Florida and others — will likely be renamed to reflect that they are Space Force bases, Raymond said.

The Space Force may also diverge from the Air Force’s organization into squadrons and wings, he said.

“We have an opportunity. We looked at and will continue to look at different organizational constructs,” Raymond said.

Speaking of Overcoming...,

themindunleashed |  By September of 2013, there were already more than 500,000 pieces of debris, or “space junk” orbiting Earth and that number is still increasing.

The bits of junk travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph—fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. This is also potential danger to space vehicles, but especially to the International Space Station, space shuttles, and other spacecraft with humans aboard.

“The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris,” said Nicholas Johnson, NASA chief scientist for orbital debris.

As a result of this risk, the European Space Agency signed a debris-removal contract with Swiss startup ClearSpace tasking the company with de-orbiting a substantial piece of a Vega rocket left in orbit in 2013.

TicTac UAP's at Tonopeh? Cleavon and Cletus, Y'all Muhuggahs Ain't Never Gettin a Ride...,

thedrive |  Tonopah Test Range Airport, located along the northern edge of the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range, may not get all the pop culture attention that nearby Area 51 gets, but in many ways, it is just as fascinating. It was born out of a program that saw American fighter pilots secretly flying captured MiGs against their fellow aviators. Not long after that program spun-up, the remote installation was greatly expanded to house the F-117 Nighthawk force during the early and deeply classified part of its career. It has since housed the semi-mothballed F-117 fleet following its official retirement more than a decade ago. It was also the original home of RQ-170 Sentinel. Today, the high-security base continues to support a number of secretive programs, as well as testing at the nearby range. Now, highly unusual activity around a dozen hangars at the shadowy installation has been caught on satellite.

The image in question was snapped at around 10:15 AM local time on December 6th, 2019 by one of Planet Labs' PlanetScope satellites that image the vast majority of the earth daily. The three-meter resolution image shows the front row of the southern-most 'canyon' of hangars, which were originally built for the F-117 program, with seemingly identical craft sitting in front or at least protruding out of the hangars. These are also the hangars that appear to house at least one secretive aircraft, which has been spotted peeking out in multiple prior satellite images in the past. But the December 6th image is unique in that we could not find a similar phenomenon after checking hundreds of similar images that span months of time. 

It appears that some program was uniquely active that day with a small fleet that makes up the contents of those hangars being involved. 

They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her...,

spectrum.mit |  Ronald Raines ’80 was first drawn to chemistry and biology as an undergraduate at MIT, where he completed a double major, studying enzymes in a chemistry lab on the first floor of the Dreyfus Building.

Some three decades later, he is back in that same building, gesturing excitedly at protein models arrayed in his office along with books and travel mementos. As he discusses his research, the “Brass Rat” class ring on his hand provides a tangible reminder of where he began. And, it’s clear he is just as interested in chemistry and biology as he ever was.

Raines, who joined the MIT faculty in 2017 after a long career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serves as the Firmenich Professor of Chemistry at MIT—a professorship with a distinguished 40-year history. He leads a lab pursuing projects at the interface of both fields that are poised to have a major impact on medicine and society.

“I’ve always liked tangibility, I’ve liked science I could touch, and chemistry and biology are both sciences that I can touch,” Raines explains. “I love projects that span from very fundamental science all the way to a clinical outcome—that’s the goal.”

One such project that has occupied Raines’s lab for the past five years started with a straightforward concept: Proteins are complex molecules that carry out many key tasks in cells, but mutations in the DNA blueprint used to build them may result in dysfunctional proteins—and when these damaged proteins are involved in how cells grow or divide, it can lead to cancer. So, Raines thought, what if you could overcome such cancer-causing mutations by simply replacing dysfunctional proteins with working versions?

This year’s gene-write with “ready for space” focus

gpwrite-2019  |  P23. Genetic Engineering of Human Cells for Radiotolerance Craig Westover, Sherry Yang, Sonia Iosim, Deena Najjar, Daniel Butler, Daniela Bezdan, Christopher E. Mason. Weill Cornell, New York, New York, United States Space flight has been documented to produce a number of detrimental physiological effects as a result of cosmic radiation. Space radiation is about 100 times higher than the average effective dose per year from natural radiation on earth and has the ability to produce DNA double stranded breaks leading to increased chromosomal aberrations. The harsh environmental effects of space on organisms have also been studied on the molecular level and as such have shed light on some of the underlying mechanisms that give rise to space induced alterations of cellular functions such as proliferation, differentiation, maturation, and cell survival. Our lab was recently involved in the NASA Twin Project where we analyzed Scott Kelly’s genome, transcriptome, and corresponding epigenetic modifications in response to 1 year of space flight. With this information in mind we are now moving on to genetically engineering HEK293 cells to survive ionizing cosmic radiation.

P28. Detecting evidence of genetic engineering Yuchen Ge, Jitong Cai, Joel S. Bader Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States Detecting evidence of genetic engineering is important for biosecurity, provenance, and intellectual property rights. The need for monitoring and detection is growing with contemplated release of gene drive systems. We describe results of a computational systems designed to detect engineering from DNA sequencing of biological samples, including automated identification of host strains, detection of foreign gene content, and detection of watermarks. Our results demonstrate near perfect identification of foreign gene content in blinded samples, but less ability to detect more subtle engineering associated with watermarks that blend in with natural variation. We describe plans for future improvements.

GP-Write: Quest for the Synthetic Human Genome

cen.acs.org |  In the 15 years since the Human Genome Project was declared finished in 2003, the cost of reading a whole human genome has plummeted to about $1,000. Scientists estimate that writing a full human genome with today’s DNA synthesis technology could cost upward of $100 million. That number was the group’s declared fundraising goal in 2016, but it still doesn’t have centralized funding dedicated to the task. This year, some GP-write participants suggested that patenting the ultrasafe cell line or technologies developed along the way could encourage financial support from investors.

“It may be essential,” said Kristin Neuman, executive director for biotechnology licensing at the patent firm MPEG LA. “Some of the scientists want to see everything open access. Others recognize the importance of intellectual property protection to incentivize private investment,” she observed. During the meeting, Neuman encouraged the group to consider patents for cells and technology developed by the group while still making the ultrasafe cell line available to researchers doing basic science.

GP-write cofounder Nancy Kelley said a systematic fundraising effort will begin soon. “A couple years ago we had a rocky beginning, and we really needed to do some work on straightening out the message,” she said. “I now believe we have something serious to talk about.”

Church added that more than 100 research groups involved in GP-write have their own significant funding. “I don’t think we are underfunded at this point; I think we just need to execute,” he said. Teams can now begin signing up for a chromosome, or part of a chromosome, to recode or help with technology development. “There are plenty of things for people to do today.”

At the end of the GP-write meeting, the group’s goals seemed at once more focused and much broader. Church said the group is not backing down from synthesizing a full human genome and that the ultrasafe cell line gives the consortium an immediate task with a clear payoff. But in the end, the GP-write story may be less about completing a project and more about uniting a multidisciplinary cohort of scientists behind something big.

“Our goals aren’t fixed in stone yet,” Church said. “Hopefully they won’t be fixed in stone even at the finish line.”.

Cosmic Longevity - Prerequisite for the Conquest of Space

technologyreview |  Izpisúa Belmonte believes epigenetic reprogramming may prove to be an “elixir of life” that will extend human life span significantly. Life expectancy has increased more than twofold in the developed world over the past two centuries. Thanks to childhood vaccines, seat belts, and so on, more people than ever reach natural old age. But there is a limit to how long anyone lives, which Izpisúa Belmonte says is because our bodies wear down through inevitable decay and deterioration. “Aging,” he writes, “is nothing other than molecular aberrations that occur at the cellular level.” It is, he says, a war with entropy that no individual has ever won.

But each generation brings new possibilities, as the epigenome gets reset during reproduction when a new embryo is formed. Cloning takes advantage of reprogramming, too: a calf cloned from an adult bull contains the same DNA as the parent, just refreshed. In both cases, the offspring is born without the accumulated “aberrations” that Izpisúa Belmonte refers to.

What Izpisúa Belmonte is proposing is to go one step better still, and reverse aging-related aberrations without having to create a new individual. Among these are changes to our epigenetic marks—chemical groups called histones and methylation marks, which wrap around a cell’s DNA and function as on/off switches for genes. The accumulation of these changes causes the cells to function less efficiently as we get older, and some scientists, Izpisúa Belmonte included, think they could be part of why we age in the first place. If so, then reversing these epigenetic changes through reprogramming may enable us to turn back aging itself.

Izpisúa Belmonte cautions that epigenetic tweaks won’t “make you live forever,” but they might delay your expiration date. As he sees it, there is no reason to think we cannot extend human life span by another 30 to 50 years, at least. “I think the kid that will be living to 130 is already with us,” Izpisúa Belmonte says. “He has already been born. I’m convinced.”