USC Viterbi Researchers Honored with Best Paper Nomination at the 2019 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems – USC Viterbi School…

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Bee+, a 95 mg four-winged robotic insect prototype designed by the Autonomous Microrobotic Systems Laboratory. PHOTO/Nestor Prez-Arancibia.

Next time you pass a flying insect, take a moment to appreciate its structure. With a body thats fairly heavy compared to its thin, delicate wings, this insect will fly with grace, fluidity and control. While this is an intrinsic aspect of an insects natural anatomical design, its very difficult to achieve this perfect balance of elements when replicating it in a robotic version.

In work that resulted in a best paper nomination by the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), USC Viterbi researchers achieved this balance. The research team, members of the Autonomous Microrobotic Systems Laboratory (AMSL), designed the first four-winged robotic insect weighing less than 100mg. At 95mg, this prototype, Bee+, features a new type of actuator that weighs half as much as the prior state-of-the-art piezoelectric actuatorone that transforms electrical energy into a mechanical displacement or stress.

The research team is led by Nstor O. Prez-Arancibia, Assistant Professor in the USC Viterbi Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) and includes AME PhD candidates Xiufeng Yang and Ariel A. Caldern, as well as recent AMSL PhD graduates Ying Chen and Longlong Chang.

This new actuator and a new robotic configuration enabled us to integrate four wings inside the same envelope as that of the prior two-winged prototype, said Prez-Arancibia. The individual areas of expertise of the participant PhD students reflect the multidisciplinary nature and complexity of the research effort that resulted in the reported innovation: Xiufeng is an expert on robotic design; Ying is an expert on control and dynamics; Longlong is an expert on aerodynamics; and Ariel is on expert on fabrication. Together, we were able to make an incredible breakthrough.

It also enabled the researchers to break the world record of lift-to-weight ratio for flying robots at this scale. Bee+ demonstrates improved controllability and potentially longer life span over predecessors, like the 75-mg RoboBee created seven years ago by a team of Harvard researchers that included Prez-Arancibia.

Members of the Autonomous Microrobotics Systems Laboratory, led by Nstor O. Prez-Arancibia. PHOTO/Nstor O. Prez-Arancibia.

Next up, the lab is working on creating the first fully autonomous (in terms of control and power) sub-gram flying robot.

Held in Macau, China from November 4-8, 2019, the IROS conference is one of the leading conferences on robotics in the world. Over 2,500 papers from 53 countries were submitted. The paper on Bee+ was one of four finalists for the IROS 2019 Best Paper Award and was simultaneously accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. To read more about the Bee+, please see here.

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USC Viterbi Researchers Honored with Best Paper Nomination at the 2019 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems - USC Viterbi School...

Most plastic is not getting recycled, and AI robots could be a solution – Business Insider

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Humans have enlisted nearly 100 AI-powered robots in North American to come to the rescue for something humans are terrible at: recycling.

Even when we try to do it right, we're often making things worse; About one out of every four of the things people throw into the recycling bin aren't recyclable at all.

All those misplaced greasy pizza boxes (not recyclable) and clamshell containers tossed in with the plastics, have imperiled an industry that was never really that effective in the first place.

Only a small fraction of the over 2.1 billion tons of the garbage the world produces each year gets recycled about 16%.

And even that small sliver has gotten smaller over the past year.

For decades, the US sold more than half of its recyclables to China mostly plastics to be melted into pellets, the raw material for making more plastic.

But in March of 2018, China said, "No More."

"They started shipping more and more stuff to China, often contaminated dirty plastics or mixed too many mixed goods," said Kate O'Neill, a UC Berkeley professor and author of "Waste."

Around a quarter of the shipments China received had to be hand-processed, buried in landfills, or incinerated.

So the Chinese government declared that bales could contain only up to half a percent of things that contaminated them, like food wrappers or a dirty jar of peanut butter. US consumers and recycling centers couldn't keep up.

"I think people in the wealthy countries had gotten complacent, never bothering to build more recycling facilities domestically," O'Neill added.

Today, a handful of start-ups are testing out new technology to make recycling sustainable.

AMP Robotics is an artificial intelligence and robotics company that aims to change the way we recycle.

Founder of AMP Robotics, Matanya Horowitz said "the situation with the Chinese export markets have actually been good for [the company]."

Robots use artificial intelligence to sort through recyclables. BHS

AMP Robotics is rolling out its latest model: a "Cortex Robot" that uses optical sensors to take in what rolls by, and a "brain" to figure out what his "hands" should do with something even if it looks different to anything he's seen before.

"A lot of these recycling facilities are structured with the primary task of basically dealing with contamination that's not supposed to be there," said Horotwiz. ""What we see is a lot of recycling facilities are investing in automation to help improve their operations."

At least four companies are rolling out similar models, in the hopes of turning a profit from the US' growing piles of hard-to-sort recyclables.

And investors are taking notice. In November 2019, AMP Robotics announced a $16 million Series A investment from Sequoia Capital.

But what about helping humans get better at choosing what to put in their recycling bins in the first place?

New policies in Shanghai are one of the first steps in China's push to solve its waste problems.

This past summer, citizens will face fines and what are called "social penalties" if they don't sort things properly.

One trash sorting volunteer said, Shanghai started the test run on June 24. "It was very hard for us at the beginning. Everyone was busy, people didn't know how to sort," the volunteer who requested to be unidentified said.

"At first we had some hard times," said Shanghai citizen Zhaoju Zhang. "The most difficult part was how to differentiate between dry and wet trash. It was so complicated that we all got confused."

Almost immediately, hundreds of AI-enabled apps sprouted up in order to assist everyday sorting.

"If it's something that is confusing whether it's dry or wet trash, we can just scan the item and get the answer," Zhang said.

Shanghai citizens are now required to sort recyclables properly from their trash. Yuan Ye

But not everyone has access to AI to help parse the new rules, and many complain that complying is tough, and punishments are too harsh.

Kate O'Neill said the new laws are having a "massive cultural impact" and there are "some concerns about how draconian it is, but it's too early to really tell the results. But it certainly has seems to be a massive culture shift."

This kind of cultural shift in how we throw things away would be challenging in the US, where the average person produces twice as much trash as a Chinese citizen.

But experts warn that rethinking the way we deal with garbage is essential, and AI technology offers a promising way forward.

It's even possible for it to identify who created a piece of trash in the first place.

Horowitz explained that robots are able to learn the features of materials. They are able to sparse whether a material is cloudy or opaque. AI robots may even be able to identify symbols of specific brands. All of these abilities help the robots like Max narrow down the source of contamination and what to do with it.

Last year, over 250 companies signed a MacArthur Foundation agreement pledging that 100% of plastic packaging will be easily and safely reused, recycled, or composted by 2025.

CEO of SC Johnson, Fisk Johnson, said in an interview, "We're a family company, and we have a very long-term view, and business has to be part of the solution."

Whether or not they make good on this pledge, AI will be quietly watching, and gathering data on the packaging these brands continue to use.

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Most plastic is not getting recycled, and AI robots could be a solution - Business Insider

Ten outrageous things robots can do right now, from cooking to building IKEA furniture – National Post

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Robots are still a far cry from the ones that turned on humanity in I, Robot and the Terminator movies, but they are rapidly becoming more advanced. For example, Boston Dynamics has a dog-like robot that can open doors, and a humanoid one that does parkour and gymnastics. Here are 10 more outrageous skills robots have picked up in recent years.

1. Play soccer and Simon Says simultaneously

Researchers at MIT designed their quadrupedal mini cheetah to be virtually indestructible: it has the dexterity of a yoga teacher, can nail a 360-degree backflip and, when kicked to the ground, recovers in one kung-fu-like swoop. So far, the army of tiny bots have mastered soccer and Simon Says.

2. Cook a gourmet dinner

In a few years, its entirely possible that robot chefs will be as common a household item as toasters or coffee makers. U.K.-based tech company Moley has created an entirely robotic kitchen, which features a set of dexterous arms that can hold utensils, crack eggs, measure ingredients and even do the dishes. The master robo-chef is able to prepare hundreds of recipes from around the world, all of which can be downloaded from an electronic library. The consumer version is expected to launch by the end of the year.

3. Make rock music

A team of German engineers decided to put a literal spin on heavy metal with Compressorhead, a fully animatronic rock band. Each of its four members the aptly named Fingers (a guitarist with 78 fingers), Stickboy (a four-armed drummer), Bones (the bass player), and the latest addition, Junior (the lead singer, which the bands creators crowdfunded more than $400,000 to build) plays a real instrument. Since the band formed in 2013, it has released a full album and performed at music festivals in the U.K., Russia, France, Australia and even Canada.

4. Give hugs

Researchers in Stuttgart, Germany have created a real-life version of Disneys Big Hero 6. (A robot deemed so lovable that it won 2015s Most Huggable Character award.) HuggieBot standing over five feet tall and weighing 450 pounds asks humans for hugs (and even says please) before embracing them in its massive metal arms. Its creators hope that one day, HuggieBot can be used for emotional support in college dorms and senior facilities.

5. Win at Rock Paper Scissors

Even past victors of the World Rock Paper Scissors Championship (yes, thats a real thing) stand no chance against the University of Tokyos Janken robot, which has never lost a game ever. Instead of relying on prediction, the bot uses high-speed recognition to determine what shape the human hand is going to make, then reacts with the winning move. The entire process only takes a thousandth of a second.

6. Ski like an Olympian

During last years winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, humans werent the only ones competing in Alpine skiing. At the nearby Welli Hilli ski resort in Hoenseong, eight robot athletes zipped down the slopes to compete for a prize of $10,000. Each bot had to be over 50 cm tall, maneuver around the flag poles and needed to have joints that allowed them to bend their knees and elbows. The snow pants were optional.

7. Run a hotel

For just under $200, you could spend a night in a hotel run by robots. At Japans Henn na Hotel, almost every single thing from the receptionists (a female android and an English-speaking dinosaur) to the luggage porter to the room service is automated. In an unfortunate turn of events, half of the 243 robots staff were laid off earlier this year, but the hotel is still fully operational.

8. Build IKEA furniture

If theres a single thing everyone can agree on, its that trying to assemble IKEA furniture is a hellish process. Researchers in Singapore want to spare amateur furniture builders from ever having to crack another instruction manual, so they created a set of robotic arms that can assemble an IKEA chair in just 20 minutes. While most manufacturing bots function assembly line-style, this robot uses 3D cameras to correctly identify which parts it needs, then pieces them all together.

9. Perform brain surgery

Earlier this month, doctors in Toronto performed the worlds first-ever brain surgery using robotics. The patient had suffered a major aneurysm, and surgeons used a remote controlled robotic arm to guide a catheter from an incision made near her groin all the way up to her brain.

10. Lead a funeral

In Japan, hiring a Buddhist monk for a funeral can cost upwards of $3,000. Pepper a robe-wearing robot priest is able to chant sutras while simultaneously tapping a drum for a fifth of the cost. Bonus: the automated monk can live-stream the ceremony to those who are unable to attend.

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Ten outrageous things robots can do right now, from cooking to building IKEA furniture - National Post

Robots Need to Know They Can Die at Any Minute, Just Like the Rest of Us – Popular Mechanics

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How do you get machines to perform better? Tell them they could croak at any minute. In a new paper from the University of Southern California, scientists say that in a dynamic and unpredictable world, an intelligent agent should hold its own meta-goal of self-preservation.

Lead researcher Antonio Damasio is a luminary in the field of intelligence and the brain. In his profile at the Edge Foundation, they say Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, decision-making and consciousness. At USC, hes co-director of the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) with his equally luminous wife, Hanna Damasio.

Damasios paper, coauthored with BCI researcher Kingson Man, is a model based on philosophy and science of mind paired with accumulating research into robotics technology. They published the paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, a title usually meant as Natures [Journal of] Machine Intelligence but in this case, strangely prescient.

Damasio and Man suggest the way to make resilient robots isnt to make them impenetrably strong, but rather, to make them vulnerable in order to introduce ideas like restraint and self-preserving strategy. If an AI can use inputs like touch and pressure, then it can also identify danger and risk-to-self, ScienceAlert summarized.

This idea invokes the design concept of a survival game, where a finite number of resources is given to a set number of players and they must find an equilibrium or eliminate their competitors. The gorgeous 2018 card game Shipwreck Arcana is a great example of a cooperative survival game: To win, at least one person must survive being shipwrecked. You can share resources to preserve more people, or you can sacrifice resources from some players to increase the likelihood that one person will survive.

A robot with a sense of its own health isnt the most novel thingwhen a car tells you the oil is low or the engine is overheating, thats a direct self-preservation behavior. Theres just no in-between layer of circuitry to model thinking or prioritizing. Instead, the car has sensors only, and those sensors flag errors in order for the vehicles operator to address them. Imagine a car that considered your planned commute and the health of its engine and pulled itself over every 10 minutes to cool off.

Under certain conditions, machines capable of implementing a process resembling homeostasis might also acquire a source of motivation and a new means to evaluate behaviour, akin to that of feelings in living organisms, Damasio and Man say in their abstract. The car example fits this rubric. Instead of a sensor alerting an outsider every time, the hypothetical car has a brain to run analyses of the different factors that can go wrong and how likely each scenario is.

Human brains do this without, well, a second thought. Our many sensesnot just fivefeed constant input into our brains, and our body systems adjust in response. People dislike the idea that their brains and bodies are basically machines, although our complexity will probably never be fully understood by human scientists. What the scientists paper represents is the way more and more complex materials and computing are bringing machines steps toward our level, not the other way around.

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Robots Need to Know They Can Die at Any Minute, Just Like the Rest of Us - Popular Mechanics

ESA studies human hibernation for space travel – EarthSky

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Fictional image of hibernating astronauts, via ESA.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on November 18, 2019, that its scientists have recently been investigating the process of placing astronauts into hibernation to cross the vastness of space. These scientists met at ESAs Concurrent Design Facility to assess the advantages of human hibernation for a trip to a neighboring planet, such as Mars. They took as their reference an existing study that described sending six humans to Mars and back on a five-year timescale. They studied how crew hibernation would impact space mission design, and put some numbers to known advantages to human hibernation for space travel, for example, that a smaller space capsule could be used if the crew were hibernating, rather than awake, for the months-long journey to Mars.

Jennifer Ngo-Anh, a team leader in ESAs Science in Space Environment (SciSpacE) program, commented:

For a while now hibernation has been proposed as a game-changing tool for human space travel.

If we were able to reduce an astronauts basic metabolic rate by 75% similar to what we can observe in nature with large hibernating animals such as certain bears we could end up with substantial mass and cost savings, making long-duration exploration missions more feasible.

EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

Here is ESAs Concurrent Design Facility, which hosts representatives of all space mission disciplines in order to design future space missions. Image via ESA.

Why do we need to put astronauts into hibernation at all? The reason is that space is vast. Even our own neighborhood of space our solar system is subject to a space-is-vast issue that factors heavily into our missions to explore the other planets near us in space. Consider that the New Horizons mission to Pluto, for example launched in 2006 needed nine years to get to its flyby.

To get an idea of the distance scale of our solar system, visit If the moon were only 1 pixel showing the relative distances of the planets to scale on a single extra-wide page. Then try if you can to extend what youve learned to the billions of other likely solar systems in our galaxy alone.

As Joe Hansen host of the PBS series Its Okay to be Smart says in the video below:

The human brain just cant fathom how big things like the solar system are.

Robin Biesbroek of ESA who has worked in the past on the removal of space debris from low-Earth orbit was part of the recent ESA study on human hibernation. He commented:

We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design.

We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team.

Finally we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years.

The scientists found that the mass of a spacecraft for human hibernation could be reduced by a third.

The ESA scientists quantified what might seem fairly obvious that a spacecraft for hibernating astronauts could be on the small side. This comparison shows the size of a module for a crewed Mars mission with its hibernation-based equivalent. Image via ESA.

If the crew were hibernating, you wouldnt need extensive crew quarters, or as much storage room for consumables (like food and water). Hibernation module design via ESA.

ESA said hibernation would take place in small individual pods that would double as cabins while the crew are awake. Hibernation pod design via ESA.

What would it be like for the astronauts? ESA explained:

The assumption was that a drug would be administered to induce torpor the term for the hibernating state. Like hibernating animals, the astronauts would be expected to acquire extra body fat in advance of torpor. Their soft-shell pods would be darkened and their temperature greatly reduced to cool their occupants during their projected 180-day Earth-Mars cruise.

ESA said the hibernating cruise phase would end with a 21-day recuperation period. It said that based on the experience of animal hibernation the crew would likely not experience bone or muscle wastage. ESA also explained:

Radiation exposure from high-energy particles is a key hazard of deep space travel, but because the hibernating crew will be spending so much time in their hibernation pods, then shielding such as water containers could be concentrated around them.

And ESA also spoke of the largely autonomous operations, with optimum use of artificial intelligence and fault detection, isolation and recovery needed on a spaceship where most humans are hibernating.

Sound a bit creepy or lonely? Maybe. But Ngo-Anh commented:

the basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy: a broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades. Most major medical centres have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in a better shape than they otherwise would be.

We aim to build on this in future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people.

NASA has contracted studies on human hibernation in space, too. This image is a settlement-class Mars Transfer Habitat designed by NASA contractor SpaceWorks in 2017. Read more: Sleeping their way to Mars.

By the way, if youre interested in reading a wonderful recent science fiction series depicting deep-space travel via human hibernation two of the best sci-fi books Ive ever read (and Ive read a bunch) try Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovksy. Both have all the things I love in science fiction: travel over millenia among the stars, how the hibernating travelers perceive time passing, strange planets, weird aliens, a human love story. Human hibernation plays a big role in these awesome books!

The cover of Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovksy.

Bottom line: The European Space Agency has been studying how real-life human hibernation would impact space mission design.

Via ESA

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ESA studies human hibernation for space travel - EarthSky

European Space Agency wants to put astronauts into hibernation for space travel – Digital Trends

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Once the preserve of science fiction, through films such as Alien (pictured) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, hibernation or suspended animation may one day become an important enabler of deep space travel. 20th Century Fox

The European Space Agency (ESA) is daring to dream big, with the organizations latest project to implement human hibernation for space travel. The concept of sleeping while traveling to distant planets is a mainstay of sci-fi movies like Alien, Interstellar, and Passengers.

The ESA has assembled a team to study hibernation with the aim of using it in manned space missions as part of the Future Technology Advisory Panel. The team began by looking at current attempts to create hibernation technologies and considering what the impact would be on mission design. As a reference point, they considered a theoretical mission that would send six people to Mars and back within five years.

We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design, Robin Biesbroek of the ESAs Concurrent Design Facility said in a statement. We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team. Finally, we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years.

According to the teams research, the use of hibernation could reduce the total mass of a spacecraft by one third, as well as a one-third reduction in the requirements for consumables like food and water. Instead of crew quarters, each astronaut would have a soft pod that would double as a cabin while they were awake. The astronauts would be administered a drug to induce hibernation, then their pods would be darkened and their temperature reduced for several months.

The big advantage of hibernation is that it would enable astronauts to travel on much longer space missions. If a hibernation state could be achieved in which an astronauts metabolic rate was reduced by around three-quarters, which is what happens in hibernating animals such as bears, then manned space missions could reach much further from our planet as the requirements for food, water, and oxygen would be reduced.

Despite the fact that humans clearly dont hibernate, scientists say that the idea of putting people into a hibernation-like state is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy, Jennifer Ngo-Anh, leader of the ESAs SciSpacE team, said in the same statement. A broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades. Most major medical centers have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in better shape than they otherwise would be.

We aim to build on this in the future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people.

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European Space Agency wants to put astronauts into hibernation for space travel - Digital Trends

Credit Suisse says to buy Virgin Galactic stock for its ‘near-term monopoly’ on space tourism – CNBC

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Credit Suisse began coverage of Virgin Galactic with an outperform rating Thursday, saying in an a note titled "The Ultimate Joyride" that the firm sees multiple factors driving the space tourism stock higher.

"Our bullish view reflects the near-term monopoly SPCE offers in an industry (commercial space tourism) where public investment opportunities are scarce. We view this as a classic tech-driven high demand, low supply story with high barriers to entry," Credit Suisse analyst Robert Spingarn wrote in a note to investors. "Not everyone will see the value, but we believe the math works nonetheless."

Virgin Galactic shares rose in premarket but later dropped, closing down 7.4% at$9.10. Credit Suisse has a $12.43 price target on the stock, essentially seeing 36% upside over the next year. The firm is the second to begin covering Virgin Galactic with a buy recommendation: Vertical Research Partners is also bullish on the opportunity.

The stock has slid since its public debut last month, down about 20%, but that doesn't worry Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya. He expects Virgin Galactic to begin flying its first customers as early as May, saying on Wednesday that flights "will begin in about six to nine months."

"I think the story of Virgin is just so new that it hasn't been written yet. We'll start commercial operations in the middle of next year, so the full-fledged business value will become apparent very quickly to a lot more people at that point," Palihapitiya said in an interview with CNBC's Seema Mody on "Closing Bell."

Credit Suisse agrees, saying the stock's upside largely depends on how closely Virgin Galactic sticks to its schedule and begins flying people.

"We believe the greatest single catalyst would be successful completion of the first commercial flight," Spingarn said. "From here, losses should dissipate rapidly as flight activity rises."

Virgin Galactic spacecraft Unity fires its engine and heads to space with its first test passenger on board in February 2019.

Virgin Galactic | gif by @thesheetztweetz | CNBC

At $250,000 per person, Virgin Galactic's ticket revenue is about three times the cost of each flight, Credit Suisse noted, "which would drive very attractive incremental margins." The company's spacecraft holds up to six passengers along with the two pilots.

Spingarn says Virgin Galactic "has a distinct first-to-market advantage" in space tourism, estimating nearest competitor Blue Origin is at least two years behind. And even when Blue Origin does start flying people, the company is inaccessible to public investors as it is wholly owned and funded by Jeff Bezos.

Credit Suisse also mentions SpaceX, with its fully reusable Starship rocket, as a long-term threat to Virgin Galactic's business.

"While SpaceX does not appear to be as focused on space tourism, a point-to-point solution serviced by Starship could convert space travel from a novelty experience to a commodity service," Spingarn said.

Virgin Galactic is thinking about the potential of high-speed, long distance travel, also known as point-to-point space travel. Boeing's venture arm HorizonX last month invested $20 million into Virgin Galactic to explore developing a vehicle capable of flying around the world at hypersonic speeds. But SpaceX is a notable risk to Virgin Galactic's future business, Credit Suisse said.

"Unless Virgin is able to offer a similarly compelling point-to-point solution, the arrival of point-to-point by competitors could damage the overall [total addressable market] for space tourism and, therefore, the long-term demand profile," Spingarn said.

Finally, Credit Suisse warns that any major accident or malfunction would likely substantially slow Virgin Galactic's business. In 2014, an accident during a Virgin Galactic test flight killed a co-pilot.

"We assign a $0 value in the case of a catastrophic event (e.g., a fatal crash)," Spingarn said.

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Credit Suisse says to buy Virgin Galactic stock for its 'near-term monopoly' on space tourism - CNBC

The Weirdly Nihilistic Reason Why Outer Space Is So Cold – Popular Mechanics

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Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reachers of our galaxyin the vast nothingness of spacethe distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. Temperatures in these vacuous regions can plummet to about -455 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 kelvin). Are you shivering yet?

But why is the vacuum of space this cold? Well, it's complicated.

For physicists, temperature is all about velocity and motion. When we talk about the temperature in a room, thats not the way a scientist would talk about it," astronomer Jim Sowell of the Georgia Institute of Technology tells Popular Mechanics. We would use the expression heat to define the speeds of all the particles in a given volume.

Most scientists use the kelvin instead of Fahrenheit to describe extremely cold temperatures, so we'll be doing that here, too.

Most, if not all of the heat in the universe comes from stars like our sun. The inside of the sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, temperatures can swell to 15 million kelvin. (On the surface, they only reach up to about 5,800 kelvin.)

The heat that leaves the sun and other stars travels across space as infrared waves of energy called solar radiation. These solar rays only heat the particles in their path, so anything not directly in view of the sun stays cool. Like, really cool.

At night, the surface of even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, drops to about 95 kelvin. Plutos surface temperature reaches about 40 kelvin. Coincidentally, the lowest temperature ever recorded in our solar system was clocked much closer to home. Last year, scientists measured the depths of a dark crater on the surface of our moon and found that temperatures dropped to about 33 Kelvin, according to New Scientist.

Thats SUPER cold, like -400 Fahrenheit cold.

Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

But our universe is vastunimaginably vast. (And possibly a loop?) What about the vacuum of space?

Well, thats where things get tricky. Within near and distant galaxies, the mesh of dust and clouds that weaves between the stars has been observed at temperatures between between 10 and 20 kelvin. The sparse pockets of space that contain little but cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the formation of the universe, hover in at around 2.7 kelvin.

These temperatures dip perilously close to an elusive measurement: absolute zero. At absolute zero, which to -459.67 degrees Fahrenheitno motion or heat is transferred between particles, even on the quantum level.

In the vacuum of space, gas particles are few and far betweenabout one atom per spoonful, or 10 cubic centimeters, according to Quartzso they arent able to readily transfer heat to each other through conduction and convection. Heat in space can only be transferred through radiation, which regulates how particles of light, or photons, are absorbed or emitted, according to UniverseToday.

The further you travel into interstellar space, the colder it gets. I dont know that youll ever get down to absolute zero, Sowell says. Youre always going to see some light and therell be some motion. There may be pockets of the universe where temperatures drop to 1 Kelvin above absolute zero, he notes, but so far, the closest measurement to absolute zero has only been observed in laboratories here on Earth.

"Humans are actually pretty good at creating extreme temperatures," Alasdair Gent, a graduate student in astroparticle physics also of the Georgia Institute of Technology tells Popular Mechanics. Scientists are able to recreate the same temperatures seen in the vacuum of space as well as inside the core of stars like our sun.

Back here on Earth, we have it easy. You can have high-speed particles zipping by us outside the Earth's atmosphere, but if you took off your space suit, you would feel cold because there aren't that many particles hitting you, says Sowell. Here on the surface of the earth, particles aren't moving really fast, but there are zillions of them.

Earths atmosphere does an excellent job of circulating the suns heat through conduction, convection and radiation. Thats why we feel temperature changes so acutely on Earth. The particles are moving just a bit faster due to the sunlight or weather patterns, says Sowell.

When we venture out past the safety and confines of our planet, we wear spacesuits and travel in spacecraft that help protect us from these extreme temperatures. Here, a large dose of creativity and a whole lot of insulation is critical.

The Apollo-era spacesuits, for example, had heating systems that included flexible coils and lithium batteries. Modern suits come equipped with tiny, microscopic balls of heat-reactant chemicals that helped protect astronauts from the frigid temps. The Artemis spacesuits, which will take the next man and first woman to the moon in 2024, come equipped with a portable life support system that will help future moonwalkers regulate their temperature on the moon and beyond.

Were you to weave between galaxies in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, the heat from your bodyabout 100 watts, according to Space.comwould start to radiate away from you. (Remember, conduction and convection don't work here.) This would be a slow, frigid way to go, and, eventually, you'd freeze to death. But... it's likely you'd asphyxiate first.

After all, space is all about extremes.

Update: A previous version of this article referred to the kelvin as being measured in degrees. The kelvin is not measured in degrees. We regret the error.

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The Weirdly Nihilistic Reason Why Outer Space Is So Cold - Popular Mechanics

Writer And Director Robert Segovia Creates A Universe Where Space Travel Is Boring And Hilarious – KUT

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Robert Segovia, the writer and director of the new comedic two-act playLosers in Spacesuggests that the play might not exist if he hadnt lost his job a while back. I started writing it three or four years ago, and didnt think I was a good enough writer, he says And I got laid off, which is sad, but it did give me time of like,oh, its kind of now or never to write this thing.

One of the core concepts of the show is rooted in Segovias childhood love for a particular style of science fiction TV show. When I was kid, I used to think I didnt like sci-fi, but then I realized I didnt like sci-fi where theytravel. I just wanted tostay, he says. I didnt really like the Star Trekkylets go to these planets [and] fight a monster.I really like the idea of lazy spacefaring. Like youve gotten out here and youre just gonna hang out a little bit.

Hes interested in the idea of space travel becoming so common that its no longer romanticized and its just a job. Its kind of fun to think of space like that there will be a point where well be in space so long thatll itll seem notbad, butboring. Itll just be like, oh, were on this planet. Great. I gotta take out the trash still.

Thats the core comedic conceit ofLosers in Space its characters arent heroic or brilliant pioneers, theyre regular folks who are kind of bored with their jobs and arent that bright. There are very few intelligent characters in my universe, Segovia says. And they arefrustrated, because everyone around them is kind of bumbling.

The characters work at a topaz mining base on the planet Parkor (topaz is worth in the 29thcentury exactly what its worth now, which is to say not that much, Segovia says). Parkor is a planet where the natural landscape looks very much like a present-day American parking lot, largely because Segovia and his crew had to film some video scenes of the planet in Austin. Austins nothing but parking lots, so I just made the planet parking lots, Segovia says with a laugh.

True to its old-school TV sci-fi heritage,Losers in Spaceis a two-act stage show that plays kind of like a TV show. I call it a two-act play, but its really two episodes, Segovia says. If it goes well, we could do more and more and more.

The idea of creating more adventures and settings and characters for theLosers in Spaceuniverse clearly excites Segovia, and is rooted in his childhood imagination. I [was] a Mexican-American kid who grew up in a predominantly white community, and so I never saw myself on TV, he says. So I think fantasy and sci-fi and things like that writing in those forms, you can kind of project yourself into those, where you may not be able to project yourself into your regular romantic comedy because you just never see yourself in those roles. If the world that youre living in as a kid is not something that you can be a part of, then you just build a different world.

"Losers In Space' runs through December 1 at Fallout Theater

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Writer And Director Robert Segovia Creates A Universe Where Space Travel Is Boring And Hilarious - KUT

New ‘Atlas Obscura’ Book Offers Host of Space Oddities to Visit on Earth – Space.com

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If you're looking to plan a space-themed trip but you've already been to NASA's Kennedy and Johnson space centers, Atlas Obscura's new book can offer off-the-beaten-path cosmic destinations.

"Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders" (Workman Publishing, 2019) offers around-the-world destination recommendations for travelers looking for something unusual. Based on the website of the same name, the book was written by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton and covers oddities of every nature. Plenty of those recommendations touch on spaceflight and related topics.

Perhaps you'd like to see icons of spaceflight itself: the book recommends stops like Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where Russian Soyuz vehicles still launch to the International Space Station. Or visit Australia's museum dedicated to the Skylab station that fell out of the sky.

Related: 5 Great Summer Vacation Ideas for Space Lovers

Or, if you're more interested in science destinations, consider visiting facilities like Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia or the Large Zenith Telescope with its mercury mirror in Canada.

Museum options abound, including historic planetariums, Germany's space travel museum, a museum dedicated to Galileo Galilei (and his preserved middle finger) and the Shanghai Astronomical Museum.

"Atlas Obscura" also offers places to see where space and Earth intersect, from finding Libyan desert glass to visiting Namibia's massive Hoba meteorite, left where it fell since it's too massive to move.

Or, of course, you could take the alien route. Consider the Betty and Barney Hill Archive in New Hampshire, dedicated to alien abduction accounts; stop by memorials of encounters with UFOs in Poland and Sweden, or even visit a would-be alien welcome center in South Carolina.

The book explores plenty of other space-related destinations as well. It's not quite the same as visiting space but we can't all be astronauts.

You can buy Atlas Obscura, 2nd Edition: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders at Amazon.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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New 'Atlas Obscura' Book Offers Host of Space Oddities to Visit on Earth - Space.com

SpaceX rocket that Elon Musk wants to take people to Mars in explodes during tests – The Independent

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A prototype of a SpaceX rocket designed to carry people to Mars has suffered a major failure during tests in Texas.

A video of the incident recorded by a local space enthusiast captured the moment the top of the Starship MK-1 rocket exploded.

SpaceXsaid there were no injuries and that the incident in such an early-stage test of the rocket was not a serious setback.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The purpose of todays test was to pressurise systems to the max, so the outcome was not completely unexpected, a spokesperson for the space firm said.

SpaceX CEO revealed on Twitter that tests would now proceed with the Starship MK-3 prototype design, which is more refined and features a much-improved flight design.

"The striking colour and texture of Africa Illizi, Algeria"

"Every day spent living in space is a great day, but today was particularly special. I got to speak with one of my inspirational heroes Prof Stephen Hawking and his amazing daughter Lucy, who developed the Principia Space Diary to engage children with STEM subjects. As well as talking about dark matter, quantum entanglement, alien life and light beam powered nanocraft we also got to see an amazing pass over the Bahamas and this - my favourite reef smile emoticon"

"Sunrise approaching Russia's frozen north-east coast"

"Hello London! Fancy a run? 🙂 #LondonMarathon"

"50 shades of blue: Bahamas"

"Snow on the mountains next to Yinchuan in China"

"Is it just me or do I see some rocket flames down there? These strange land features are in the Erg Iguidi desert, with its yellow stripes of sand stretching from Algeria to northern Mauritania in the Sahara"

"Sunlight reflecting the stunning colours of this Himalayan lake"

"The real thing: found Everest! Last picture turned out to be third-tallest mountain Kanchengjunga"

"Go #Exomars have a great mission. Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think #AfricaArt"

"Amazingly clear view of Tenerife"

"Some midday winter sun glinting off Greenlands snow-capped peaks"

"Great texture in these huge sand dunes, Saudi Arabia"

"The dam makes this river look like a dragons tail. Oahe Dam north of Pierre, South Dakota in the United States. (North is to the right)"

"Spotted volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning heat has melted snow around top"

"New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine. Mt Cook centre left with the Grand Plateau to the front and Mt Tasman (3,497m) to the right of the Grand Plateau. Fox Glacier in the middle then Franz Josef curving right. Tasman Lake (largest at front) is at the foot of the Tasman glacier which runs along the front of them. The Hooker Glacier flows out behind Mt Cook coming down to meet the Mueller Glacier on the left of the photo. The Murchison Glacier is at the front of the photo running parallel with the Tasman Glacier"

"Another great pass over Patagonia and a swirling plankton bloom off the coast"

"We dont often get such clear views of Alaska"

"Lights along the Nile stretching into the distance from Cairo"

"The Pacific Ring of Fire clear to see amongst the volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia"

"Im guessing there was an impressive storm going on under that cumulonimbus cloud"

"Night-time Sahara you can really see how thin the Earths atmosphere is in this picture"

"Tokyo and Japanese coast. This image shows most of Japan with the largest mass of light corresponding to Tokyo. The white lights on the left are fishing boats"

"Morning sun striking active volcanoes in Guatemala"

"The vast waters of the Tapajos river, Amazonia"

"Beautiful glacial river water flowing from this Patagonian ice field Lake Viedma, West is up"

"Minus the #Dragon photobomb this time..."

"Sediment spilling into this mountain lake, Ethiopia"

"We have phases of short nights on the International Space Station sunlight is nearly always visible right now. No prizes for guessing where this is"

"From one mighty ocean to another ships passing through the Panama canal"

"The striking colour and texture of Africa Illizi, Algeria"

"Every day spent living in space is a great day, but today was particularly special. I got to speak with one of my inspirational heroes Prof Stephen Hawking and his amazing daughter Lucy, who developed the Principia Space Diary to engage children with STEM subjects. As well as talking about dark matter, quantum entanglement, alien life and light beam powered nanocraft we also got to see an amazing pass over the Bahamas and this - my favourite reef smile emoticon"

"Sunrise approaching Russia's frozen north-east coast"

"Hello London! Fancy a run? 🙂 #LondonMarathon"

"50 shades of blue: Bahamas"

"Snow on the mountains next to Yinchuan in China"

"Is it just me or do I see some rocket flames down there? These strange land features are in the Erg Iguidi desert, with its yellow stripes of sand stretching from Algeria to northern Mauritania in the Sahara"

"Sunlight reflecting the stunning colours of this Himalayan lake"

"The real thing: found Everest! Last picture turned out to be third-tallest mountain Kanchengjunga"

"Go #Exomars have a great mission. Earth has more in common with Mars than you might think #AfricaArt"

"Amazingly clear view of Tenerife"

"Some midday winter sun glinting off Greenlands snow-capped peaks"

"Great texture in these huge sand dunes, Saudi Arabia"

"The dam makes this river look like a dragons tail. Oahe Dam north of Pierre, South Dakota in the United States. (North is to the right)"

"Spotted volcano smoking away on Russias far east coast this morning heat has melted snow around top"

"New Zealand looking stunning in the sunshine. Mt Cook centre left with the Grand Plateau to the front and Mt Tasman (3,497m) to the right of the Grand Plateau. Fox Glacier in the middle then Franz Josef curving right. Tasman Lake (largest at front) is at the foot of the Tasman glacier which runs along the front of them. The Hooker Glacier flows out behind Mt Cook coming down to meet the Mueller Glacier on the left of the photo. The Murchison Glacier is at the front of the photo running parallel with the Tasman Glacier"

"Another great pass over Patagonia and a swirling plankton bloom off the coast"

"We dont often get such clear views of Alaska"

"Lights along the Nile stretching into the distance from Cairo"

"The Pacific Ring of Fire clear to see amongst the volcanoes of Kamchatka, Russia"

"Im guessing there was an impressive storm going on under that cumulonimbus cloud"

"Night-time Sahara you can really see how thin the Earths atmosphere is in this picture"

"Tokyo and Japanese coast. This image shows most of Japan with the largest mass of light corresponding to Tokyo. The white lights on the left are fishing boats"

"Morning sun striking active volcanoes in Guatemala"

"The vast waters of the Tapajos river, Amazonia"

"Beautiful glacial river water flowing from this Patagonian ice field Lake Viedma, West is up"

"Minus the #Dragon photobomb this time..."

"Sediment spilling into this mountain lake, Ethiopia"

"We have phases of short nights on the International Space Station sunlight is nearly always visible right now. No prizes for guessing where this is"

"From one mighty ocean to another ships passing through the Panama canal"

Mr Musk unveiled the Starship spacecraft in September, claiming it would be ready to carry humans to Mars within a few years.

This is going to sound totally nuts, but I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months, he said at the event in Texas.

The billionaire polymath also reiterated his belief that humanity needs to colonise the Moon, Mars and other parts of space in order to ensure its survival.

Elon Musk shared a picture of what the Starship rocket will look like(Elon Musk)

In order to achieve this, the company has ushered in a number of groundbreaking innovations to vastly reduce the cost of space travel, including reusable rockets that can land vertically following take off.

We need to make space travel like air travel. Any other mode of transport is reusable so the critical breakthrough is a rapidly reusable orbital rocket this is the holy grail of space, he said.

"I think we should really do our best to become a multi-planet species, and we should do it now."

Social media is an increasingly important battle ground in elections - and home to many questionable claims pumped out by all sides. If social media sites won't investigate the truth of divisive advertising, we will. Please send any political Facebook advertising you receive todigitaldemocracy@independent.co.uk, and we will catalogue and investigate it.Read more here.

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SpaceX rocket that Elon Musk wants to take people to Mars in explodes during tests - The Independent

The answer to cheap space travel to other planets is a 1,000km Skyhook – TweakTown

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The answer to efficient and cheap space travel might just be simpler than you think; all it requires is a cable and a weight.

Above, we have a video from Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell, and this time around, the scientific YouTube Channel is exploring the idea of cheap and effective space travel. The idea that is proposed begins with what is called a 'Tether,' which is simply a weight with a cable attached to it. Kurzgesagt suggests that humans build extremely long versions of these tethers and place them at a safe distance around our planet and use them as a 'free' means of propulsion to other planets.

Since the tether would be spinning around our planet, spaceships would be able to attach onto the tether and use its rotational force to be pushed towards a designated planet. The video says that there will be a few problems in doing this; humans would have to create smaller spacecrafts that would be able to match the tethers speed throughout our atmosphere (12,000km per hour). While that might sound extremely difficult, it should be noted that traditional spacecrafts need to reach 45,000km per hour to exit our planet's gravity.

The idea is also extended to other planets such as Mars and even smaller asteroids that we could land on, mine, and then return the plundered minerals from. Kurzgesagt estimates that if tethers were used, the time it takes to get to Mars will be reduced from 9 months to just 5 or even 3 months. Tether use would also reduce the size of the rockets by about 84%-96%, due to most of their body not needing to carry monumental amounts of fuel.

* Prices last scanned on 11/22/2019 at 9:50 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, please click for very latest pricing

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The answer to cheap space travel to other planets is a 1,000km Skyhook - TweakTown

Former miner turned inventor in link-up with space centre to tackle waste in space – HeraldScotland

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A FORMERFife miner who has devised a series of inventions around dissolving materials including bandages and wipes has linked up with scientists at Strathclyde University to develop ways of tackling waste in space.

Brian McCormack has already developed a suite of dissolvable products he believes could transform the way healthcare professionals would treat burns, as well as flushable wipes.

The 62-year-old, who set up McCormack Innovation to develop his products, has now entered a five-year agreement to explore ways of tackling waste in space.

The next stage of the race will be in deep space, and Mr McCormack hopes Scotland will be at the forefront of developing sustainable space travel.

Mr McCormack has created a group of inventions that include a dissolvable bandage that works like conventional crepe dressings, yet can be removed by placing in water.

READ MORE:SpaceX launches supplies to International Space Station after power delays

He is also in advanced discussions with a number of global companies over taking his products to market.

Now he has linked up with experts at the to Strathclyde Aerospace Centre of Excellence to develop new products for space use.

The growing problem of waste in space prompted NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to launch a contest for ideas for tackling rubbish and other waste generated by space crew on long-range human space exploration missions, such as to the Moon or Mars.

Four astronauts can generate 2,500 kilograms of waste in a one-year mission.

Above:NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Expedition 30 flight engineer, is pictured among stowage bags in the Harmony node of the International Space Station. The bags, containing waste, will be transferred to the docked Progress 45 spacecraft for disposal. Credit: NASA

There is already an issue of waste material in space left over by earlier rockets, with between 16,000 and 20,000 pieces being tracked orbiting Earth.

Waste disposal methods on the International Space Station involve astronauts manually processing refuse by placing it into bags then loading it onto a designated vehicle for short term storage, which depending on the craft, returns the refuse to Earth or burns up in the atmosphere.

However, this disposal method will not be available for missions beyond low-Earth orbit.

READ MORE: Former Fife miner invents soluble bandages that could ease pain of millions

Mr McCormack said: Currently general waste on the international space station - packaging, wipes, everything - is put in bags and stored in a capsule.

The capsule is then released from the space station, the capsule enters the Earths atmosphere and burns up on entry like a meteor would.

This is planned so the burn up happens above the Pacific Ocean and at times the rubbish is taken away by a visiting commercial vehicle that returns to Earth.

This system works for low Earth orbit but not for deep space travel. In deep space there will not be the luxury of visiting commercial vehicles to take the rubbish away."

Above: NASA: 'We are going to the Moon by 2024.' Credit: NASA

Mr McCormacksaid:In deep space if you released a waste capsule it would not be pulled back into the Earths atmosphere and burn up, it would travel at dangerously high speeds and pollute space.

NASA has reached out to innovators and industry to develop a system that could solve this problem of disposal of waste in deep space. This is a major challenge.

McCormack Innovation, who have developed the worlds first dissolving wipe, could see opportunity to introduce items of every day use in space travel that would dissolve after use.

The biomedical tested wipe is one. Dissolving toilet paper and other packaging is also included.

READ MORE: Watch: Former Fife miner's soluble bandage 'could revolutionise trauma and burns care'

The company agreed the link-up after a meeting with a team of space academics led by Professor Max Vasile and Dr Monica Oliveira.

Mr McCormack said: It will be an honour for McCormack Innovation to work alongside this team on this project of dissolving waste in space, and making a very important contribution to deep space travel. Again, first-class innovation coming out Scotland.

Dr Oliveira, senior lecturer in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said: Waste management is a great challenge in space, especially in the context of long-duration space missions. Any innovative solutions that help to mitigate issues of waste are key for sustainable long-duration human space travel.

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Former miner turned inventor in link-up with space centre to tackle waste in space - HeraldScotland

Space travel barrier removed as docs freeze and revive human for first time – Daily Star

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Journeys to other star systems will forever be out of reach unless a massive breakthrough in physics makes faster-than-light travel a reality, or a breakthrough in medicine makes suspended animation possible.Now, at least, one of those things has happened.

Samuel Tisherman, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the leader of a team that has successfully put a human being in suspended animation.

Describing the successful operation as a little surreal, Professor Tisherman told New Scientist how he removed the patients blood and replaced with ice-cold saline solution.

The patient, technically dead at this point, was removed from the cooling system and taken to an operating theatre for a two-hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored and being warmed to the normal temperature of 37C.

Prof Tisherman says he will be producing a full account of the procedure in a scientific paper in the new year.

He says that his focus is on pausing life long enough to perform emergency surgery rather than sending astronauts on interstellar journeys.

He tells the story of a young man who was stabbed over a row in a bowling alley: He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly he was dead. We could have saved him if wed had enough time.

His suspended animation technique is intended as a way of securing that extra time.

I want to make clear that were not trying to send people off to Saturn, he says. Were trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.

But inevitably space agencies such as NASA and the ESA as well as more ambitious tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will be taken a keen interest in Prof Tishermans paper when it is published in 2020.

A journey to Saturn can take up to seven years, so keeping the crew on ice might be easier than keeping them healthy and happy for all that time.

While Prof Tisherman has released this news of one successful trial, there is no word on how many previous attempts were made with critical patients before this.

The experiment was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA waived the usual requirement for patient consent in this case as the patient could not be saved by any other means.

At the moment, the biggest obstacle to reliable animation of a patient who has been super-cooled in this way is cell damage as they are re-warmed so-called reperfusion injuries.

Prof Tisherman says that there may be a drug, or cocktail of drugs, that can help minimise these injuries but, he says: but we havent identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet.

Once he has, whether or not he wants to send a refrigerated crew to Saturn, its likely that sooner or later thats exactly what will happen.

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Space travel barrier removed as docs freeze and revive human for first time - Daily Star

This Is How Putting Astronauts Into Hibernation Could Work on a Mission to Mars – Newsweek

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Putting astronauts into a state of suspended animation during long distance space travel is a staple of science fiction. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has investigated how such a technologyif it existed in real lifecould work and what its impacts would be on the designs of potential missions to Mars or other worlds.

The key finding of this investigation is that missions which made use of human hibernation would require much less physical space than normal, according to the space agency's Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) and SciSpacE team.

The research assessed human hibernation on a hypothetical mission to send six humans to Mars and back over five years.

"We worked on adjusting the architecture of the spacecraft, its logistics, protection against radiation, power consumption and overall mission design," Robin Biesbroek from the CDF said in a statement.

"We looked at how an astronaut team could be best put into hibernation, what to do in case of emergencies, how to handle human safety and even what impact hibernation would have on the psychology of the team. Finally we created an initial sketch of the habitat architecture and created a roadmap to achieve a validated approach to hibernate humans to Mars within 20 years," he said.

The CDF assumed that the astronauts would be induced into hibernation using drugs while inside small individual "soft-shell pods." The pods would be darkened and cooled to keep the bodies of the astronauts at a low temperature for most of the 180-day journey from Earth to Mars.

Before going into hibernation, the crew would have to put on extra body fatjust like hibernating animals do in the wild. Furthermore, the astronauts would go through a 21-day recuperation period after waking up in order to give their bodies time to recover.

An added bonus of human hibernation is that mission designers may be able to better protect astronauts from harmful radiationone of the main hazards of deep space travel. The crew would spend most of the mission in their pods, which could be protected by special shielding.

However, one challenge in any mission involving human hibernation, the CDF said, is that it would have to be largely automated and equipped with an artificial intelligence system that could deal with technical issues until the crew can be revived.

Importantly, the study found that hibernation technology may enable mission designers to reduce spacecraft mass by a third because the crew quarters would no longer be necessary, not to mention several tons of consumable items. The hibernation pods would double as cabins while the astronauts are awake.

"For a while now hibernation has been proposed as a game-changing tool for human space travel," Jennifer Ngo-Anh from the SciSpacE team said in a statement. "If we were able to reduce an astronaut's basic metabolic rate by 75 percentsimilar to what we can observe in nature with large hibernating animals such as certain bearswe could end up with substantial mass and cost savings, making long-duration exploration missions more feasible."

It is important to note that currently there is no proven technology available that can place humans into a hibernation-like state. However, this is not to say that it is beyond the realms of possibility in the future.

"The basic idea of putting astronauts into long-duration hibernation is actually not so crazy: a broadly comparable method has been tested and applied as therapy in critical care trauma patients and those due to undergo major surgeries for more than two decades," Ngo-Anh said.

"Most major medical centers have protocols for inducing hypothermia in patients to reduce their metabolism to basically gain time, keeping patients in a better shape than they otherwise would be. We aim to build on this in future, by researching the brain pathways that are activated or blocked during initiation of hibernation, starting with animals and proceeding to people," she said.

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This Is How Putting Astronauts Into Hibernation Could Work on a Mission to Mars - Newsweek

Catastrophic Theatre Produces A Tale Of Faith And Survival For The Holidays, Plus Composer Jimmy Lpez Bellido Writes A Musical Love Letter To NASA -…

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In this episode of the podcast Unwrap Your Candies Now, Ernie Manouse interviews Jeff Miller (director) and Tamarie Cooper (cast member and co-artistic director) about Baby Screams Miracle by Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Clare Barron. Described as a funny, moving tale of faith and survival, the show is being produced by The Catastrophic Theatre from November 22 December 15 at MATCH.

Then, Catherine Lu chats with Houston Symphony Composer-in-Residence Jimmy Lpez Bellido about his World Premiere Symphony No. 2, Ad Astra, dedicated to NASA and inspired by space travel. A culmination of his three-year residency, the piece is also a kind of love letter to Houston. Performances are December 5, 7 and 8 at Jones Hall.

Share your comments, questions and ideas at UYCN@houstonpublicmedia.org.

Music used: Invention No. 13 by J.S. Bach performed by Andrs Schiff and Symphony No. 2, Ad Astra by Jimmy Lpez Bellido (rehearsal excerpts) performed by the Houston Symphony, Music Director Andrs Orozco-Estrada

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Catastrophic Theatre Produces A Tale Of Faith And Survival For The Holidays, Plus Composer Jimmy Lpez Bellido Writes A Musical Love Letter To NASA -...

What If Space-Time Were ‘Chunky’? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality. – Livescience.com

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Is our fundamental reality continuous or is it chopped up into tiny, discrete bits?

Asked another way, is space-time smooth or chunky? The question cuts to the heart of the most fundamental theories of physics, linking together the way space and time intersect with the material of our everyday existence.

However, experimentally testing the nature of space and time has been impossible, because of the extreme energies needed to probe such tiny scales in the universe. That is until now. A team of astronomers has proposed an ambitious new plan to use a fleet of tiny spacecraft to detect subtle changes in the speed of light, a hallmark of some of the most mind-bending theories of the cosmos. If space and time are indeed broken up into little bits, the research could pave the way for a completely new understanding of reality.

Related: The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics

The question of "what is space and time?" goes back thousands of years, and our modern understanding rests on two strangely incompatible pillars: quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity.

In general relativity, space and time are woven together into the unified fabric of space-time, the four-dimensional stage that underpins our universe. This space-time is continuous, which means that there are no gaps anywhere; it's all a smooth texture. Space-time isn't just a platform for us to act our parts, however; it's also a player too: The bending and warping of space-time gives us our experience of gravity.

Related: 8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life

In the opposite corner, a set of rules called quantum mechanics governs the interactions of the very tiny things in the universe. Quantum mechanics rests on the idea that not much of our everyday experience is smooth and continuous, but chunky. In other words, it's quantized. Energy, momentum, spin and so many other properties of matter come in only discrete little packets.

What's more, quantum mechanics itself also splits itself into two camps. On one hand, we have the familiar particles of our everyday existence, such as electrons and protons, that interact and do other interesting things. These are obviously very chunky, as they're discrete "things." On the other hand, we have the quantum fields. In the subatomic world, each kind of particle has its own field that spreads throughout space-time; when we think of particles, we think of little vibrations in their fields, which in turn interact with other particles, and do some other interesting things. The fields are understandably very smooth.

So, we have some smooth pictures of our universe and some chunky ones. When it comes to space-time itself, we can easily imagine extending the concepts of quantum mechanics all the way to their logical conclusion, and ruling that space and time are discrete: The very fabric of reality is divided up like pixels on a computer screen, and what we experience as smooth, continuous movement is nothing but a grid of discrete pixels at the tiniest of scales.

Related: The Illusion of Time: What's Real?

Many theories of merging together quantum mechanics and general relativity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, predict some form of discrete space-time (although the precise predictions, interpretations and implications of that chunkiness are still poorly understood). If we could find evidence for discrete space-time, it would not only completely rewrite our understanding of reality, but also open the door to a revolution in physics.

This discreteness can reveal itself only in the most subtle ways; otherwise we would've spotted it by now. Various theories have predicted that if space-time were indeed chunky, then the speed of light may not be entirely constant it may shift ever so slightly depending on the energy of that light. Higher energy light has a shorter wavelength, and when the wavelength becomes small enough, it can "see" the chunkiness of spacetime. Imagine walking down sidewalk: with big feet you don't notice any small cracks or bumps, but if you had microscopic feet you would trip over every little imperfection, slowing you down. But this shift is incredibly tiny; if space-time is discrete, it's on a scale more than a billion times smaller than what we can currently probe in our most powerful experiments.

Enter GrailQuest: the Gamma-ray Astronomy International Laboratory for Quantum Exploration of Space-Time. A team of astronomers submitted a proposal for this mission in response to a call for new space-time-hunting ideas from the European Space Agency (ESA). Their proposal is detailed in the arXiv database, meaning that it hasn't yet been reviewed by peers in the field.

Here's the scoop: In order to see if the speed of light changes with different energies, we need to collect a huge amount of the highest-energy light in the universe, and GrailQuest hopes to do just that.

GrailQuest consists of a fleet of small, simple spacecraft (the exact number varies, from just a few dozen if the satellites are larger to well over a few thousand if they're smaller) to constantly monitor the sky for gamma-ray bursts. These are some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Like their name suggests, these bursts release copious amounts of high-energy photons, a.k.a. gamma rays. These gamma rays travel across billions of years before reaching the fleet of spacecraft, which record the energy of the gamma rays and the differences in timings as the burst washes over the fleet.

With enough accuracy, GrailQuest might be able to reveal if space-time is discrete. At least, it has the right setup: It's examining the highest-energy light (which is affected the most in theories that predict that space-time is chunky); the gamma rays have been traveling for billions of light-years (allowing the effect to build up over time); and the spacecraft are simple enough to produce en masse (so the entire fleet can see as many events as possible, all across the sky).

How would our conceptions of reality change if GrailQuest were to find evidence for the discreteness of space-time? It's impossible to say our current theories are all over the map when it comes to implications. But no matter what, we're going to have to wait. This round of ESA proposals is for launches sometime between 2035 and 2050. While we're waiting, we can debate if the time elapsed between now and then is fundamentally smooth or chunky.

Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

Originally published on Live Science.

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What If Space-Time Were 'Chunky'? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality. - Livescience.com

Nasa could create GM astronauts designed to be super-strong and feel no pain and send them to Mars – The Sun

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AS NASA gears up to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s, scientists are brewing new ways to help them survive the trip.

One wacky option is to modify the DNA of space explorers to make them super strong and cancer or pain resistant using controversial gene-editing technology.

Much like Sam Worthington in the 2018 Sci-Fi flick The Titan, astronauts would be engineered to deal with the toll of long-distance space travel.

Nasa-backed researchers have already begun to investigate the possibility, reports The Times.

One experiment at Cornell University in New York is looking at taking a gene from a tiny but hardy creature and inserting it into humans.

The tardigrade, also known as the water bear, is smaller than a grain of table salt with a remarkable resistance to cosmic radiation.

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Scientists hope to take the gene that grants them this resistance and implant it into astronauts to help them survive the cancer-causing cosmic rays they'll face during space missions.

"We'll protect the astronauts physically, we'll protect them pharmacologically," Dr Christopher Mason, lead scientists on the project, told The Times.

"But could we protect them genetically, with armour on the inside of their cells?"

The technology faces huge ethical and legal hurdles, and remains decades away from ever being implemented.

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It involves taking the super-gene in question and using a virus to permanently weave it into a person's DNA.

Scientists still have no idea what the long-term effects such a change might have on someone's mental and physical health.

More than 40 other genes that could benefit astronauts have been tracked down by Harvard University geneticist Professor George Church.

One, found in Tibetans, allows them to function at the top of mountains, where there is very little oxygen.

What is gene editing?

Here's what you need to know...

Transferred to astronauts, the trait could help them survive on a limited supply of the gas.

Other genes promise to boost memory and strength, or make someone less sensitive to pain or anxiety.

One, known as the ABC11 gene, is linked with sweat that doesn't smell as bad, potentially benefiting space explorers in cramped spaces.

Gene scientists Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, told The Timesthat the tardigrade DNA idea was "an interesting one, but I suspect rather premature".

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Each change to human DNA would need to go through lengthy assessments for safety and efficacy, he added.

"And there is a question as to who would volunteer to have probably permanent changes made to their [DNA]," Professor Lovell-Badge said.

"It's a type of enhancement which could be considered to be for social rather than personal gain."

Even those behind the experiment admit it's a long way off from a fully-fledged Nasa programme.

How long does it take to get to Mars?

It's not that short of a trip...

"I don't have any plans of having engineered astronauts in the next one to two decades," lead scientist Dr Mason told an audience at a US space conference last month.

Speaking at the 8th Human Genetics in NYC Conference, he said he hoped to have confirmed the modification worked on humans some time in the next two decades.

"If we have another 20 years of pure discovery and mapping and functional validation of what we think we know, maybe by 20 years from now, I'm hoping we could be at the stage where we would be able to say we can make a human that could be better surviving on Mars," Dr Mason said.

In other space news, a bug expert claimed this week that he'd found evidence of insects living on Mars.

A crackpot conspiracy theorist said he'd dug up evidence of asarcophagus on the Red Planet in Nasa photos published in August.

ROCKY HORROR Huge 500-foot asteroid to skim past Earth at 38,000mph on MONDAY, Nasa reveals

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU Hungarian scientists may have found a fifth force of nature

HOT STUFF Giant 50,000C 'Wall of Fire' surrounding our Solar System discovered by Nasa

SPACED OUT Nasa finds astronaut blood moving BACKWARDS on ISS and it could be deadly

NOT SO COOL Botched Elon Musk spaceship test buries launch complex in -196C liquid nitrogen

BIBLICAL FIND Real Noah's Ark 'buried in Turkey' and experts say they can prove it exists

And, Nasa recently managed to record the incredible sound of a "Marsquake" -which you can listen to here.

What do you think of the bonkers GM plan? Let us know in the comments!

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Nasa could create GM astronauts designed to be super-strong and feel no pain and send them to Mars - The Sun

Exclusive Star Citizen Goes to ACTUAL SPACE with MyRadar! – Wccftech

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A couple of years ago, I brought you guys news that Star Citizen was collaborating with a company called MyRadar that makes a weather app for phones. Its a terrestrial weather app but has a twist. The CEO of MyRadar, Andy Green also happens to be a Star Citizen backer so he decided to add some of the in game planets into MyRadar and this partnership with Cloud Imperium Games was announced 2 years ago at CitizenCon.

Well, that collaboration has continued, and today we bring you exclusive news of its latest evolution, an evolution which will see MyRadar and Star Citizen going to space properly! MyRadar is launching a satellite into space and in a crazy twist, the Star Citizen backer decided that he would put the Star Citizen logo on the satellite itself so that it will make Star Citizen the first videogame in space! This is no glory project and as you'll see in the video and interview below, has real world implications that will help real people.

Star Citizen Introduces Theatres of War Game Mode Foot, Vehicles and Space Combat

This news obviously comes ahead of this years CitizenCon event tomorrow which well be covering. Lets just say that a weather app with in game weather may just prove useful in future versions if some of the rumours circulating are to be believed...

For now though, I got to ask Andy Green a few questions about the satellite that MyRadar will be launching. They've made a video talking a bit about it and from the (admittedly little) I understand about real world space and satellites this sounds amazing. Check the video out here:

Wccftech: Space! It's amazing, what the Star Citizen community is doing and launching a satellite is unbelievable! Given MyRadar is a weather app, can I assume that the satellite will be for giving you guys more granular data to use within the app?

Andy Green: This first satellite is an introductory satellite that will be a testbed for the aviation side of our business; it will listen to aircraft tracking signals from space and transmit them back down to the ground. This is incredibly helpful as present day infrastructure requires an aircraft to be in range of a ground-based tracking station in order to receive timely information on it. Receiving the signals from space will allow us to track trans-oceanic aircraft, which would have been a tremendous help locating some high-profile missing aircraft tragedies in the last decade.

Our second satellite, already in development, will be our testbed for weather-related sensing. It will look down upon the earth using a patent-pending imaging technique, and the data we get back from the observations will help with everything from hurricane predictions to agricultural analysis.

Star Citizen Introduces microTech Planet and Anvil Carrack, Pisces Ships

W: How did the idea to launch your own satellite first come about? I can't imagine that many other weather companies have their own satellites.

AG: Essentially, we saw a gap in the ability to provide some of the data we're about to start collecting with the new satellites, and with launch costs coming down and our in-house technical capabilities up to the challenge, we decided to move ahead and launch our own. The aircraft tracking data will be able to provide an important safety service that frankly should have been in place long ago, and the weather/environmental observation satellite with its unique image processing will give us some incredible insight that no one else is able to provide. We'll be able to provide all of this data through the MyRadar app to the millions of people who use it every day, including the ability to task satellites to take custom imagery.

W: What type of satellite is it? Who makes it? What company will launch it?

AG: We are engineering and building both satellites in-house. The first satellite is a pocket-cube satellite. It'll be launching into space very shortly on the Rocket Labs "We're Running Out of Fingers" mission, with our launch partner Alba Orbital. The launch window opens this month on November 28th

W: I assume given it's a satellite, it'll have lots of sensing equipment in it, which ship would you most closely associate it with from Star Citizen? The Carrack perhaps as an explorer?

AG: Given its smaller size and specific mission, I think I'd most closely associate it with the Terrapin! It's designed to hide out quietly in space, slipping "under the radar", and its main mission is to track other vehicles and relay that data back to command

W: Star Citizen stuff, what specific artwork will be going up on the satellite? Will it be on the outside? Inside? Both?

AG: The cubesat will have the Star Citizen logo emblazoned on the exterior of one size of the satellite. Check out this promo video we made where you can see it!

W: Do you REALLY need a satellite for myradar or is this just your way of getting in to space while we wait for affordable commercial space travel??

AG: As the initial satellites are just the testbeds, their early-stage purpose is to establish the workflow and proof of concepts, but both of them will still be fully functional. It's the intention to launch a constellation of the satellites to allow us more global coverage for both services each satellite was designed to address.

In the case of the aircraft tracker (the one launching soon), this is part of ACME AtronOmatic, LLC's original core business (ACME is the parent company of the MyRadar app). MyRadar currently provides aircraft tracking services as well as arrival and departure delay information, gate information, and other flight details that can assist both the casual traveler and aircraft pilots/operators.

In the case of the weather/environmental satellite, the new types of imagery we'll be able to collect will, among a plethora of other tasks, be able to look inside the eye wall of a hurricane with a 3D perspective, allowing us to get greater details on the intensity and temperatures at the center of these storms. This data can then in turn be used as inputs to existing forecast models to provide for greater accuracy in tracking these deadly storms. The satellite will also be equipped with a visual-spectrum camera, so we'll be able provide both the custom data imaging and regular visual imaging of the earth below, and we'll be able to offer these on-demand to users right from the app.

Check out the MyRadar app here:

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Exclusive Star Citizen Goes to ACTUAL SPACE with MyRadar! - Wccftech

The most incredible images of the International Space Station as it turns 21 – Evening Standard

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In the 21 years since the launch of the International Space Station (ISS), 239 astronauts from 19 countries have visited.

This includes 151 Americans, 47 Russians, three Germans and just one Brit Timothy Peake.

Selected as an ESA astronaut in 2009, 47-year-old Peake graduated from basic astronaut training in 2010 before three years conducting further training and working as a communicator with the ISS prior to being assigned a long-duration mission in 2013.

The Chichester-born astronaut spent six months at the space station from December 15, 2015 to June 18, 2016. During this time Peake conducted a spacewalk to repair the Stations power supply, drove a rover across a simulated Mars terrain and ran the London marathon using the space stations treadmill.

NASA discovers 'mind boggling' oxygen fluctuations on Mars

Upon his arrival back to earth, Peake was awarded a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Queens 2016 Birthday Honours for services to space research and scientific education.

US President Ronald Reagan first directed NASA to build the ISS within the next 10 years in 1984 but it wasnt until 1998 that the first segment of the ISS launched, taking over 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble

Two years later, on November 2, 2000, American Commander Bill Shepherd, and Russian Flight Engineers Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to reside for several months in the station.

Expedition 1's crew, American Commander Bill Shepherd, and Russian Flight Engineers Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev (AFP/Getty Images)

There are currently five members on board the ISS: NASA astronaut Drew Morgan, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, plus the newest arrivals, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.

In June this year, NASA announced it will allow tourists to visit the ISS from 2020 at a price of $35,000 (27,100) per night. The space agency saidthere will be up to two private short astronaut missions per year and the tourists will be permitted to travel to the ISS for up to 30 days - the beginning of a new era of space tourism.

Click through the gallery above to see some of the most incredible images of the International Space Station from the past 21 years.

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The most incredible images of the International Space Station as it turns 21 - Evening Standard