SpaceX at it again. reusing Dragon to ISS

SpaceX's Dragon. Nasa.gov

Remember the last post about SpaceX?  Well they are at it again!

This time, SpaceX has propelled supplies to International space station on saturday.More so is that they used a verssel that has flown before.

The refurbished Dragon cargo capsule propeled into space annexed to a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:07 pm (2107 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

With a countdown made by NASA spokesman Mike Curie, the rocket blazed a steady vertical path into the clouds.

 

The last time this particular spaceship(Dragon) flew to space was in 2014.

The Dragon on present mission is packed with almost 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of science research, crew supplies and hardware and should arrive at the Monday(ISS time).

The supplies for special experiments include live mice to study the effects of osteoporosis and fruit flies for research on microgravity's impact on the heart.

The spacecraft is also loaded with solar panels and equipment to study neutron stars.

After about 10 minutes after launch, SpaceX successfully returned the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a controlled landing at Cape Canaveral.

The rocket powered its engines and guided itself down to Landing Zone One, not far from the launch site.

"The first stage is back," Curie said in a NASA live webcast, as video images showed the tall, narrow portion of the rocket touch down steadily in a cloud of smoke.

SpaceX said it marked the company's fifth successful landing on solid ground. Several of its Falcon 9 rockets have returned upright to platforms floating in the ocean.

The effort is part of SpaceX's push to make spaceflight cheaper by re-using costly rocket and spaceship components after each launch, rather than ditching them in the ocean.

The launch was the 100th from NASA's historic launch pad 39A, the starting point for the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a total of 82 shuttle flights.

A Self ventilating suit to keep you dry and cool while you perform exercise

 

                                                                                    

Images of garment prototype before exercise with flat ventilation flaps (F) and after exercise with curved ventilation flaps (G). Credit: Science Advances (2017). advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/5/e1601984

           

A team of MIT researchers has designed a breathable workout suit with ventilating flaps that open and close in response to an athlete's body heat and sweat. These flaps, which range from thumbnail- to finger-sized, are lined with live microbial cells that shrink and expand in response to changes in humidity. The cells act as tiny sensors and actuators, driving the flaps to open when an athlete works up a sweat, and pulling them closed when the body has cooled off.

The researchers have also fashioned a running shoe with an inner layer of similar cell-lined flaps to air out and wick away moisture. Details of both designs are published today in Science Advances.
Why use live cells in responsive fabrics? The researchers say that moisture-sensitive cells require no additional elements to sense and respond to humidity. The microbial cells they have used are also proven to be safe to touch and even consume. What's more, with new genetic engineering tools available today, cells can be prepared quickly and in vast quantities, to express multiple functionalities in addition to moisture response.
To demonstrate this last point, the researchers engineered moisture-sensitive cells to not only pull flaps open but also light up in response to humid conditions.
"We can combine our cells with genetic tools to introduce other functionalities into these living cells," says Wen Wang, the paper's lead author and a former research scientist in MIT's Media Lab and Department of Chemical Engineering. "We use fluorescence as an example, and this can let people know you are running in the dark. In the future we can combine odor-releasing functionalities through genetic engineering. So maybe after going to the gym, the shirt can release a nice-smelling odor."
Wang's co-authors include 14 researchers from MIT, specializing in fields including mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, architecture, biological engineering, and fashion design, as well as researchers from New Balance Athletics. Wang co-led the project, dubbed bioLogic, with former graduate student Lining Yao as part of MIT's Tangible Media group, led by Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.
Shape-shifting cells
In nature, biologists have observed that living things and their components, from pine cone scales to microbial cells and even specific proteins, can change their structures or volumes when there is a change in humidity. The MIT team hypothesized that natural shape-shifters such as yeast, bacteria, and other microbial cells might be used as building blocks to construct moisture-responsive fabrics.

"These cells are so strong that they can induce bending of the substrate they are coated on," Wang says.
The researchers first worked with the most common nonpathogenic strain of E. coli, which was found to swell and shrink in response to changing humidity. They further engineered the cells to express green fluorescent protein, enabling the cell to glow when it senses humid conditions.
They then used a cell-printing method they had previously developed to print E. coli onto sheets of rough, natural latex.
The team printed parallel lines of E. coli cells onto sheets of latex, creating two-layer structures, and exposed the fabric to changing moisture conditions. When the fabric was placed on a hot plate to dry, the cells began to shrink, causing the overlying latex layer to curl up. When the fabric was then exposed to steam, the cells began to glow and expand, causing the latex flatten out. After undergoing 100 such dry/wet cycles, Wang says the fabric experienced "no dramatic degradation" in either its cell layer or its overall performance.
No sweat
The researchers worked the biofabric into a wearable garment, designing a running suit with cell-lined latex flaps patterned across the suit's back. They tailored the size of each flap, as well as the degree to which they open, based on previously published maps of where the body produces heat and sweat.
"People may think heat and sweat are the same, but in fact, some areas like the lower spine produce lots of sweat but not much heat," Yao says. "We redesigned the garment using a fusion of heat and sweat maps to, for example, make flaps bigger where the body generates more heat."
Support frames underneath each flap keep the fabric's inner cell layer from directly touching the skin, while at the same time, the cells are able to sense and react to humidity changes in the air lying just over the skin. In trials to test the running suit, study participants donned the garment and worked out on exercise treadmills and bicycles while researchers monitored their temperature and humidity using small sensors positioned across their backs.
After five minutes of exercise, the suit's flaps started opening up, right around the time when participants reported feeling warm and sweaty. According to sensor readings, the flaps effectively removed sweat from the body and lowered skin temperature, more so than when participants wore a similar running suit with nonfunctional flaps.
When Wang tried on the suit herself, she found that the flaps created a welcome sensation. After pedaling hard for a few minutes, Wang recalls that "it felt like I was wearing an air conditioner on my back."
Ventilated running shoes
The team also integrated the moisture-responsive fabric into a rough prototype of a running shoe. Where the bottom of the foot touches the sole of the shoe, the researchers sewed multiple flaps, curved downward, with the cell-lined layer facing toward—though not touching—a runner's foot. They again designed the size and position of the flaps based on heat and sweat maps of the foot.
"In the beginning, we thought of making the flaps on top of the shoe, but we found people don't normally sweat on top of their feet," Wang says. "But they sweat a lot on the bottom of their feet, which can lead to diseases like warts. So we thought, is it possible to keep your feet dry and avoid those diseases?"
As with the workout suit, the flaps on the running shoe opened and lit up when researchers increased the surrounding humidity; in dry conditions the flaps faded and closed.
Going forward, the team is looking to collaborate with sportswear companies to commercialize their designs, and is also exploring other uses, including moisture-responsive curtains, lampshades, and bedsheets.
"We are also interested in rethinking packaging," Wang says. "The concept of a second skin would suggest a new genre for responsive packaging."
"This work is an example of harnessing the power of biology to design new materials and devices and achieve new functions," says Xuanhe Zhao, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a co-author on the paper. "We believe this new field of 'living' materials and devices will find important applications at the interface between engineering and biological systems."

Tumor suppressor key in maintaining stem cell status in muscle

A gene known to suppress tumor formation in a broad range of tissues plays a key role in keeping stem cells in muscles dormant until needed, a finding that may have implications for both human health and animal production, according to a Purdue University study.

Shihuan Kuang, professor of animal sciences, and Feng Yue, a postdoctoral researcher in Kuang's lab, reported their findings in two papers published in the journals Cell Reports and Nature Communications. The results suggest modifying expression of the PTEN gene could one day play a role in increasing muscle mass in agricultural animals and improve therapies for muscle injuries in humans.
Muscle stem cells, called satellite cells, normally sit in a quiescent, or dormant, state until called upon to build muscle or repair a damaged muscle. Inability to maintain the quiescence would lead to a loss of satellite cells. As humans age, the number of satellite cells gradually declines and the remaining cells become less effective in regenerating muscles, resulting in muscle loss – a condition called sarcopenia.
Kuang and Yue, in the Nature Communications paper, explored the role tumor-suppressor gene PTEN plays in satellite cells. The PTEN gene encodes a protein that suppresses the growth signaling, thereby, limiting the growth of fast-growing tumor cells. Mutation of the PTEN gene is associated with many types of cancers, but how the gene functions in muscle stem cells is unknown.
To understand the function of a gene, the authors first wanted to know how the gene is expressed.
"This gene is highly expressed in the satellite cells when the cells are in the quiescent state. When they become differentiated, the PTEN level reduces," Yue said.
By knocking out the PTEN gene in resting satellite cells, the researchers found that satellite cells quickly differentiate and become muscle cells. So PTEN plays an essential role in keeping satellite cells in their quiescent state.
"You no longer have the stem cells once you knock out the gene," Kuang said.
In their Cell Reports paper, Kuang and Yue took a step further to examine PTEN function in proliferating stem cells. This time, they knocked out PTEN in embryonic progenitor cells, those that will later become muscle in the mouse. They found that as the mouse grew, muscle mass increased significantly—by as much as 40 percent in some muscles—over that of a normal mouse.
"That would be significant in an animal production point of view," Kuang said.
The increased muscle came with a cost, however. Besides creating muscle, those progenitor cells create satellite cells. Without PTEN, not only fewer satellite cells were created, but the resulting satellite cells cannot maintain dormancy, leading to an accelerated rate of depletion during aging.
The faster depletion of satellite cells during aging wouldn't matter much in an animal production scenario, Kuang said. Beef cattle, for example, are harvested before they age. The increase in muscle mass, however, would be a significant advantage in production efficiency.
The findings may lead to improvement in human health, the authors said. The ability to control the expression of PTEN could lead to therapies for quicker healing of muscle injuries.
"If you want to quickly boost up the stem cells to repair something, you need to suppress PTEN," Kuang said. "After that, you'd need to increase PTEN to return the cells back to quiescent state. If we could do that, you would suspect that the muscle would repair more quickly."
Knowing that PTEN also suppresses tumors in many types of tissues, the authors noted that the elimination of the gene did not cause tumor formation in the muscle cells they studied. That suggests regulation of PTEN could be a feasible method for improving human health and animal agriculture.

Credit : Brian Wallheimer

Blitab Technology :createing tablet for the blind and visually impaired

Blitab, a tablet with a Braille interface, looks like a promising step up for blind and low vision people who want to be part of the educational, working and entertainment worlds of digital life.

A video of the Blitab Technology founder, Kristina Tsvetanova, said the idea for such a tablet came to her during her studies as an industrial engineer. At the time, a blind colleague of hers asked her to sign him for an online course and a question nagged her: How could technology help him better?
Worldwide, she said, there are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people.
She was aware that in general blind and low vision people were coping with old, bulky technology, contributing to low literacy rates among blind children. She and her team have been wanting to change that.
There was ample room for improvements. The conventional interfaces for the blind, she said, have been slow and expensive. She said the keyboard can range from about $5000 to $8000. Also, she said, they are limited to what the blind person can read, just a few words at a time. Imagine, she said, reading Moby Dick, five words at a time.
They have engineered a tablet device with a 14-line Braille display on the top and a touch screen on the bottom.

Part of their technology involves a high performance membrane, and their press statement said the tablet uses smart micro fluids to develop small physical bubbles instead of a screen display.
They have produced a tactile tablet, she said, where people with sight loss can learn, work and play using that device.
The user can control the tablet with voice-over if the person wants to listen to an ebook or by pressing one button, dots will be activated on the screen and the surface of the screen will change.
Romain Dillet, in TechCrunch: "The magic happens when you press the button on the side of the device. The top half of the device turns into a Braille reader. You can load a document, a web page—anything really—and then read the content using Braille."
Tsvetanova told Dillet, "We're not excluding voice over; we combine both of these things." She said they offer both "the tactile experience and the voice over experience."

Rachel Metz reported in MIT Technology Review: "The Blitab's Braille display includes 14 rows, each made up of 23 cells with six dots per cell. Every cell can present one letter of the Braille alphabet. Underneath the grid are numerous layers of fluids and a special kind of membrane," she wrote.

Credit: Blitab

At heart, it's an Android tablet, Dillet said, "so it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and can run all sorts of Android apps."
Metz said that with eight hours of use per day, it's estimated to last for five days on one battery charge.
The tablet team have set a price to this device, at $500.
How they will proceed: First, she said they will sell directly from their web site, then scale through global distributors, and distribute to less developed world.
What's next? Dillet said in the Jan.6 article that "the team of 10 plans to ship the tablet in six months with pre-orders starting later this month."
Blitab Technology recently took first place in the Digital Wellbeing category of the 2016 EIT Digital Challenge. EIT Digital is described as a European open innovation organization. They seek to foster digital technology innovation and entrepreneurial talent.


credit ;Nancy Owano 

Second-generation stars identified, giving clues about their predecessors

The figure shows a sub-population of ancient stars, called Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor (CEMP) stars. These stars contain 100 to 1,000,000 times LESS iron (and other heavy elements) than the Sun, but 10 to 10,000 times MORE carbon, relative to iron. The unusual chemicalcompositions of these stars provides clues to their birth environments, and the nature of the stars in which the carbon formed. In the figure, A(C) is the absolute amount of carbon, while the horizontal axis represents the ratio of iron, relative to hydrogen, compared with the same ratio in the Sun. Credit: University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame astronomers have identified what they believe to be the second generation of stars, shedding light on the nature of the universe's first stars.

A subclass of carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars, the so-called CEMP-no stars, are ancient stars that have large amounts of carbon but little of the heavy metals (such as iron) common to later-generation stars. Massive first-generation stars made up of pure hydrogen and helium produced and ejected heavier elements by stellar winds during their lifetimes or when they exploded as supernovae. Those metals—anything heavier than helium, in astronomical parlance—polluted the nearby gas clouds from which new stars formed.
Jinmi Yoon, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics; Timothy Beers, the Notre Dame Chair in Astrophysics; and Vinicius Placco, a research professor at Notre Dame, along with their collaborators, show in findings published in the Astrophysics Journal this week that the lowest metallicity stars, the most chemically primitive, include large fractions of CEMP stars. The CEMP-no stars, which are also rich in nitrogen and oxygen, are likely the stars born out of hydrogen and helium gas clouds that were polluted by the elements produced by the universe's first stars.
"The CEMP-no stars we see today, at least many of them, were born shortly after the Big Bang, 13.5 billion years ago, out of almost completely unpolluted material," Yoon says. "These stars, located in the halo system of our galaxy, are true second-generation stars—born out of the nucleosynthesis products of the very first stars."
Beers says it's unlikely that any of the universe's first stars still exist, but much can be learned about them from detailed studies of the next generation of stars.
"We're analyzing the chemical products of the very first stars by looking at what was locked up by the second-generation stars," Beers says. "We can use this information to tell the story of how the first elements were formed, and determine the distribution of the masses of those first stars. If we know how their masses were distributed, we can model the process of how the first stars formed and evolved from the very beginning."
The authors used high-resolution spectroscopic data gathered by many astronomers to measure the chemical compositions of about 300 stars in the halo of the Milky Way. More and heavier elements form as later generations of stars continue to contribute additional metals, they say. As new generations of stars are born, they incorporate the metals produced by prior generations. Hence, the more heavy metals a star contains, the more recently it was born. Our sun, for example, is relatively young, with an age of only 4.5 billion years.
A companion paper, titled "Observational constraints on first-star nucleosynthesis. II. Spectroscopy of an ultra metal-poor CEMP-no star," of which Placco was the lead author, was also published in the same issue of the journal this week. The paper compares theoretical predictions for the chemical composition of zero-metallicity supernova models with a newly discovered CEMP-no star in the Milky Way galaxy.

Credit ; Brian Wallheimer 

A Swiss firm acquires Mars One private project

Mars One consists of two entities: the Dutch not-for-profit Mars One Foundation and a British public limited company Mars One Ventures

A British-Dutch project aiming to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2018 announced Friday that the shareholders of a Swiss financial services company have agreed a takeover bid.

"The acquisition is now only pending approval by the board of Mars One Ventures," the company said in a joint statement with InFin Innovative Finance AG, adding approval from the Mars board would come "as soon as possible."
"The takeover provides a solid path to funding the next steps of Mars One's mission to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars," the statement added.
Mars One consists of two entities: the Dutch not-for-profit Mars One Foundation and a British public limited company Mars One Ventures.
Mars One aims to establish a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet, and is currently "in the early mission concept phase," the company says, adding securing funding is one of its major challenges.
Some 200,000 hopefuls from 140 countries initially signed up for the Mars One project, which is to be partly funded by a television reality show about the endeavour.
Those have now been whittled down to just 100, out of which 24 will be selected for one-way trips to Mars due to start in 2026 after several unmanned missions have been completed.
"Once this deal is completed, we'll be in a much stronger financial position as we begin the next phase of our mission. Very exciting times," said Mars One chief executive Bas Lansdorp.
NASA is currently working on three Mars missions with the European Space Agency and plans to send another rover to Mars in 2020.
But NASA has no plans for a manned mission to Mars until the 2030s.