Month: January 2016

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Elon Musk wows students at Hyperloop contest

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Elon Musk, the originator of the Hyperloop concept, addresses students. (Texas A&M photo)

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the top rating in the design phase of a SpaceX-sponsored contest to develop levitating cars for a Hyperloop rapid-transit test track. More than 20 other teams, including a student group from the University of Washington, were also cleared for this year’s big race.

The design weekend, conducted at Texas A&M University, marked the first winnowing of the field for the competition. More than 115 student engineering teams, representing 27 U.S. states and 20 countries, participated in the event.

The highlights included a talk by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx – and a surprise appearance by Elon Musk, the billionaire who heads SpaceX as well as the Tesla electric-car company.

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Google tests Internet drones at spaceport

Image: Titan drone
Titan Aerospace, which was acquired by Google in 2014, has been working on solar-powered drones that could provide high-speed Internet access from a high altitude. (Credit: Titan file)

The latest twist in the race to provide high-speed Internet access from above comes in the form of a report in The Guardian, to the effect that a hush-hush Google project called SkyBender is testing drones in the skies above Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The Guardian says it’s obtained documents laying out how high-altitude drones could relay gigabits of data per second, using millimeter-wave, phased-array transmissions. Jacques Christophe Rudell, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington, is quoted as saying that “the huge advantage is access to new spectrum, because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded.”

Millimeter-wave communications could open the way for 5G wireless service that’s 40 times faster than the current 4G LTE standard. But millimeter-wave signals have a relatively short range: According to The Guardian, Project SkyBender would have to use thousands of transceiver-equipped aerial vehicles to knit together the network.

The system is reportedly being tested using Aurora Flight Sciences’ Centaur optionally piloted aircraft as well as the solar-powered drones made by Titan Aerospace, which was acquired by Google in 2014 after a fling with Facebook.

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Science News

Startups bring new attitude to fusion quest

Image: Prototype fusion reactor
General Fusion is working on a prototype fusion reactor. (Credit: General Fusion)

The lab where a company called General Fusion is trying to spark an energy revolution looks like a cross between a hardware store and a mad scientist’s lair. Bins full of electrical gadgets are piled high against the walls. Capacitors recycled from a bygone experiment are stacked up like bottles in wine racks. Ten-foot-high contraptions bristle with tangled wires and shiny plumbing.

Michael Delage, General Fusion’s vice president for strategy and corporate development, makes sure nothing is turned on when he takes a visitor through the lab, which is tucked away in a bland industrial park near Vancouver. He’s worried about the voltage.

“If you get a broken wire or something like that, you get a very loud bang,” Delage explains.

His company and others are looking for a bang of a different sort: a smashing together of superhot hydrogen atoms that produces a net gain in energy. Nuclear fusion. It’s the same mass-to-energy reaction that’s behind the sun’s radiative power and the blast of a hydrogen bomb, but scaled down to a manageable level for power generation.

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GeekWire

Scientists trace link between the moon and rain

Image: TRMM
Readings from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, shown in this artist’s conception, provided evidence to support a link between lunar tides and rainfall patterns. (Credit: NASA)

When the moon is high in the sky, its gravitational pull warps the atmosphere enough to reduce rainfall ever so slightly. At least that’s the conclusion that researchers from the University of Washington reached after reviewing 15 years of detailed rainfall data.

The evidence is laid out in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Readings from the U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, collected between 1998 and 2012, suggest that rainfall is reduced by about 1 percent if the precipitation falls when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot.

Those findings are in sync with a 2010 study that laid out a similar link between phases of the moon and precipitation. Both papers show that lunar tides have an effect on the atmosphere.

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EMC2 revives its quest for nuclear fusion

Image: Plasma glow
Plasma glows inside EMC2 Fusion’s test device during a high-energy shot in 2013. (Credit: EMC2 Fusion)

After languishing in limbo for most of the last year, EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. says it’s back in business with an unorthodox concept for nuclear fusion power plants.

The concept is variously known as Polywell fusion, inertial electrostatic confinement or magnetic cusp confinement..

If anyone ever finds a way to harness fusion – the reaction that powers the sun – it could usher in an era of low-cost, plentiful, relatively clean energy. Lots of research teams are trying to do it, ranging from the international ITER consortium to private companies such as Lockheed Martin, Tri Alpha Energy, General Fusion, Helion Energy, LPPFusion and EMC2. So far, no one’s produced a net gain in energy.

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GeekWire

Boeing’s 737 MAX jet gets ‘wow’ reviews

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Boeing’s 737 MAX jet rises into the sky after taking off from Renton. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

Boeing’s newest breed of airplane, the fuel-efficient 737 MAX, took to the air for the first time on Jan. 29– and the first pilots to fly it had nothing but glowing reviews.

“This is our first airplane of our second century, and I just have to say, wow, this is an amazing machine,” chief test pilot Craig Bomben told reporters afterward at Seattle’s Boeing Field, in a reference to the Boeing Co.’s centennial this year.

737 MAX chief pilot Ed Wilson said that the nearly three-hour flight occasionally got “a little rough up there,” due to the rainy weather, but that the plane worked like a charm. “This airplane is ready to go to test. … We are off and running,” he said.

For this first flight, the jet was limited to traveling at a speed of no more than 250 knots, and rising no higher than 25,000 feet. “We just let it cruise,” Wilson said.

The latest incarnation of the long-lived 737 line will undergo months of testing and certification, leading up to the first deliveries to customers in 2017. Southwest Airlines, which is due to receive the first planes, tweeted its congratulations during the nearly three-hour maiden flight.

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Map reveals more water ice on Pluto

Image: Pluto water map
This false-color infrared image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows water ice concentrations on Pluto. The left image is the result of an initial analysis, and the right image has been reprocessed to account for mixtures with other types of ice. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

A color-coded map from NASA’s New Horizons mission shows where Pluto’s frozen water is concentrated, just in case we need to fill up our tanks on the way toAlpha Centauri or Planet Nine.

Water ice turns out to be more widespread on the dwarf planet than previously thought, the mission’s researchers reported today. They came to that conclusion after some sophisticated analysis of infrared imagery captured during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby last July 14.

Soon after the flyby, the mission team concluded that Pluto possessed mountains of water ice rising as high as 11,000 feet above the icy world’s surface. That conclusion was confirmed in follow-up studies based on the infrared data from the piano-sized probe’s Ralph/LEISA instrument.

LEISA’s survey mapped concentrations of water ice, but scientists figured out that the spectral readings could be thrown off if the frozen water was mixed in with frozen methane. When they modeled the contributions from other types of ice on Pluto’s surface, the resulting map showed wider stretches where water ice should be present.

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GeekWire

Elon Musk wants to go into space by 2021

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Elon Musk flashes a smile during the StartmeupHK Festival. (Credit: InvestHK via YouTube)

SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he has his heart set on going into space himself, perhaps in the next four or five years, and organize the first flights to Mars by 2025.

Musk’s travel timetable came out this week during Musk’s chat at the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong. The 44-year-old billionaire said he’d unveil his detailed plan for sending settlers to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. That means the SpaceX fans who have been buzzing about the Mars Colonial Transporter may have to just keep buzzing for another eight months or so.

The StartmeupHK talk was as wide-ranging as Musk’s interests, which take in electric cars (as Tesla Motors’ CEO), solar power (as Solar City’s chairman) and the potentialuses and misuses of artificial intelligence (as a backer of the OpenAI foundation). That’s all in addition to his focus on spaceflight and humanity’s interplanetary future.

Musk introduced yet another theme: the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head.

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Quake summit focuses on ‘the Really Big One’

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A simulation shows the kind of alert that would be generated by an 8.0 quake. (PNSN via YouTube)

The Pacific Northwest mega-quake known as “the Really Big One” may not be televised, but a White House summit focusing on earthquake preparedness will be streamed online next Tuesday.

The White House says new commitments to adopt an earthquake early-warning system for the United States will be announced at its Earthquake Resilience Summit, due to be live-streamed starting at 9:30 a.m. PT Tuesday.

Researchers from the University of Washington are heavily involved in developing such a system through the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, or PNSN – and in a series of tweets, PNSN said the system could go public as early as this year.

“A year depends on it being ready,” UW seismologist John Vidale, the network’s director, told GeekWire today. It’s not yet ready for prime time, but PNSN has shared a video showing how the ShakeAlert system could provide 28 seconds’ worth of advance warning about a magnitude-8 quake off the coast of Oregon.

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GeekWire

How robots are taking over the milking parlor

Image: Ron Austin and cow
Dairy farmer Ron Austin peers past the robot-controlled milking cups attached to a cow’s teats. The cows mostly decide when and how often they’re milked. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

OAKVILLE, Wash. – The Austin family’s cows seem a lot more contented since the robots took over the milking. It’s the humans, not the cows, who have had to make the biggest adjustments.

“At first, you’re a deer in the headlights,” Ron Austin recalled at the family farm, 90 miles southwest of Seattle. “You get a call from the robot, and you don’t know what to do. The cows learned faster than we did.”

The Austins and about a dozen other families in Washington state are part of a rising robot revolution in the dairy industry.

More than 30,000 autonomous milking machines have been sold around the world, and the trend is just now picking up speed in the United States. By 2025, as much as a quarter of the cows in North America could be milked by robots.

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