Month: April 2016

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British astronaut breaks space marathon record

Image: Tim Peake
British astronaut Tim Peake runs a marathon on the International Space Station’s COLBERT treadmill, with NASA astronaut Jeff Williams keeping watch. (Credit: ESA)

It’s amazing that British astronaut Tim Peake just broke the record for a space marathon, but it’s almost as amazing that there was a record to break.

“The run went better than expected,” Peake wrote today in a blog post after Sunday’s 3:35:21 performance on the International Space Station.

Peake put the traditional marathon distance of 26 miles and 385 yards on the odometer of the station’s COLBERT treadmill (also known as the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, with an acronym inspired by talk-show host Stephen Colbert). At the same time, about 38,000 other runners were taking on the London Marathon.

Peake’s time wasn’t close to London Marathon winner Eliud Kipchoge’s mark of 2:03:05, but it was an improvement on the only other marathon known to have been run in space.

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams’ 4:24 time still stands as the space marathon record for women, the Guinness Book of World Records announced in an online posting that also hailed Peake’s performance.

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Round-the-world solar plane lands in California

Image: Solar Impulse 2 plane and Golden Gate Bridge
Solar Impulse 2 flies over San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

Two and a half days after setting out from Hawaii, pilot Bertrand Piccard made a picture-postcard arrival in California tonight aboard the fuel-free Solar Impulse 2 airplane.

“Thank you for your welcome!” he told well-wishers who gathered at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, Calif.

The landing at 11:45 p.m. PT was marked by a bit of turbulence, but nothing Piccard couldn’t handle. “The touchdown is a little bit stronger than I would have expected,” he acknowledged.

This week’s 2,400-mile nonstop trek was the second-longest leg of what’s expected to be a 22,000-mile round-the-world flight, the first ever done with a solar-powered aircraft.

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BioViva makes progress in anti-aging quest

Image: Telomeres
Telomeres, highlighted in green, serve as protective DNA caps for the cell’s chromosomes. (Illustration courtesy of BioViva USA)

The way BioViva founder Elizabeth Parrish sees it, biological aging is a disease – and she’s willing to bet her life on a cure.

Last fall, the 45-year-old Seattle-area woman underwent an experimental type of gene therapy aimed at addressing some of the big effects of aging, including loss of muscle mass and a shortening of the chromosomes’ telomeres. The procedure was reportedly done in Colombia, to get around U.S. regulations.

The idea of having gene therapy done on yourself raised eyebrows in the biotech community, but Parrish was unfazed.

“I 100 percent believe that it will work, or else I wouldn’t have done it,” Parrish told GeekWire during an interview in February. “I didn’t try to flame out in glory. The research shows that it should absolutely work.”

Now BioViva is reporting that it does seem to work, at least on Parrish’s telomeres. And that’s likely to fuel a debate over the widening scientific quest for greater longevity – conducted not only by BioViva, but by other ventures such as Human Longevity Inc. This week, Human Longevity announced a 10-year deal with AstraZeneca to analyze 500,000 DNA samples for anti-aging clues.

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Q&A with ‘Game of Thrones’ master linguist

Image: Dothraki
Khal Drogo (played by Jason Momoa) gives someone an earful in Dothraki during an episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” (Credit: HBO)

This season’s plot twists on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” are closely guarded secrets, but you can bet you’ll be hearing a lot from the horse lords known as the Dothraki, who have Queen Daenerys in their power as the season begins. And you can bet that linguist David J. Peterson has a lot of say over what those horse lords say.

It was Peterson who constructed an entire language for the Dothraki, building on the smattering of words that appear in the George R.R. Martin novels. The 35-year-old also created a fictional High Valyrian language for the nobles on “Game of Thrones,” as well as the Mag Nuk tongue that a giant spoke last season (“Lokh kif rukh?” … which roughly translates into “What the [blank] are you looking at?”)

But that’s not all: On one of his websites, Dothraki.com, Peterson delights in laying out the detailed vocabulary and grammar for the languages he’s made up, explaining how those languages translate into HBO screen time, and putting on haiku contests for his fans.

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Hanford waste removal resumes after leak check

Workers install transfer lines in March to connect the equipment for transferring toxic waste from Hanford’s Tank AY-102 to another double-shell tank. (Credit: DOE)
Workers install transfer lines in March to connect the equipment for transferring toxic waste from Hanford’s Tank AY-102 to another double-shell tank. (Credit: DOE)

The U.S. Department of Energy says there’s no sign that toxic waste has leaked into the environment from a double-shell storage tank at Eastern Washington’s Hanford Site, and it has resumed operations to remove the waste from the tank.

Last weekend, an alarm was set off when sensors detected that the level of sludge had risen to about 8 inches deep in the space between the inner and outer walls of Tank AY-102.

Leaks in the inner wall of that underground tank have been causing problems for years, and last month, workers began pumping the mixed radioactive and chemically toxic waste out of the tank for storage in other double-shell tanks. Even before the procedure began, planners determined there was a chance that disturbing the material in AY-102 could cause more waste to leak into the space between the walls.

“We were prepared for this event,” Glyn Trenchard, the Energy Department’s deputy assistant manager for Hanford’s tank farms, said April 21 in a statement.

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How the ion drive will blaze a trail to asteroid

Image: Electric propulsion probe
An artist’s concept shows a space probe powered by ion thrusters. (Credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne)

Aerojet Rocketdyne’s next-generation ion thrusters could well make their debut in space during NASA’s robotic mission to grab a piece of an asteroid and bring it back to lunar orbit in the 2020s.

Earlier this week, NASA announced that Aerojet’s operation in Redmond, Wash., would be getting in on a 36-month, $67 milllion contract to develop a high-power electric propulsion system for future spacecraft. Today, NASA officials explained what the system would be used for.

“Basically, we’re building a whole new drive train for deep-space exploration,” Bryan Smith, director of NASA’s Space Flight Systems Directorate at Glenn Research Center in Ohio, told reporters.

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Solar Impulse is back on round-the-world trek

Image: Solar Impulse departure
Solar Impulse CEO Andre Borschberg flashes a thumbs-up as the Solar Impulse 2 airplane, piloted by Bertrand Piccard, rises from its runway in Hawaii. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

More than a year after its odyssey began, the Solar Impulse 2 airplane resumed its round-the-world, solar-powered trip in Hawaii today.

The ultra-lightweight plane took off at 6:18 a.m. Hawaii time (9:18 a.m. PT).

Solar Impulse began the trek in March 2015, taking off from Abu Dhabi and making stopovers in Oman, India, Myanmar, China and Japan. It got as far as Hawaii last July.

That five-day, five-night nonstop flight across the Pacific to Hawaii took a heavy toll on the plane’s batteries. The system overheated, and it took several months to make the repairs. The team also had to wait for reliably good weather to return.

Now the $150 million project has gotten off the ground again.

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Hubble celebrates 26 years with a bubbly view

Image: Bubble Nebula
The Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7653, is an emission nebula located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. (Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team)

It’s been 26 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit, but the Bubble Nebula picture unveiled to mark its birthday would make the great observatory feel like a kid again.

Anthropomorphizing inanimate objects is usually a bad idea: They hate that. But every April, the telescope’s science team releases an eye-opening picture as a birthday present. It’s not really for Hubble. It’s for its fans.

The telescope went into space aboard the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, went through a mission-saving series of optical repairs in 1993, had its final servicing mission in 2009, and is continuing to send back jaw-dropping pictures of the universe.

Hubble has previously captured views of the Bubble Nebula, also known as NGC 7635. But this time, the science team knit together four images from the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 to show off the bubble in its entirety.

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Solar Impulse gets set to return to the air

Image: Solar Impulse 2
The Solar Impulse 2 airplane is ready to fly from Hawaii to California. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

More than a year after the odyssey began, the Swiss-led Solar Impulse project is ready to resume its round-the-world, solar-powered airplane flight in Hawaii on April 21.

Takeoff is set for 3 p.m. GMT (8 a.m. PT, 5 a.m. Hawaii time), the team tweeted.

The ultra-lightweight Solar Impulse 2 airplane started out on its trek from Abu Dhabi in March 2015, made stopovers in Oman, India, Myanmar, China and Japan, and got as far as Hawaii last July.

The five-day, five-night nonstop flight across the Pacific to Hawaii took a heavy toll on the plane’s batteries, however. The system overheated, and it took several months to make the repairs. The team also had to wait for reliably good weather to return.

This week, the leaders of the $150 million effort said it was finally time to fly.

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Who’ll win ‘Game of Thrones’? Play the market

Image: Daenerys Targaryen
Emilia Clarke plays Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” (Credit: HBO)

She belongs to a political family who used to be in power. She’s leading the odds to take the reins of power again. And she’s a blonde.

No, we’re not talking about Hillary Clinton: The powerful woman in question is Daenerys Targaryen, the platinum-haired dragon queen on “Game of Thrones.”

The next season of the HBO sword-sex-and-sorcery series, based on George R.R. Martin’s novels, begins this weekend. This season, for the first time, the show goes beyond what Martin has written, which means what happens is anyone’s bet.

Literally.

PredictWise, the prediction market aggregator created by Microsoft Research’s David Rothschild, includes the outlook for “Game of Thrones” alongside its charts for the presidential campaign (which currently looks good for Clinton) and prognostications for hockey’s Stanley Cup (with the Washington Capitals as the top-ranked contender).

As of today, Daenerys is given the best chance of sitting the Iron Throne when the TV series ends, which seems likely to happen in 2018. PredictWise gives her a 28 percent chance, compared with 19 percent for Jon Snow (who is supposed to bedead, dead, dead, dead, dead) and 9 percent for wine-loving Tyrion Lannister (played by Emmy-winning Peter Dinklage).

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