Month: July 2016

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Microsoft, UW raise the bar on DNA data storage

Image: DNA in test tube
The pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube can store incredible amounts of encoded digital data. (Credit: Tara Brown Photography / University of Washington)

Computer scientists from Microsoft and the University of Washington say they’ve set a new standard for DNA storage of digital data – but they acknowledge that the standard won’t last long.

For now, the bar is set at 200 megabytes. That’s how much data the researchers were able to encode in synthetic DNA pairings, and then correctly read out again. The encoded files included a high-definition music video by the band OK Go, titled “This Too Shall Pass”… the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages … the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg … and the Crop Trust’s global seed database.

But Karin Strauss, the principal Microsoft researcher on the project, acknowledges that so much more is theoretically possible.

“You could pack an exabyte of data in an inch cubed,” she told GeekWire. An exabyte is equal to 8 quintillion bits of information, which is much more information than is contained in the Library of Congress. (Exactly how much more? That’s a matter of debate.)

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Space station crew begins shakedown cruise

Image: Soyuz launch
Photographers line up to take pictures of Russia’s Soyuz rocket as it rises from its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

Three spacefliers from three countries – the United States, Russia and Japan – began a longer-than-usual flight to the International Space Station tonight in the first of a new breed of Russian Soyuz spaceships.

The Soyuz MS-01 mission lifted off at 6:36 p.m. PT from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin and Japan’s Takuya Onishi. NASA TV aired live launch coverage.

“We are feeling fine and everything is good onboard,” Ivanishin reported minutes after launch. The crew members exchanged fist bumps after reaching orbit.

This version of the Soyuz capsule is expected to be the last major upgrade of Russia’s space workhorse, a buglike craft that Russia plans to replace with its next-generation Federatsiya (Federation) spaceship sometime in the next decade.

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Washington creates drone industry council

Drone
An unmanned aerial vehicle flies through a forest. (Photo via Chase Jarvis)

Officials at the Washington State Department of Commerce are working to create an Unmanned Systems Industry Council to foster commercial drone operations in the state.

Plans for the council are being drawn up by John Thornquist, the director of the state’s Office of Aerospace; and Joseph Williams, state director of economic development for the information and communication technology sector. An organizing symposium will be held in Seattle on Sept. 19, Thornquist told GeekWire today.

“It’s going to be selective, for the businesses that are players in this industry,” he said. “It’s not just about the vehicles. It’s also about the tech companies that are behind it.”

Thornquist said the council would bring together state officials, industry representatives and academic experts on unmanned aircraft systems, also known as drones or UAS’s (or unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, for that matter). “The idea is to create a forum whose goal is to increase commercialization in this subsector of aerospace,” he said in an email.

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Mass extinction traced to a ‘one-two punch’

Image: Dying dinosaur
What led to the mass extinction that did in the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago? Scientists say volcano-caused climate change was a contributing cause. (Credit: Zina Deretsky / NSF)

Scientists generally agree that a catastrophic asteroid blast killed off the dinosaurs and most of Earth’s other species more than 65 million years ago, but newly described evidence supports the view that there was an additional culprit: rapid climate change brought on by volcanic eruptions.

The idea that the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction was a one-two punch isn’t new. For decades, scientists have debated how much the eruptions in the Indian subcontinent’s Deccan Traps contributed to the die-off, as opposed to the miles-wide space rock that hit the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

A study of ancient Antarctic fossil seashells, published online today in Nature Communications, turns the spotlight on the volcanoes’ effect.

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‘Juno, welcome to Jupiter’: Probe goes into orbit

Jupiter and Io
Jupiter and its moon Io show up in the last image taken by the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft before instruments were powered down for orbital insertion. The June 29 picture was taken from a distance of 3.3 million miles from Jupiter. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS)

NASA’s farthest-out solar-powered probe, the Juno spacecraft, successfully entered orbit around Jupiter tonight after a five-year, 1.8 billion-mile cruise through interplanetary space – and many hours’ worth of high tension back on Earth.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California had to program Juno’s computer in advance to execute a 35-minute rocket engine firing that put the probe in the correct orbit. If anything went wrong, Juno could have zoomed right past Jupiter, and flight controllers couldn’t have done anything about it.

It took 48 minutes for signals to travel from the spacecraft to Earth at the speed of light, which meant no one on Earth knew that the engine burn had even started until 13 minutes after it was over. Mission managers said the engine burn was just 1 second off what was planned.

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How a crash created many moons for Mars

Image: Mars smash-up
Artwork shows the collision of Mars with another celestial object. The scenario could have given rise to a debris disk, and eventually to Mars’ two present-day moons. (Copyright 2016 Labex UnivEarthS)

Are Mars’ two moons asteroids that were captured by the Red Planet’s gravitational field, or are they the result of an ancient smash-up? Astronomers have now laid out a series of computer simulations to argue in favor of the smash-up hypothesis, and the modeling suggests that Mars should have had a giant moon early in its history.

In a study published today by Nature Geoscience, the researchers say the giant moon would have been created out of the debris from the collision between Mars and another celestial object about a third of Mars’ size. The crash would have occurred sometime between 100 million and 800 million years after Mars’ formation.

Within about 5 million years after the crash, the big moon and a bevy of smaller moons would have broken up and fallen to the surface. But the simulations show that Phobos and Deimos, the two moons we know about today, would have survived all the tumult and ended up in their present-day orbits.

“The proposed scenario can explain why Mars has two small satellites instead of one large moon,” the scientists, led by Pascal Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, say in their paper. “Our model predicts that Phobos and Deimos are composed of a mixture of material from Mars and the impactor.”

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6 bright ideas for summer science books

Lumin-essence
Swirls of bioluminescent dinoflagellates, called Noctiluca scintillans, sparkle under the night sky in a quiet cove on Shaw Island. To learn more about how Floris van Breugel took this picture, visit ArtInNaturePhotography.com. (Copyright 2011 Floris van Breugel)

Summer reading is often light and airy, but those are qualities that don’t usually apply to science books. Now that school’s out, summer blockbusters are showing up in the theaters, and the vacation season has begun, here are a few recently published books that provide a completely different kind of “light reading,” plus some heavy-duty science to balance things out.

Get the full list on GeekWire.

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‘Voyage of Time’ trailer sends you on cosmic trip

Image: 'Voyage of Time' poster
The poster for “Voyage of Time” emphasizes the film’s cosmic subject matter. (Credit: IMAX)

The video trailer for “Voyage of Time” provides a trippy taste of a movie that’s been more than 30 years in the making – and tells the story of a universe that’s been billions of years in the making.

Make that two movies: The big-screen IMAX version of Terrence Malick’s film, narrated by Brad Pitt with a running time of 40 minutes, is due for release on Oct. 7. There’ll also be a 90-minute version narrated by Cate Blanchett.

What’s the difference? That’s not exactly clear. The longer version is described as a “poetic and provocative ride full of open questions,” while the IMAX experience “immerses audiences directly into the story of the universe and life itself.”

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New Horizons mission extended to Kuiper Belt

Image: New Horizons
Artwork shows New Horizons flying by a Kuiper Belt object known as 2014 MU69. (Credit: NASA)

Almost a year after New Horizons’ unprecedented flyby of Pluto, NASA has given the official go-ahead for the probe to fly past another icy object in the Kuiper Belt in 2019.

At the same time, the space agency decided to keep the Dawn spacecraft in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, rather than sending it out to another asteroid known as Adeona.

The decisions are part of NASA’s process for extending its planetary missions into the 2017-2018 time frame.

New Horizons’ extension means that mission operations will be supported as the piano-sized probe makes its way toward a Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69. The object was detected in 2014 during a Hubble Space Telescope search for post-Pluto targets that could be reached by New Horizons. The mission team already has been maneuvering the spacecraft in preparation for a flyby on Jan. 1, 2019.

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Juno mission to Jupiter nears its climax

Image: Juno at Jupiter
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. (Credit: NASA / SwRI)

Everything about NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter is big: the destination (giant planet, duh!), the cost ($1.1 billion), the travel time (five years to cruise 1.8 million miles), even the solar panels (totaling 635 square feet in area, about the size of a one-bedroom apartment).

And one of the biggest things for us Earthlings is that you can use the small screen on your smartphone to watch the mission reach its climax while you’re waiting for the Fourth of July fireworks to begin.

NASA will be providing live video coverage of Juno’s orbital insertion maneuver, starting at 7:30 p.m. PT Monday. Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California expect to hear that the bus-sized spacecraft successfully executed Monday’s key engine burn at 8:53 p.m. PT.

If the engine firing goes wrong, the probe could zoom uselessly past Jupiter, or enter the wrong orbit around the planet. But a successful maneuver will set the stage for 20 months’ worth of meticulously planned orbital observations.

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