Month: April 2017

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Trump calls for speeding up trips to Mars

Trump in Oval Office
President Donald Trump chats with astronauts on the International Space Station from his desk in the White House’s Oval Office, flanked by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins on the left and Ivanka Trump on the right. (White House via YouTube)

Humans on Mars by 2024? President Donald Trump set that time frame today, almost certainly in jest, during a congratulatory video call to the International Space Station and its record-setting commander, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson.

The purpose of the orbital linkup from the Oval Office was to recognize Whitson’s new status as the U.S. record-holder for most cumulative time in space – “534 days and counting,” Trump noted.

But the topic soon turned to Mars, and how soon humans would be journeying to the Red Planet. When Trump asked Whitson what the time frame was, Whitson noted that the bill he signed into law last month called for the journeys to begin in the 2030s.

“Well, we want to try and do it during my first term, or at worst during my second term,” Trump replied. “So we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?”

“We’ll do our best,” Whitson said, amid smiles and laughter.

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Amazon stirs up laughs on ‘Silicon Valley’

Silicon Valley
HBO has ramped up the tech-themed comedy “Silicon Valley” for its fourth season. (HBO Illustration)

HBO’s “Silicon Valley” comedy series presents a California-centric view of how tech is done (and undone), but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Seattle-based Amazon Web Services came in for satirical shout-outs in April 23’s season premiere.

The show centers on the travails of a startup called Pied Piper, often suffered at the hands of Hooli, a monolithic Google-like company.

As the season’s first episode begins, Pied Piper is pivoting from the data compression and storage business to video chat – specifically, a miraculous smartphone app called PiperChat that can conference an unlimited number of video users at the same time, with no lag or loss of picture quality.

Pied Piper CEO Richard Hendricks poses as an Uber driver and virtually kidnaps a potential VC investor, touting PiperChat’s 120,000 daily active users and the 18 percent week-over-week growth in its user base.

But there’s a problem: The user load is so high that Pied Piper is burning through cash to pay Amazon Web Services for the streaming. There’s no money left to pay Pied Piper’s developers, despite their protests.

“I’m not paying because you’re not the one getting [bleeped] face first by your credit card company because of massive AWS hosting fees,” the startup’s living-on-the-edge backer, Erlich Bachman, tells the team.

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D.C.’s March for Science sparks chain reaction

Science marchers
A breast cancer survivor poses as Wonder Woman among other demonstrators at the March for Science, with the U.S. Capitol in the background. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The scenery for the world’s most watched March for Science may have featured the political icons of the nation’s capital, but the weather was pure Seattle.

Today’s rally brought thousands of people to the National Mall for hours’ worth of teach-ins and speeches, despite a Seattle-style drizzle.

Bill Nye the Science Guy, a co-chair for the national March for Science movement, struck on the theme of the day when he noted that many policymakers in Washington and around the world were “deliberately and actively suppressing science.”

He also noted the stereotypical view of scientists as detached nerds who dwell on topics with little relevance to society as a whole.

“But our numbers here today show the world that science is for all,” he told the crowd. “Our lawmakers must know and accept that science serves every one of us, every citizen of every nation and society. Science must shape policy. Science is universal. Science brings out the best of us. With an informed, optimistic view of the future, together we can – dare I say it? – save the world.”

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Lilium shows off all-electric VTOL airplane

Lilium’s all-electric prototype airplane looks impressive as it makes a vertical takeoff and landing in a demonstration video released today – but will the concept fly as a commercial aircraft? The jury is still out.

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How Elon Musk plans to put chips in brains

Electrode-equipped cap
A researcher wears an electrode-equipped cap in an experiment aimed at demonstrating direct brain control of a computer. (University of Washington / National Science Foundation via YouTube)

Three weeks after word leaked out that billionaire deep-thinker Elon Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, his detailed vision for linking brains and computers is laid out in a 36,000-word white paper.

Complete with stick figures.

To explain it all for us, Musk turned to Tim Urban, the creator of the Wait But Why website. Urban has crafted similarly illustrated long reads about the SpaceX rocket company and the Tesla electric company, the two ventures that currently occupy most of Musk’s time as CEO.

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Hubble sees double to mark 27 years in orbit

NGC 4302 and NGC 4298
This Hubble image, marking the 27th anniversary of the space telescope’s launch, features the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4302 and the tilted galaxy NGC 4298. (STScI / NASA / ESA Photo / M. Mutchler)

It’s traditional for the team behind the Hubble Space Telescope to release a jaw-dropping picture to celebrate the anniversary of the observatory’s launch in April 1990, and this year’s image might well rate a double jaw drop.

The science team’s greeting card for Hubble’s 27th birthday features side-by-side views of two spiral galaxies much like our own Milky Way galaxy, seen from two angles.

The edge-on galaxy at left, NGC 4302, is about 60 percent of the Milky Way’s size and contains about 10 percent of our home galaxy’s mass, the Hubble team says in today’s image advisory.

The galaxy at right, NGC 4298, is tilted about 70 degrees as seen from Earth, and measures about a third as wide as the Milky Way. It weighs in at 17 billion solar masses, which is less than 2 percent of the Milky Way’s 1 trillion solar masses.

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U.S.-Russian duo joins space station crew

Today there are 67 percent more people working in space than there were the day before, now that NASA astronaut Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin have arrived at the International Space Station. The two spacefliers were launched from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early today and took a six-hour ride aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft – using a fast-track trajectory that’s more efficient than the alternative two-day route.

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Eclipse campsites sell out in 90 minutes

To accommodate overwhelming demand, Oregon state park officials freed up 1,000 campsites today for folks wanting to see a total solar eclipse on Aug. 21. They didn’t last long. The extra spots were made available for reservations at 8 a.m. – and by 9:25 a.m., they were sold out.

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What to do if an asteroid comes our way

Chelyabinsk meteor blast
A series of video frames shows the Chelyabinsk meteor passing through the skies above the Siberian city of Kamensk-Uralskiy on Feb. 15, 2013. (Aleksandr Ivanov / Popova et al. / Science / AAAS)

If an asteroid strikes, don’t head for the hills, or the windows: Head for the basement.

A study aimed at sorting out the effects of a catastrophic asteroid impact found that violent winds and pressure shock waves would be the biggest killers, accounting for more than 60 percent of the lives lost in simulated scenarios.

“This is the first study that looks at all seven impact effects generated by hazardous asteroids and estimates which are, in terms of human loss, most severe,” Clemens Rumpf, a senior research assistant at the University of Southampton in Britain, said today in a news release from the American Geophysical Union.

Rumpf is the lead author of the study, which is published in Geophysical Research Letters, an AGU journal.

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NASA puts $50 million toward way-out ideas

Fusion-driven rocket
An artist’s conception shows a fusion-driven rocket powering a probe toward Mars. (MSNW / UW)

Fusion-driven rockets, remote control systems for space robots, and satellites that build themselves up in orbit are among the made-in-Washington projects getting a share of $49.9 million in NASA grants.

Seven businesses in Washington state will benefit from NASA’s latest round of Small Business Innovation Research grants and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, announced today.

The two programs, known as SBIR and STTR, are aimed at encouraging the development of commercial innovations that could come in handy for NASA’s space missions.

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