Month: April 2017

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Super-Earth may reveal secrets of alien air

LHS 1140
An artist’s impression shows a super-Earth passing across the disk of the faint red star known as LHS 1140. (CfA Illustration / M. Weiss)

It’s not the closest potentially habitable planet, but astronomers say a world 40 percent wider than Earth could be one of the best places to target in the search for life beyond our solar system.

“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade. We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science – searching for evidence of life beyond Earth,” Jason Dittmann, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said today in a news release.

Dittmann is the lead author of a paper published by the journal Nature describing the exoplanet, known as LHS 1140 b.

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Facebook tests ‘Tether-Tenna’ for broadband

Tether-Tenna demonstrated
Yael Maguire, who heads the Facebook Connectivity Lab, shows off the Tether-Tenna system during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, Calif. (Facebook Video)

Facebook is adding tethered helicopters known as “Tether-Tennas” to its toolkit for widening internet access around the globe, even in emergency situations.

The Tether-Tenna concept calls for sending a car-sized helicopter equipped with telecommunications equipment hundreds of feet up in the air, to provide connectivity in areas where wireless capacity has been lost due to a disaster or other emergency.

A tether keeps the copter anchored to the ground and provides the cable links for electricity and data, theoretically allowing the Tether-Tenna to stay on duty for months at a time.

“We call this a type of insta-infrastructure,” Yael Maguire, the head of the Facebook Connectivity Lab, said today during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, Calif.

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Airbus plans drone deliveries in Singapore

Singapore delivery drone
An artist’s conception shows a delivery drone flying over Singapore. (News Direct via YouTube)

Airbus Helicopters has partnered with Singapore Post for its Skyways drone delivery project, due to begin trials at the National University of Singapore by early 2018. The memorandum of understanding, announced today at the Rotorcraft Asia exhibition in Singapore, follows up on an initial agreement with the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore.

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Amazon patents ‘aquatic fulfillment centers’

Inflatable underwater bags
An underwater warehousing system could use inflatable bags to retrieve packages. In this picture, divers with the Israeli Defense Forces’ Underwater Missions Unit use a lifting bag to transfer equipment. Photo by Israel Defense Forces via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Amazon has patented some crazy ideas, including flying fulfillment centers that drop packages from the air. But its patent for “aquatic fulfillment centers” could be the craziest one yet.

The concept calls for warehousing packages underwater in specialized tanks – or even in a designated area of, say, Seattle’s Lake Union. Packages could be dropped from the air, parachute down to the water, and then sink to a specific water level based on its density.

When it’s time to select a package for delivery, a coded series of acoustic tones could be beamed through the water, activating a device on the desired package to inflate a balloon from an attached cartridge of compressed air. The package would then float up to the surface for retrieval and shipping.

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Naveen Jain’s Viome offers a gut check

Naveen Jain
Viome CEO Naveen Jain shows how a stool sample would be placed into a kit for an analysis of gut microbes. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain is ramping up Viome, a wellness monitoring service that’s the first venture brought to life by his BlueDot innovation factory.

Viome blends readings from your blood, urine, saliva and stool samples to develop a profile of your biochemistry, as well as the microbes in your digestive system, and then feeds that profile into a smartphone app that spits out personalized recommendations for diet and lifestyle.

That basic model is the foundation for a widening array of wellness ventures, including Seattle-based Arivale as well as Ubiome in San Francisco, DayTwo in Israel and at least half a dozen others. But Viome CEO Jain and his fellow executives are banking on a technology they’re licensing from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to analyze the human gut microbiome in unmatched detail.

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Liftoff sends Cygnus cargo ship into orbit

Cygnus-Atlas liftoff
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket flashes to life on its Cape Canaveral launch pad, sending Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo capsule on the first leg of its journey to the International Space Station. (NASA TV)

Today’s launch of a robotic Cygnus cargo craft to the International Space Station was totally successful. But the first-ever live 360-degree video stream of a rocket launch? Not so much.

The good news is that more than 7,600 pounds of supplies and experiments are now on their way to the station aboard Orbital ATK’s cylindrical transport ship, which is named the S.S. John Glenn in honor of the late space pioneer and senator.

Among the payloads are more than three dozen nanosatellites and a new habitat for growing plants in the station’s weightless conditions, plus experiments to facilitate growing cell cultures and test anti-cancer drugs that activate the body’s own immune system. There’s also the latest in a series of experiments to study how things burn up in space.

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Scientists ID fish 40 years after it was caught

Duckbilled fish
The duckbilled clingfish has a broad snout like a duck’s bill. (Kevin Conway and Glenn Moore)

After spending 40 years sitting in a museum jar, a toothy fish from the waters off Australia has been identified as a previously unknown species dubbed the duckbilled clingfish.

To document the species’ characteristics, researchers turned to technologies that weren’t widely available when the fish was caught in 1977: digitized X-ray scans and 3-D printing.

The fish tale was laid out last week in the journal Copeia.

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Boeing sends layoff notices to hundreds more

Boeing logo
Boeing says involuntary layoffs will affect hundreds of workers in engineering. (GeekWire Photo)

The Boeing Co. signaled that hundreds of employees involved in aerospace engineering in Washington state and other locations will be laid off starting in June.

The job cuts, reportedly due to begin on June 23, come on top of earlier rounds of voluntary and involuntary layoffs that have unfolded over the past year. Boeing Commercial Airplane’s employment figures have fallen by just over 10 percent since the start of 2017. Last month, Boeing approved voluntary buyouts for 1,500 machinists and 305 engineers, and also issued 245 involuntary layoff notices to take effect in May.

The newly announced layoffs should start taking effect on June 23, according to a widely cited memo from John Hamilton, vice president of engineering at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

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Scientists double down on DNA data storage

DNA data storage experiment
The University of Washington’s Luis Ceze and Lee Organick prepare DNA containing digital data for sequencing. (UW Photo / Tara Brown Photography)

Twist Bioscience says it’s extending its collaboration with Microsoft and the University of Washington on a project aimed at perfecting a process for encoding digital data in DNA molecules.

In a news release issued today, San Francisco-based Twist said Microsoft will purchase 10 million strands of synthetic DNA from the company for use in future experiments. The deal comes more a year after an initial purchase of the same number of strands for data storage.

Last July, researchers at Microsoft and UW announced that they were able to store and read out a record 200 megabytes of DNA-encoded data with 100 percent accuracy.

“After working together for over a year, the organizations have improved storage density, thereby reducing the cost of DNA digital data storage by encoding more data per strand and increasing the throughput of DNA production,” Twist said.

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SpaceX sets Hyperloop II contest for August

Hyperloop pod racer
The UW Hyperloop team’s sleek pod racer is unveiled at an Eastlake lab building amid the glow of purple spotlights. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

SpaceX’s second Hyperloop competition for student-led teams is coming up in August, with the University of Washington’s crew listed among two dozen contestants.

Hyperloop Pod Competition II, set for Aug. 25-27 at SpaceX’s test track in Hawthorne, Calif., follows up on the first round of pod races that took place in January. The mile-long, low-pressure tube is designed to simulate high-speed transit trips on a scaled-down basis.

Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, came up with the Hyperloop concept four years ago as a means of getting from, say, San Francisco to Los Angeles in just a little more than a half-hour.

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