Boeing has taken the wraps off its closely held design for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, a new type of helicopter that’s being proposed as a replacement for the U.S. Army’s now-retired Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior.
Month: March 2020
Researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science have captured the first-ever recording of electrical spikes from von Economo neurons — a rare kind of cell that’s found deep in the human brain and may be associated with social intelligence.
Astronauts on the International Space Station get thick calluses on the tops of their feet instead of the bottoms, but today students tried out ways to make the final frontier a little friendlier for feet.
Not only did they get a chance to talk with NASA astronaut Jessica Meir about socks in space, over a video link between the space station and Seattle’s Museum of Flight, but they also ran their own experiment as part of an Astro Socks Challenge created by NASA and Microsoft Education.
The challenge, and the Earth-to-space chat, made a teachable moment out of a fact of life for long-duration spacefliers.
The once-stealthy California company known as Astra came within 53 seconds of sending up a rocket to try winning a $2 million prize in the DARPA Launch Challenge today, but ended up scrubbing the launch.
An evolutionary analysis based on the genome sequences of COVID-19 coronavirus samples taken from patients in the Seattle area suggests that the number of infections doubles roughly every six days, which translates into hundreds of infections over the course of the past six weeks.
So far, 18 cases have been confirmed in Western Washington, including 14 in King County and four in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. As of today, five patients have died — four in King County and one in Snohomish County.
But the analysis laid out in a series of tweets from Trevor Bedford, a researcher at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who specializes in the study of viral dynamics, concludes that many more people are likely to be part of a chain of infections leading from the first patient in the U.S. to be diagnosed with the virus. Some probably passed along the virus even though they didn’t know they were infected — a phenomenon known as “cryptic transmission.”
The Boeing-backed GoFly Prize program gave out a $100,000 award during its inaugural fly-off in California, but the $1 million grand prize went unclaimed because none of the competitors could go fly.
You might think it’s depressing to contemplate the view that the universe is likely to end in everlasting darkness — but that’s not how physicist Brian Greene rolls.
“I am quite upbeat about the end of everything,” he insists.
Greene lays out what scientists have learned about the grand sweep of cosmic evolution, and its implications for phenomena ranging from the origin of life to consciousness and free will, in a new book titled “Until the End of Time.” This latest work follows up on books dealing with topics ranging from string theory to parallel universes — and in its way, it’s just as mind-bending.
The Columbia University theoretical physicist’s efforts to spread the scientific gospel, good news as well as bad, brought him to Seattle last week, for a fireside chat with KUOW radio host Ross Reynolds and a Q&A session with fans at University Temple United Methodist Church.