Author: Alan Boyle

Mastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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Boeing bans Pokémon Go at work

Image: Pokemon Jets
You can catch Pokemon characters on Boeing jets, as shown in this lineup for All Nippon Airways, but don’t try catching them at Boeing facilities. (Credit: ANA / Nintendo via Japan Info)

Mark off the Boeing Co. as one more place where you shouldn’t be playing Pokémon Go, the monster-catching game that’s been taking smartphones by storm.

It’s not that Boeing has anything against Charmander or those other cute virtual critters: It’s just that the game sucks up bandwidth as well as work time – and also poses potential safety risks.

9to5Mac reported last week that the game was being installed on more than 100 work phones at a large aerospace company, and that one employee almost got hurt due to gameplay distraction. Tweets and follow-ups made clear that the company was Boeing, and that Pokémon Go was added to a software blacklist that bans carrier bloatware apps.

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Startup to build rockets with ‘zero human labor’

Two engineers with experience at Blue Origin and SpaceX have raised almost $10 million for their own rocket startup, Relativity Space, which promises to build orbital rockets “with zero human labor.”

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The funding rounds are described in two documents filed in May and this month with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The first filing reports that $1.1 million in equity was sold to investors. The second filing serves as a new notice of $8.4 million in equity sold, out of a $9.6 million offering.

The filings indicate that Relativity Space is based in Seattle, but in response to an email inquiry, the company declined to say anything further about its location, its business plan or its investors. “We are entirely in stealth mode and will comment more when we are ready,” the company said.

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SpaceX rocket lifts off, comes back with a boom

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its Florida launch pad. (Credit: NASA)

SpaceX launched a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station tonight with a couple of precedent-setting payloads on opposite ends of the size spectrum: a 5-foot-wide docking adapter, which was built by Boeing to accommodate future commercial space taxis; and the first DNA sequencer destined for use in space, which is about the size of a candy bar.

The Falcon 9 rocket rose into the night at 12:45 a.m. ET Monday (9:45 p.m. PT Sunday) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Minutes later, the Falcon 9’s second stage and the uncrewed Dragon separated from the first stage and continued on to orbit. Meanwhile, the first stage flew itself back to Florida’s Space Coast and touched down at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1, near the launch pad.

“LZ-1, Falcon 9 has landed,” SpaceX’s mission control announced. The news was greeted with whoops and hollers from hundreds of SpaceX employees who gathered at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

Floridians heard a thunderous sonic boom as the booster descended.

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Boeing centennial blends the old and the new

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Boeing employees Teresa Felix and Laurie Staples check out the windows at an exhibit at Seattle’s Museum of Flight during the company’s centennial festivities. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The Boeing Company pulled out all the stops today to celebrate its 100th birthday – from the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, to the “Boeing 100” flag flying atop Seattle’s space needle, to the old and new Boeing airplanes lined up at the Museum of Flight.

But it was the old and new people in the company’s extended family who provided some of the most touching highlights at today’s kickoff for the centennial weekend.

June Boeing, the 90-year-old widow of William Boeing Jr. and the daughter-in-law of company founder William Boeing, reminisced about her husband after receiving a gift of the company’s original incorporation papers, filed in Seattle on July 15, 1916.

“I always thought I was his first love. And soon after we were married, I found out I wasn’t,” she said. “The Boeing Company was his first love.”

Another moment came when Mawut Mayen, one of the “lost boys of Sudan” who grew up to become a manager with the 777 program, recounted how Boeing helped him find a happy ending to his refugee story. “I have a great future ahead of me,” he said.

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Ford works on virtual drivers for future cars

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Ford is testing Fusion Hybrid autonomous research vehicles at night. (Credit: Ford)

The car of the future may well be controlled by a certified virtual driver that relies on the cloud for guidance, ranging from directions to software security updates.

Those are some of the concepts laid out today by Jim Buczkowski, director of electrical and electronics systems at Ford Research and Innovation, during a Seattle Chamber of Commerce breakfast. And tech companies in the Seattle area are playing a role in turning those concepts into reality.

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One year later, New Horizons revisits Pluto flyby

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Composite image shows enhanced-color views of Charon and Pluto. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

One year ago today, NASA’s New Horizons probe whizzed past Pluto and opened up a new frontier for planetary science – and to mark the occasion, the mission team is looking back at its greatest hits and looking ahead to a landing.

“It’s strange to think that only a year ago, we still had no real idea of what the Pluto system was like,” project scientist Hal Weaver, who’s based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a news release celebrating the anniversary. “But it didn’t take long for us to realize Pluto was something special, and like nothing we ever could have expected.”

After more than nine years of cruising through interplanetary space, the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moons at a speed of more than 30,000 mph on July 14, 2015, capturing readings as it went. Since then, the probe has been transmitting gigabytes’ worth of data back to Earth at a slow but steady rate.

The pictures have been unprecedented, providing the first close look at icy worlds that whirl more than 3 billion miles from the sun, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. They’ve even inspired a set of postage stamps.

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Juno revises, resumes cancer trial after deaths

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Inside Juno Therapeutics’ lab, employees work with a patient’s genetically engineered T-cells and prepare them for infusion. (Credit: Juno Therapeutics)

Seattle-based Juno Therapeutics says it’s resuming a clinical trial of its immunotherapy treatment, a week after the Food and Drug Administration ordered a hold due to the deaths of three patients.

The FDA lifted its hold on the Phase II clinical trial for Juno’s first product, known as JCAR015, after the company removed a chemotherapy drug known as fludarabine from the treatment protocol. The deaths resulted from cerebral edema, or brain swelling, which was thought to have been caused by a toxic reaction to a drug combination including fludarabine.

Fludarabine was added to the pre-conditioning treatment regimen only recently. A different drug, known as cytoxan or cyclophosphamide, will continue to be used.

Now that the hold has been lifted, patients can once again be enrolled in the trial.

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Less ugh, more yay on Amazon Prime Day

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Cute kitten or Exploding Kittens on Amazon Prime Day? You decide. (Credit: Amazon via Twitter)

Amazon says its second annual Prime Day outdid the first one on the sales front – and although some Twitter users reported “Add to Cart” fails, the social-media metrics for Tuesday’s shopping extravaganza showed improvement as well.

At least that’s the verdict from Adobe Digital Insights, which cites figures that are at least as solid as Amazon’s sales report. The assessment is based on more than 4 million blips that were aggregated from blogs, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, Reddit, Foursquare and other sources in July 2015 and July 2016.

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FAA funding measure boosts airport security

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A bomb-sniffing dog and its security team from the Transportation Safety Administration keep watch at Washington Dulles International Airport. (Credit: TSA)

The U.S. Senate today gave final congressional approval to a measure that authorizes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration through September 2017 – and also changes procedures for airport security and emergency drone operations.

“It’s a little more than a 14-month extension, but don’t let that fool you, because it is going to put into permanent law bolstering security at our airports in order to help better protect us,” Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said on the Senate floor.

Bolstering airport security was a high priority for Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., one of the bill’s sponsors. She said the measure would help head off soft-target airport attacks like the ones that hit Brussels and Istanbul earlier this year.

“By passing this bill, we’re doubling the number of terrorist deterrent teams at U.S. airports and ground transportation hubs,” Cantwell said.

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Monkey genes shed light on brain mysteries

Image: Monkey brain
A cross-section of the neocortex and cerebellum from an adult rhesus monkey brain has been labeled with a stain that highlights brain cells. (Credit: Allen Institute)

A project led by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science has mapped out how genes get fired up in key areas of a rhesus monkey’s brain as it develops – and the results could help researchers unlock the mysteries surrounding autism, microcephaly, schizophrenia and other neurological conditions.

The gene expression map, laid out today in research published by the journal Nature, shows that rhesus macaque monkeys are much better models than the usual mice for humans when it comes to brain development. It also confirms the view that different neurological disorders follow dramatically different genetic pathways.

“The sets of genes that turn on early, and the sets of genes that turn on in the adult, shift dramatically,” Allen Institute neuroscientist Ed Lein, the study’s senior author, told GeekWire.

The gene map follows up on earlier work that Lein and his colleagues have done with mice, to track how the brain develops from its fetal stage to adulthood. The Allen Institute has done similar work with adult human brains and fetal brains as well.

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