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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Bat-killing disease make the leap to the West

Image: Afflicted bat
This little brown bat with white nose syndrome was found near North Bend, Wash. (Credit: PAWS)

Researchers are dismayed by the first-ever case of the bat-killing disease known as white nose syndrome in Washington state, more than 1,000 miles west of where it’s been detected before.

The illness is linked to a fungus that’s primarily spread from bat to bat, but the fungus can also be transmitted via the shoes, clothes and gear of cave visitors.

Although it’s not harmful to humans, pets, livestock or most wildlife, the fungus is devastating for the bats. White nose syndrome has killed more than 6 million bats in North America since it was first documented nearly a decade ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says.

White nose syndrome was first detected in New York, and until now, it was thought to have spread only as far west as Nebraska.

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Hundreds line up to sign up for Tesla’s latest car

Image: Sid Bharadwaj
Sid Bharadwaj, the first buyer in line at Tesla Motors’ Bellevue Square store, has his picture taken after putting down a $1,000 deposit for a Model 3 electric car. (Credit: Sid Bharadwaj / Tesla Motors)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – As the clock counted down to the big reveal for the Tesla Model 3 electric sedan, would-be buyers lined up by the hundreds today to put down a deposit, sight unseen.

The phenomenon was reminiscent of the hullabaloo that typically accompanies Apple’s launch of a new iPhone.

The Model 3 is way more expensive than an iPhone: List price, before tax incentives, is expected to be around $35,000. But that’s low for a Tesla, and that’s the point. All those folks who have been salivating over a $70,000 Model S sedan or an $80,000 Model X SUV are finally seeing something in a lower price range.

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SETI Institute searches for red-dwarf aliens

Image: Red dwarf planetary system
An artist’s conception shows a planetary system around a red dwarf star. (Credit: ESO)

The SETI Institute is shifting the focus of its search for extraterrestrial intelligence to places that could harbor life that’s not as we know it: 20,000 red-dwarf star systems.

“Red dwarfs – the dim bulbs of the cosmos – have received scant attention by SETI scientists in the past,” SETI Institute engineer Jon Richard said today in a news release announcing the initiative. “That’s because researchers made the seemingly reasonable assumption that other intelligent species would be on planets orbiting stars similar to the sun.”

Red dwarfs are nothing like the sun: The brightest of the breed are a tenth as luminous as the sun, and some are just 0.01 percent as bright. But astronomers say they account for three-quarters of all stars.

The star that’s closest to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf. A variety of observing efforts, including the Pale Red Dot initiative, are looking for planets around Proxima Centauri.

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Microsoft, NASA create HoloLens Mars tour

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Erisa Hines, a driver for the Mars Curiosity rover, talks to participants during the “Destination: Mars” mixed-reality tour. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Microsoft)

Microsoft and NASA are bringing HoloLens to the masses – and bringing the masses to Mars – with a mixed-reality experience that will make its debut this summer.

“Destination: Mars,” an exhibit opening at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida this summer, takes regular folks on a virtual guided tour to sites visited by the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet.

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin serves as one of the “holographic tour guides,” along with Curiosity rover driver Erisa Hines of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way,” JPL visualization producer Doug Ellison said March 30 in a news release. “To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context.”

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Boeing will trim 4,000 jobs, and maybe more

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A Boeing 777 jet is assembled at the company’s plant in Everett, Wash. (Credit: Boeing)

Boeing Commercial Airplanes says it’s following through on its job reduction plan with the target of reducing its workforce by 4,000 positions by midyear.

So far, there have been no involuntary layoffs, company spokesman Doug Alder told GeekWire in an email today. But he said that may have to come as a “last resort” in order to reduce costs and remain competitive with Airbus, Boeing’s European rival.

In addition to the workforce reduction, Boeing has been trying to save on non-labor costs and supply chain expenses, Alder said.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes employs about 82,000 people worldwide, accounting for more than half of the Boeing Co.’s total job count. Boeing’s employment in Washington state, including employees in the company’s defense and administrative units as well as commercial airplanes, amounts to about 78,000.

The Seattle Times, which first reported the numbers behind the company’s job reduction plan, cited Boeing documents suggesting that the reductions could total 8,000 jobs, or 10 percent, by the end of the year.

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Elon Musk’s Mars plan sparks a nerd fight

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SpaceX’s Elon Musk sits in a Crew Dragon capsule during its unveiling in 2014. (Credit: SpaceX)

Is SpaceX founder Elon Musk crazy to press ahead with plans to send people to Mars? Or crazy like a fox? A rehash of discouraging words from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has sparked a renewed debate over Musk’s grand plan.

Tyson’s pronouncements actually date back to last November, when he told The Verge in an interview that people were deluding themselves if they thought private enterprise alone could send people to Mars.

“The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier,” Tyson said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

He explained that interplanetary spaceflight is just too expensive and risky, with too little of an initial return on investment, to make sense as a private venture. “A government has a much longer horizon over which it can make investments,” Tyson said. (He told Larry King pretty much the same thing months earlier.)

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Microsoft shows off ‘Star Wars’ holoportation

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Microsoft Research’s Shahram Izadi shows how a clip of his HoloLens-facilitated interactions with his daughter in a remote environment can be played back in 3-D. (Credit: Microsoft Research)

As Microsoft gets set to ship its HoloLens development kit, it’s previewing a “Star Wars” application called holoportation that takes full advantage of the mixed-reality headset.

The effect is like that scene in the original Star Wars movie, where Princess Leia pops up in a hologram and tells Obi-Wan Kenobi he’s her “only hope.” (The same concept is behind other holo-conferences sprinkled throughout the sequels and prequels.)

In a demo video, Microsoft Research’s Shahram Izadi shows how it works.

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Alaska volcano erupts – and disrupts flights

Image: Pavlof eruption
Colt Snapp captured a picture of the ash plume emanating from Mount Pavlof on Sunday evening as he was flying to Anchorage from Dutch Harbor. (Credit: Colt Snapp via Twitter)

The spectacular eruption of Alaska’s Mount Pavlof had a not-so-spectacular effect on airline schedules today: Alaska Airlines said it had to cancel 41 flights to and from six cities in northern Alaska due to the massive ash cloud emanating from Pavlof.

More than 3,000 passengers were affected by today’s cancellations, Alaska Airlines said in a travel advisory. Flights to Barrow, Bethel, Fairbanks, Kotzebue, Nome and Prudhoe Bay are suspended until the airline can assess weather reports after dawn Tuesday.

Anchorage’s KTVA TV said Bering Air, PenAir and Ravn Alaska canceled flights this morning, but at least some of those airlines returned to normal schedules later in the day.

Mount Pavlof, 600 miles southwest of Anchorage on the Alaska Peninsula, is one of the state’s most consistently active volcanoes. The 8,261-foot peak began erupting on Sunday afternoon, sending ash to heights in excess of 20,000 feet.

KTVA quoted public safety officer Barrett Taylor as saying more than an eighth of an inch of ash had blanketed much of the Aleutian community of Nelson Lagoon. “It was basically raining ash,” Taylor said.

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Scientists straighten out a tangle of brain cells

Image: Brain neurons
This graphic traces a network of cortical neurons from a trillions of bytes’ worth of 3-D data. Some of the neurons are color-coded according to their activity patterns in the living brain. (Credit: Clay Reid, Allen Institute; Wei-Chung Lee, Harvard Medical School; Sam Ingersoll, graphic artist)

Scientists say they’ve analyzed trillions of bytes’ worth of mapping data from the brain of a mouse to trace the connections within a tangle of neurons that’s smaller than a pinhead.

The results, published today in the journal Nature, mark a preliminary step toward an even more ambitious neuron-mapping project called MICrONS.

“This is the culmination of a research program that began almost 10 years ago,” study co-author R. Clay Reid, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a news release. “Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring.”

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Find out where we’re likely to trigger quakes

Image: Earthquake map
This map shows the U.S. Geological Survey’s forecast for natural and human-induced earthquakes in 2016. The colors denote the chance of damage, ranging from less than 1 percent to 12 percent. The graphic for the central and eastern U.S. combines the two types of earthquakes. The map for the western U.S. assumes that all of the earthquakes occur naturally. Click on the map for a larger version. (Credit: USGS)

For the first time, the U.S. Geological Survey is pinpointing the places where quakes induced by human activity as well as natural seismicity are most likely to occur this year.

The map released today dramatically raises the earthquake risk assessment for areas of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and Arkansas, primarily due to seismic activity triggered by injecting wastewater deep underground.

Wastewater injection is often associated with the oil and gas extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. However, the USGS says fracking fluid typically makes up less than 10 percent of the injected wastewater. Most of it is saltwater that’s brought up as a byproduct during the oil and gas production process. To avoid polluting freshwater sources, the undrinkable water is typically pumped deep underground over the course of years or decades..

Previous studies have shown a link between wastewater injection and the increased incidence of quakes in Oklahoma. Such quakes aren’t catastrophic, but they do cause damage to buildings – and that’s why they were included in the newly released assessment.

“By including human-induced events, our assessment of earthquake hazards has significantly increased in parts of the U.S.,” Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project, said in a news release.

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