Cosmic Log
Astrophysicists say they’ve identified an object beyond the orbit of Neptune that’s likely to qualify as a dwarf planet, alongside other trans-Neptunian objects including Pluto, the erstwhile “ninth planet.”
The discovery of 2017 OF201 touches upon another ninth-planet controversy: namely, whether there’s a large planet nicknamed Planet 9 or Planet X lurking somewhere on the edges of the solar system.
Scientists say they’ve put together a new kind of molecular toolkit that could eventually be used to treat a variety of brain diseases, possibly including epilepsy, sleep disorders and Huntington’s disease.
The kit currently contains more than 1,000 tools of a type known as enhancer AAV vectors, with AAV standing for “adeno-associated virus.” A consortium that included researchers from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and the University of Washington combined harmless adeno-associated viruses with snippets of engineered DNA to create a gene-therapy package that could target specific neurons in the brain while having no effect on other cells.
Researchers laid out their findings in a set of eight studies published today in the Cell Press family of journals. The work is part of a project called the Armamentarium for Precision Brain Cell Access, funded through the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative.
“Honing in on the right cells — in the right way and at the right time — is the future of precision brain medicine,” John Ngai, director of the BRAIN Initiative, said in a news release. “These tools move us closer to that future, while also expanding what we know about the brain’s cells and circuits today.”
Two years after its first space mission literally took a turn for the worse, Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space is getting ready for a second test mission aimed at having its Otter Pup spacecraft dock with another satellite in orbit.
Otter Pup 2 is due for launch from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base as early as next month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as part of the Transporter-14 rideshare mission.
Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett told me that the Otter Pup 2 demonstration mission will be “a major step, to return to flight and have a spacecraft do a really complex mission, which is to go rendezvous and then ultimately capture an unprepared spacecraft.”
The goals of the mission are similar to the original objectives for the first orbital Otter Pup test in 2023, in which the spacecraft was set to conduct proximity operations and link up with a space tug.
That plan had to be changed when Otter Pup 1 was sent into a difficult-to-control spin during its deployment. After months of maneuvering, Starfish conducted limited testing of its satellite rendezvous system but had to forgo doing an on-orbit docking.
Bennett said Starfish has made upgrades in hardware as well as software for Otter Pup 2. For example, the company is using a different electric propulsion system, provided by ThrustMe. “The major difference is, now we have software and capabilities that could fly on multiple vehicles, not just on Otter Pup,” he said.
Otter Pup, which is about the size of a microwave oven, is designed to demonstrate the technologies that will be used on Starfish’s full-size Otter satellite servicing vehicles. Such vehicles are being built to link up with satellites on a regular basis — to refuel and service them for extended missions, or deorbit them for safe disposal at the end of their missions. Starfish has won tens of millions of dollars in contracts to execute Otter satellite docking missions next year for Intelsat, the U.S. Space Force and NASA.
Don’t call ChatGPT a chatbot. Call it a conversation simulator. Don’t think of DALL-E as a creator of artistic imagery. Instead, think of it as a synthetic media extruding machine. In fact, avoid thinking that what generative AI does is actually artificial intelligence.
That’s part of the prescription for countering the hype over artificial intelligence, from the authors of a new book titled “The AI Con.”
“‘Artificial intelligence’ is an inherently anthropomorphizing term,” Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, explains in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “It sells the tech as more than it is — because instead of this being a system for, for example, automatically transcribing or automatically adjusting the sound levels in a recording, it’s ‘artificial intelligence,’ and so it might be able to do so much more.”
In their book and in the podcast, Bender and her co-author, Alex Hanna, point out the bugaboos of AI marketing. They argue that the benefits produced by AI are being played up, while the costs are being played down. And they say the biggest benefits go to the ventures that sell the software — or use AI as a justification for downgrading the status of human workers.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has blocked $48 million in federal funding for an advanced aerospace materials test bed in Spokane, triggering protests from lawmakers.
The decision also affects five other Tech Hub projects around the country that were approved for federal support in the final days of the Biden administration. Lutnick had approved a $220 million loan from the Treasury Department as part of a plan to make funding available for the six projects — but in a statement released May 16, he said he was rescinding the grants.
Lutnick said the process was “rushed, opaque and unfair,” and added that the Economic Development Administration would come up with a new process to select grant recipients by early 2026. The six blocked projects would be allowed to reapply for funding in that selection round. Lutnick’s decision does not affect 12 other Tech Hub projects that were approved last July.
The Biden administration designated 31 public-private consortiums as Tech Hubs in 2023, in an effort to support regional tech innovation. A fact sheet from the EDA said the six awards that were made in January “resulted in some criticism from those Tech Hubs that did not receive awards and their members of Congress.” It said the new selection process would follow the Trump administration’s directives on issues ranging from energy and labor policy to diversity, equity and inclusion.
U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, D-Wash., both objected strenuously to the decision.
Zeno Power, a startup that’s headquartered in Seattle as well as Washington, D.C., today announced the completion of a $50 million funding round to boost the development of nuclear batteries for maritime and space applications.
The Series B round was led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from Seraphim, Balerion Space Ventures, JAWS, Vanderbilt University, RiverPark Ventures, Stage 1 Ventures, 7i Capital, Beyond Earth Ventures and others. The fresh funding follows a $20 million Series A round in 2022 and brings total investment to $70 million.
Zeno got its start at Vanderbilt in 2018 with the goal of creating new types of radioisotope power systems.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, have been around for decades — for example, for space missions ranging from the Apollo moonshots to the years-long treks of Mars rovers. Those power systems depended on plutonium-238, but Zeno is pioneering lightweight systems that use strontium-90 instead.
Strontium-90 is produced as a byproduct in nuclear fission reactors and could serve as an abundant fuel for power-generating systems. In 2023, Zeno worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to demonstrate a strontium-based heat source. The company is also looking at americium-241 as a potential fuel source for nuclear batteries.
Since its founding, Zeno has secured more than $60 million in contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA to provide radioisotope power systems for applications where traditional power sources fall short — for example, to provide long-lasting energy for seabed infrastructure, satellites and lunar landers.
Seattle-based Interlune provided a triple-barreled update today on its progress toward mining helium-3 on the moon and returning that resource to Earth.
The startup joined Vermeer Corp., an industrial equipment manufacturer headquartered in Iowa, to unveil a full-scale prototype of an excavator that’s designed to ingest 100 metric tons of moon dirt in an hour. After the helium-3 is extracted, the machine would drop the rest of the dirt back onto the lunar surface in a continuous motion.
Also today, Interlune announced separate agreements with the U.S. Department of Energy and Maybell Quantum Industries to start supplying lunar helium-3 by 2029.
Helium-3 is an isotope that’s much rarer than the helium-4 that you typically find in lighter-than-air balloons. Helium-3 has a wide range of high-tech applications in fields that include quantum computing, fusion power, medical imaging and weapons detection for national security purposes.
The substance is hard to find on Earth, but it’s more abundant on the moon due to bombardment by solar-wind particles. Interlune aims to take advantage of the potential market by extracting lunar helium-3 and shipping it back to Earth.
Several days after the launch of the first full-scale satellites in Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation, the mission team is still on an adrenaline high, according to the team’s leader.
“It’s early in the mission and we still have lots of work ahead,” Rajeev Badyal, Amazon’s vice president of technology and head of Project Kuiper, said today in a LinkedIn post. “It’s been an entirely nominal start though, and that’s all thanks to the talent, passion and dedication of the Kuiper team. They’ve delivered in a big way here – for Amazon and for our customers – and I’m so proud.”
Project Kuiper is Amazon’s effort to build a satellite-based broadband network that could eventually serve millions of people around the world. It’s seen as a competitor for SpaceX’s Starlink network, which already has more than 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit and more than 5 million users.
Following up on a test mission in 2023, Amazon had its first batch of 27 operational Project Kuiper satellites launched into orbit from Florida on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on April 28. Those satellites are now being checked out by the mission operations team in Redmond, Wash. The launch kicked off a campaign that’s expected to take years to execute, leading to the deployment of 3,232 satellites.
Amazon’s satellites are built at a 172,000-square-foot facility in Kirkland, Wash., with additional work being done at Project Kuiper’s Redmond headquarters.
The company hasn’t shared many images of the satellites, apparently for proprietary reasons. Badyal, however, posted a video that provided a rare peek of the satellites being deployed in orbit from the Atlas V rocket’s Centaur upper stage. The video shows the satellites rising from the upper stage in sequence and floating off into space. A thin blue slice of Earth’s disk can be seen at the end of the clip.
Seven years after they started, neuroscientists have published the results of a landmark study that was designed to determine which theory of human consciousness came closest to the mark — and those results are decidedly mixed.
The bad news is that neither of the leading theories held a clear advantage in explaining how consciousness arises. The good news is that researchers picked up new clues about where to look.
One of the leaders of the effort — Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Seattle-based Allen Institute — said he was heartened by the state of the debate.
“Adversarial collaboration fits within the Allen Institute’s mission of team science, open science and big science, in service of one of the biggest, and most long-standing, intellectual challenges of humanity: the Mind-Body Problem,” Koch said in a news release. “Unraveling this mystery is the passion of my entire life.”
Seattle-based Radian Aerospace says it’s developing a reusable re-entry vehicle that can be used to test aerospace components under stressful conditions and then bring them back down to Earth.
The Radian Reusable Re-entry Vehicle, or R3V, is meant to advance technologies that the company is building into Radian One, its single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane.
Radian says the insights gained from R3V’s uncrewed test flights will inform critical elements of the Radian One mission platform, including aerodynamic performance, guidance and control, and the operability of subsystems such as propulsion and thermal protection.
For example, R3V will use Dur-E-Therm, a thermal protection material that Radian invented to withstand the stresses of atmospheric re-entry at hypersonic speeds.
R3V is under development in the Seattle area and could be ready for its first flight by early 2026, Radian says. In addition to blazing a trail for the spaceplane, R3V is expected to generate near-term revenue.