Hasta La Gadget!

The latest arrivals to the International Space Station docked in record time, NASA has confirmed, with the Express Soyuz Flight safely opening hatches at just past midnight this morning. Expedition 36 – which brought three engineers from NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, and the European Space Agency – took under six hours to reach the orbiting research platform, having taken off in the evening of Tuesday, May 28. Their arrival brings the ISS’ crew back up to six, following the departure earlier this month of Commander Chris Hadfield and his two colleagues.

The current compliment of orbiting engineers now includes NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano, as well as Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA and Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin of Russian Federal Space Agency, who made it to the ISS on March 28. The latter three will remain until September, before returning to Earth.

Soyuz docking with ISS:

There’s plenty to be done in the intervening period. Five spacewalks are planned to ready the ISS for the Russian Multipurpose Module to be installed in December, with another to take the Olympic torch outside on November 9th. The sextet will also be responsible for ISS-side management of various supply vessels expected over the coming 5.5 months, which will include cargo hauls from the ESA, Russia, and Japan.

That’s in addition to the ongoing scientific experiment load ongoing on the ISS, which will be added to with a new project investigating how longer periods in space might impact bone density. It’s also expected to also help understand osteoporosis for those back on Earth.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether any of the six crewmembers can engage with the public back on Earth in the same way that Commander Hadfield did. The Canadian astronaut made a name for himself with his outreach efforts, deftly using social media and YouTube to stoke interest in science and technology.

Even Hadfield’s closing days on the space station were notable, with the engineer recording a special version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity complete with a full music video (albeit with some assistance from people back home).

Soyuz delivers new ISS crew in fastest shuttling yet is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In a report filed by a group from the University of Alberta it’s been shown that samples from 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes were able to grow anew in special laboratory conditions. These plants had been frozen during the “Little Ice Age” that took place from approximately AD 1550 to AD 1850, appearing around Canada’s Teardrop Glacier at Sverdrup Pass.

Bryophytes are known for their ability to survive long Arctic winters, but the amount of time they’ve been dormant in this situation is unprecedented. According to Catherine La Farge, lead author of the study, the plants in question were found at the edge of a glacier that’d been retreating 3-4m per year. This retreat has accelerated “sharply” since 2004, according to the BBC.

Above you’ll see some of this 400-year-old moss from ABC Science photographed by Dr La Farge herself.

“When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind.

If you think of ice sheets covering the landscape, we’ve always thought that plants have to come in from refugia around the margins of an ice system, never considering land plants as coming out from underneath a glacier.” – Dr La Farge

Imagine seeing plants that should very well have been dead for hundreds of years appearing with new green growth on their form. It’s exciting enough finding a brand new bud on a plant that’s been in our basement over the winter!

According to Dr La Farge, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Retreating ice at Sverdrup Pass is currently uncovering species new to science – these new cyanobacteria and green terrestrial algae “really need to be studied”, said Dr La Farge – and we’re expecting her to take charge to do it!

SOURCE: PNAS

Four hundred year-old glacier-frozen plants sprout new growth is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many researchers over the years have worked towards increasing data speeds, something that has had breakthroughs in various ways over the years. The latest one involves a method the creators say is a simple concept, but one that – for whatever reason – was never done. By creating mirrored beams of light that cancel out noise, the researchers sent a 400GB/s signal down nearly 8,000 miles of fiber optic cables.

According to the researchers, fast data transfers over long distances is best achieved using two beams of light rather than a single one ran down a fiber optic cable. These twin beams, as they’re called, are mirrored images of each other, something that has the added benefit of cancelling out the noise resulting from traveling down the cable. As such, data can be send across long distances.

The merging of the signals is done at the end of the cable, with the noise-cancelling effect being the result of something call phase conjugation. When light beams are sent down the fiber optic, they produce a pattern full of essentially “ups” and “downs” referred to as peaks and troughs. The way phase conjugation works is by forming an inverse of one light beam so that a peak becomes a trough and vice versa. As a result, the noise effects are cancelled out.

While conventional methods would require phase conjugation to be performed using devices located a various places along a cable length regardless of where the cable is located – even the ocean floor – the researchers’ method removes that necessity by using the twin-beams method instead, and simply merging them together so that the noise is automatically cancelled out, resulting in a perfect signal.

Such a concept has the prospect of both increasing data speeds and increasing the distances a signal can travel without suffering from the effects of signal noise. Said lead author Dr. Xiang Liu: “Nowadays everybody is consuming more and more bandwidth – demanding more and more communication. We need to solve some of the fundamental problems to sustain the capacity growth.”

SOURCE: BBC News

Image via Ozan Uzel

Twin-beam signals send data 4x faster than conventional speeds is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The US military’s dabbled with full-on robotic suits in the past, but it’s now looking at a less convoluted, more energy-efficient approach. A project called Warrior Web from DARPA aims to enhance soldier carrying capacity and minimize injuries by distributing loads better, providing better joint support and “reapply(ing) energy to enhance motion.” Such a suit would be equipped with sensors to detect forces, and be able to fit beneath existing uniforms while consuming only 100W of juice. The US Army has nearly completed five months of prototype testing using a multi-camera motion capture system (see the video after the break) to develop critical tech. The next step will be to design and fabricate a suit ready for real-world testing, which should happen in the fall — assuming the program keeps its footing.

Filed under: Wearables, Science

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Source: DARPA

In a project that is eerily similar to the plot of the latest Spiderman movie, researchers are studying axolotl salamanders and their limb-growing ability in an effort to generate limb regrowth in humans. Specifically, the researchers are trying to determine what triggers the limb to grow back after amputation, a process they were able to effectively halt with a simple chemical change.

Such a project could, if it ever reaches its end goal, end up being a medical miracle, allowing humans who suffer limb amputation, whether it is an appendage as small as a finger or as large as an entire arm or leg, to regrow their body part. The process could also be used to promote healing without scars, eliminating issues with scar tissue, as well as healing burns.

When a human suffers a limb amputation, the wound heals over with scar tissue, resulting in a stump. The researchers recreated this healing phenomenon in the axolotl salamanders by eliminating a type of immune system cells called macrophanges, which the researchers suspected were responsible for the limb regrowth. Getting rid of the macrophanges resulted in the same type of healing humans experience.

What is particularly interesting is that once the macrophanges were restored in the salamanders that had been depleted of them, the limb that was removed and healed over regenerated when it was re-amputated – that is, surgically reintroducing the wound in the area where it had previously healed. This seems to indicate that, should a solution ever be discovered for human limb regeneration, it could be effective for those who have lost limbs in the past, rather than just those with fresh wounds.

Ideally, the research will lead to a kind of salve or similar topical that would be applied to an open wound, introducing the necessary chemicals to the area to enable limb regrowth. All of this, for now at least, is still a dream, with the project being in the research phase and the exact method that enables limb regrowth not being known. Such a prospect is certainly something to keep an eye on, however.

SOURCE: ABC News

Researchers use salamanders to fuel human limb regrowth project is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.