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Biomedicine Update – What do A, B, AB and O mean to you? Now add Langereis and Junior to the family

Published on May 12, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Biomedicine

I’m A, Rh+. Most of us are O, Rh+. Figured it out yet? I’m talking about our blood. As a regular blood donor I have learned about blood types and who I can give blood to and who I can’t. But for most of us who are not donors this remains a mystery. Well it turns out that even I as a donor only know half the story and it’s an interesting one.

Our human population globally shares 4 major blood types. In some countries these types are referred to with different classifications (in Russia, for example, they are referred to as 1, 2, 3 and 4) but generally through most of the world they are defined as A, B, AB and O. Blood that is classified as A contains an antigen or protein that makes it compatible only with other people with A or AB blood types. Blood that is classified as B contains another antigen that works only with B and AB blood types. Those with AB blood contain two antigens that makes it possible only to receive blood from another with AB blood. Those with O blood have no antigen and can therefore be compatible with any other blood type. When blood isn’t properly type matched the presence of an antigen can lead to a dangerous reaction in the person receiving the blood.

Rhesus monkeys share many of our biological characteristics. The Rh protein is named after them and when present in blood is referred to as a positive, or Rh+. The absence of Rh protein is negative or Rh-. So all blood types are a combination of these four different types plus the existence or non-existence of Rhesus proteins. Hence we have A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-. This has been our general understanding of the major blood groups since Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian, first made the discovery in the 1890s, and since our discovery of the Rhesus protein in the first half of the 20th century.

Until recently we classified four main blood groups as they appear in the illustration above plus the absence or presence of Rhesus proteins, giving us 8 in total. Today we know of 32 other proteins that differentiate blood types and suspect 10 to 15 more.

But the science of blood typing has led to further refinements since the mid-20th century and up until a few months ago we had identified 30 variable proteins. Some of these go by such interesting names as Duffy, Kidd, Diego and Lutheran. Now we can add two more named Langereis (Lan for short) and Junior discovered by the combined work of researchers at the Japanese Red Cross Osaka and Hokkaido Blood Centers, the University of Vermont and the French National Institute for Blood Transfusion in Paris. Right now both of these new blood group proteins are considered very rare but with their identification routine screening for the proteins can become a global standard.

Matching blood proteins is extremely important for ensuring successful organ transplants. Any one of these blood proteins in the donor could, if incompatible with the recipient, lead to organ rejection as the body automatically creates antibodies to defend against what is seen as a foreign invader.

Currently populations most susceptible can be found in Japan and among European Roma who are at higher risk because they do not have the Lan and Junior proteins. Scientists believe there are more unknown blood types, as many as 10 to 15, still to be discovered.

 
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Biomedicine Update: Ceramic Nanotechnology in a Breathalyzer to Uncover Disease

Published on May 11, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Biomedicine, Nanomedicine

Blow into the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer and if you get a green light you are good to go but if the light turns red it means you need to see your doctor. That is how this new invention works. Developed by a team within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stony Brook University, New York, led by Professor Perena Gouma, this gas detection device uses a sensor chip coated with tiny nanowires resembling spaghetti. The nanowires can detect minute amounts of chemical compounds in a person’s breath including disease marker gases.

Professor Gouma is also director of the Center for Nanomaterials and Sensor Development at the university and it is this particular expert knowledge that has led to the development of what will become a first response detection system available over the counter for under $20.

The manufacturing process for creating the micro-spaghetti nanowires is called electrospinning, a process that involves shooting a liquid ceramic compound through a syringe into an electrical field. The electrospun fibers crystallize as tiny threads that are captured on an aluminum backing.

The micro threads seen in this picture are electrospun fibers that are used to capture molecular indicators of disease. Source: Stony Brook University.

Electrospinning is a technology of the 21st century. It is simple and versatile allowing manufacturers to easily fabricate nanostructures on an industrial scale for use in electronics, photonics, pharmacology, and chemical engineering. A single syringe of liquid ceramic can produce a nanowire that can stretch from the Earth to the Moon. Different nanowires can be designed to be sensitive to specific molecules. A particular nanowire could detect nitrous oxide, associated with asthma and stress-related illnesses. A nanowire could be used to detect ammonia, a marker for kidney disease, or acetone, indicating diabetes. Nanowires could be used to detect the presence of viruses, e-coli, anthrax, salmonella, high cholesterol levels and different cancers.

Breathalyzers have been around for awhile. So why is this device worth talking about? Because it takes the technology from institutions like hospitals, or police departments, and turns it into a mass market, consumer product. The device is still undergoing testing but we should soon see breathalyzers using this technology on drugstore shelves.

 
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Space and Humanity in the 21st Century – Part 3: Robots to Jupiter

Published on May 10, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Robots, Space

The Grand Tour whet our appetite for learning more about planets and asteroids beyond our closest neighbour Mars. To once more explore Solar System bodies at extreme distances technology needed to be designed with its own intelligence to operate autonomously and reliably over long duration in the cold of interplanetary space. Remarkably the robotic spacecraft NASA designed to achieve these long duration flights has performed optimally.

With Jupiter our first destination, followed by Saturn, two members of the Asteroid Belt, and Pluto and Charon, these voyages straddled the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. So let’s begin with our return to Jupiter on a spacecraft named Galileo and then discuss other missions in progress or planning and why we keep going back to this gas giant.

What compelled us to return to Jupiter after the successes of the Pioneer and Voyager missions? There were lots of unanswered questions about Jupiter, when it formed, where it formed whether it has a solid core and its structural composition, and which if any of its moons had liquid water and the ability to sustain life. We wanted to understand how one moon, Io, could be constantly going through the throws of reforming its crust with more active volcanoes than any other body in the Solar System including Venus.

Galileo – A Voyage of Discovery That Changed Our View of Jupiter and its Moons Forever

The Galileo mission was designed to address some of these questions. A spacecraft designed in the 1980s, it took nearly six years from its launch in 1989 to get to Jupiter. Its route took it first by Venus once and Earth twice before developing the gravity-assisted speed necessary to coast past Mars and through the Asteroid Belt to Jupiter.

While on route it rendezvoused with two asteroids, first Gaspra in 1991 and later Ida in 1993. While passing Ida it captured a picture of the asteroid and its accompanying moonlet named Dactyl. A year later on approach to Jupiter it bore first-hand witness to the destruction of Comet Shoemaker-Levy as it impacted the planet.

Galileo finally arrived at Jupiter in December 1995. It launched a companion atmospheric probe on July 13, 1995. The probe descended through 200 kilometers (124 miles) of the planet’s outer atmosphere collecting data on local weather conditions – for July 13, a dry day with a few clouds and distant lightning. As the probe descended further it experienced winds exceeding 720 kilometers (450 miles) per hour and finally vaporized in the intense heat of the atmosphere after 61 minutes of transmission.

Galileo’s path around Jupiter took it in long elongated orbits around the planet, each averaging about two months. The orbits allowed the spacecraft to sample Jupiter’s magnetosphere in different locations while performing close rendezvous with Jupiter’s many moons. After 35 of these orbits and almost eight years of operation in the planet’s vicinity Galileo was instructed to self-destruct in the Jovian atmosphere to avoid a potential contaminating impact with the moon Europa.

What answers did Galileo give us to the questions we had about Jupiter and the Jovian system?

  1. It answered the question about the moons in discovering evidence of a saltwater ocean under Europa’s icy crust and liquid bodies of saltwater on two other moons, Ganymede (the largest moon in the Solar System) and Callisto.
  2. It gave us a better understanding of the gravitational forces of Jupiter responsible for the active volcanic and tectonic processes witnessed on the moon, Io. Such forces were little understood until scientists took a close look at the lava lakes and molten rock flows of this Jovian moon where temperatures exceeded 1,700 degrees Celsius, hotter than any place in the Solar System other than the Sun.
  3. With its probe on onboard science instruments we got our first good picture of conditions within Jupiter’s atmosphere. We studied the stationary storm, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the planet’s auroras, its magnetosphere, and its tenuous dark rings.
  4. In the discovery of larger than anticipated concentrations of argon, krypton and xenon, noble gases, it raised more questions about when and where Jupiter originated.
  5. And it raised a whole bunch of new questions about Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, a moon with its own magnetic field suggesting a dense liquid metal core similar to that found inside Earth. Even more surprising Galileo also discovered that Ganymede’s tenuous atmosphere contained O1 and O2 molecular oxygen as well as O3 (ozone).

Galileo provided us with a new perspective on the Jovian system as it repeatedly flew by Jupiter's many moons. Seen here at the top is the moon Io with the planet in the background. Io is the most tectonically active place in the Solar System. On the bottom left is Ganymede, larger than the planet Mercury. And on the bottom right is Europa, the size of our Moon, with an active ocean underneath a water ice surface crust that displays cracks and large flow patterns generated by inner tidal movement. Source: NASA/JPL/ U of Arizona

Because of these discoveries and the many still unanswered and new questions that arose from Galileo’s mission, Jupiter is once again to be visited by a new spacecraft, Juno, that will focus on the planet exclusively. The Juno mission will be followed by a new robotic spacecraft, Juice, with a mission to study the Jovian system and in particular its ice moons.

Juno – Dissecting Jupiter to Understand How the Solar System Formed

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System. Its mass is greater than all the other planets combined. Scientists theorize it was the first planet to form out of the nebula that condensed to form our proto-Sun and its planetary companions. What is not known is where Jupiter formed? The presence of large quantities of noble gases as found by Galileo suggests that Jupiter may have formed much further out than its present position as fifth planet from the Sun. Juno, the next mission to Jupiter may provide us with answers and help us learn more about the earliest period in the Solar System’s formation.

In returning to Jupiter with Juno the goal this time is to focus on the planet itself and not the larger Jovian system. Scientists hope to learn more about the origins of the Solar System by studying Jupiter, its composition, whether it has a solid core, and the mechanism behind its powerful magnetic field.

Our current theories on Jupiter's internal structure propose that the planet has a solid core with a liquid metallic hydrogen internal mantle, an external mantle hydrogen and helium in both liquid and gaseous form and an atmosphere containing water, carbon dioxide, methane and other trace gases. Source: Enciclopedia do Espaco e do Universo

Juno is a very different spacecraft than Galileo. It is solar powered. Galileo was powered by a Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG). In choosing solar over RTG the spacecraft designers have built a significant solar array with three panels, each 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) wide and 9 meters (almost 30 feet) in length. The size of this array is significantly larger than any previous robotic spacecraft. Why? Because sunlight near Jupiter is 27 times weaker than sunlight near Earth.

In addition the spacecraft is designed to fly with its solar panels always sun facing to maximize its ability to power the instrumentation package on board (see image below).

Upon its arrival in 2016 Juno will enter a close polar orbit around the planet taken it within 100 kilometers of the cloud tops. In this way Juno will be less exposed to the Jovian magnetosphere while it directs its scientific instruments at studying the planet below. After 32 to 33 orbits taking approximately one year the plan is to deorbit the spacecraft to burn up in the atmosphere in October 2017.

Juice – Europe’s Contribution to Exploring the Jovian System

The Juno mission is not our last visit to the vicinity of Jupiter. Other missions are planned including a lander with technology to drill into the surface of Europa to sample its subsurface ocean, and a new mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), named Juice, planned for a launch in 2022 with arrival at Jupiter by 2030.

Juice stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. The mission will study Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The spacecraft will make several flybys of these moons while doing further studies of Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetosphere and how the latter interacts with its moons. The plan includes a final rendezvous with Ganymede with Juice entering into orbit around that moon in 2032.

In choosing Ganymede as its final destination Juice will study its atmosphere, icy surface, internal structure and subsurface ocean as well as its unique magnetosphere.

Our next stop in our exploration of the outer planets – Saturn.

 
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Energy Update: Are Wind Farms Contributing to Global Warming? – Sorting the Fact from the Fiction

Published on May 9, 2012 by in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Renewable, wind power

A recent headline caught my eye, “Wind farms make climate change WORSE: Turbines actually heat up local areas.” This appeared in the London, England based Daily Mail. The article reported that air temperatures around four of the world’s largest wind farms had incresed over a decade by 0.72 degrees Celsius ( about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit). It went on to provide a comparison to global temperature rise stating that Earth’s average temperature comparably had warmed by only 0.8 Celsius since 1900. Fox News picked up the article with its own headline, “Wind Farms are Warming the Earth, Researchers Say,”  It therefore implied that wind farms were contributing to  global warming. Is this good scientific analysis or an anti-wind farm statement?

Are wind turbines contributors to global warming? Only if you believe bad research and alarmist media. Source:These headlines are meant to be alarmist. They are a canard. Source: MAYYSOLAR 2012

Measuring local temperatures in a few specific areas, whether near wind farms, or near coal-fired power plants, does not provide evidence that wind farms or coal-fired power plants contribute to global warming, cooling or global anything. What is actually being measured is the local impact of machinery in operation and the movement of air caused by rotating blades that affects circulation in the immediate vicinity. Waste heat from a wind turbine has to go somewhere.  Air currents are affected by turbines and may alter local ground temperature conditions either by making them warmer or cooler. (We’ll say more about this later.) On the other hand CO2 from coal-fired power plants does contribute to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere and there is a direct correlation between global warming and elevated atmospheric CO2.

The original research that led to these screaming headlines comes from State University of New York – Albany where researchers conducted a study analyzing satellite data from 2003 to 2011 over large wind farms in Texas. The researchers concluded that wind farms were contributing to local warming of the air at ground level. The researchers stated that if these wind farms were even bigger they could impact local weather and climate. The operative word local should be noted.

It is worthwhile to compare this study to another reported in December 2010 in Discovery News in an article entitled “Wind Turbines Increase Crop Growth.”   A University of Colorado study, as reported in this article, concluded that wind turbines  improve the growth of nearby corn and soybeans by keeping the crops dry and reducing temperature extremes. The increased air movement caused by the turbines cools the crops just as a fan makes air feel cooler in a room on a hot day. The article stated that wind turbines are like trees in that they modify local weather conditions. I suspect that the Daily Mail and Fox News will soon provide us with a headline that states, “Trees Contribute to Global Warming – We Need to Cut Them Down.” The truth is that any time you operate machinery its emits heat. Put a lot of it in an area and the air heats up. Operate a fan in a room and it changes air flow which moves warm and cool air around. How difficult is this to understand?

Finally it should be stated that wind farms represent a renewable energy source making it possible to rely less on fossil fuel burning, CO2 emitting power plants for our energy needs. Whereas we know that rising CO2 correlates to rising temperatures on a global scale.

 
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Space and Humanity in the 21st Century – Part 2: Orbiters, Rovers and Landers on Mars….Continued

Published on May 9, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Robots, Space, Water

By the end of 2012 Mars will have many human-built robots on its surface, in orbit around it, some artifacts and some operational.

In our last blog we talked about the compelling question we are trying to get the answers to in visiting Mars. What is our ultimate goal? Is it creating a human colony on the planet? Is it exploitation of potential Martian resources for use by humans on Earth? Or is it the science and the potential of discovering life elsewhere in the Universe that is driving our interest?

In 2003 Europe joined the United States with its first successful orbiter. Meanwhile Spirit and Opportunity were joined by a third lander in 2008, a lander with a robotic arm that was designed to find subsurface ice and test the chemical properties of its discovery.

So let’s continue the story about the unwrapping of the mysteries of Mars beginning with a new space agency player joining the search for life on Mars.

Mars Express

The European Space Agency (ESA) built its own multi-robot mission to Mars and launched it in June 2003. The spacecraft, an orbiter named Mars Express, included an additional small lander, Beagle-2, named after the ship upon which Charles Darwin made his epic voyage of discovery. The orbiter included a high resolution stereo camera plus a wide range of scientific instruments for mapping and studying surface and atmospheric composition.

Beagle-2 unfortunately failed in its landing attempt but Mars Express has been a great success working well beyond its one Martain year mission goal. It continues to provide images and telemetry to this day contributing to our further understanding of the geography and geochemistry of the planet.

This perspective image was created using the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express. It is colour coded by elevation. The image is of Tharsis Tholus, an 8 kilometer-high volcano. The relief has been exaggerated by a factor of three. Source: European Space Agency

Phoenix

The Phoenix Mars Lander was designed to study the circumpolar region of Mars. Why?

In 2002 instruments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter had discovered large quantities ice under the surface soils in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Phoenix was designed to “follow the water.” Its job was to sample subsurface ice and report on soil chemistry in the presence of ice.. Equipped with a robotic arm tipped with a shovel (see image below), and an on board set of experiments designed to do chemical analysis, Phoenix would give us a better picture of the potential for existing life on the planet.

Phoenix also had on board equipment to provide us with daily Martian weather reports for the northern arctic plain. Launched in August 2007, Phoenix touched down in May 2008. The lander mission in this harsh environment was scheduled to last ninety days. It exceeded this by almost two months before the photovoltaics (see the solar panel in the image below) could no longer gather sufficient sunlight as the northern hemisphere moved into winter.

The Phoenix Lander's robotic arm, seen in the upper right of this picture, continuously sampled Martian soils and subsurface ice throughout its mission delivering the content to the on board lab for analysis. Source: NASA/JPL/U of Arizona/ Texas A&M University

The findings of the Phoenix mission indicated the presence of liquid water with deposits of calcium carbonate left behind when the water evaporated. Deposits were attributed to precipitation in the form of snow mixing with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The soil chemistry included perchlorate, a big surprise discovery. Perchlorate on Earth is an oxidizing chemical that strongly attracts water and provides a food source for some Earth microbes. Could the perchlorate discovery by Phoenix indicate the presence of life currently on Mars?

Finally Phoenix observed something no scientists ever suspected – Martian snowfalls leading to a build up of water ice on the surface during Martian winters in the northern arctic plain.

The Phoenix findings once more reignited the life on Mars debate pointing to a strong likelihood that if it does not exist in the present, conditions for microbes to survive certainly have existed in the recent past.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Where there is water on Earth there is life. With this in mind much of our efforts to-date in exploring Mars have continued to focus on finding water. Once such mission is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched it 2005 and designed specifically to study Mars from this perspective.

This orbiter is the first to be completely designed to alter its configuration through phases of flight, to optimize fuel use and take advantage of aerobraking for orbital insertion manouevers. Slimmed down to weigh 2,180 kilograms (4,806 pounds) on blast off, of which more than half represented propellant for course corrections during the long voyage to Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived at the planet in 2006.

The orbiter is designed like a badminton birdie with the spacecraft using its large solar arrays as wings during aerobraking to slow it and reduce the size of each of its orbits. Components have been designed to withstand the heat generated by each aerobraking manoeuvre in and out of Mars’ upper atmosphere. Taking six months before settling into a final orbital trajectory, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in operation around Mars from 2006 to today.

During its long flight to Mars, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has tested new technologies for Deep Space communication using much less power. A new navigation camera has improved the precision of interplanetary flight manouevering.

The orbiter has also deployed six different scientific instruments and two on-board scientific facilities for conducting experiments. These experiments have mapped the gravity field of Mars and during aerobraking studied the structure of the Martian atmosphere.

Since its arrival three different cameras have been providing high-resolution images of the surface geography and weather on Mars. A sounding radar produces subsurface images to detect water ice to a depth greater than one meter (39 inches). A spectrometer identifies surface minerals. A radiometer measures atmospheric temperature, levels of dust and the presence of water vapour. The mission of the orbiter originally planned for one Martian year continues to this day amassing  more data than all previous Martian missions.

What has Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered?

Mars has extensive subsurface ice deposits that are subject to seasonal melting. As the orbiter has repeatedly passed over the same landscapes it has tracked these warm-season feature changes that strongly suggest evidence of salty liquid water flowing down gullies on the escarpment edges of craters.

These two pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show the dynamic nature of the Martian environment. On the left, we see an oblique angle view of what appears to be briny water flowing down the escarpment wall of a crater. These flow features average from one-half meter to less than 5 meters in width. On the right we see a dust devil travelling across a Martian plain. This dusty whirlwind is about 800 meters in height and 30 meters in diameter. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/U of Arizona

Based on these continued findings the next Martian mission, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, named Curiosity, will study one particular area of Mars to follow the water in pursuit of finding life. Curiosity is scheduled to land on the planet on August 6, 2012. We’ll look at its mission in a future blog.

 
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Space and Humanity in the 21st Century – Part 2: Orbiters, Rovers and Landers on Mars

Published on May 4, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Robots, Space

The state of our exploration of Mars can be described as follows:

  1. We are still wrestling with the results of experiments done by the two Viking landers that visited Mars in 1976.
  2. We are fascinated by the numerous detailed images our robotic orbiters have taken of the planet’s surface.  We see familiar things in land patterns that suggest the presence of water recently and in the past.
  3. We are measuring atmospheric seasonal changes that suggest either a chemical or biological change is occurring impacting the composition of the air from winter to summer and back again.

In the second decade of the 21st century Mars is more a puzzle than understood. The question our Martian adventure is getting close to answering is this: Is Earth the sole planet where living things exist? And we are getting closer to this answer without ever setting a human foot on the planet’s surface. Instead our Martian studies have involved a series of robotic missions loaded with scientific instruments. These missions have included orbiters, robotic landers and rovers. The information we have gleaned from these incredible machines has painted a picture of Mars that is altering our perspective of what constitutes a planet capable of harboring life. Let’s look at some of the technology that has gotten us to this point.

From Odyssey to Spirit and Opportunity

Odyssey

Aptly named Mars Odyssey after Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, NASA launched this robotic mission to the planet in April 2001. Its primary mission focused on studying the Martian atmosphere, surface and subsurface using three scientific instrument packages named THEMIS, MARIE and GRS. THEMIS was designed to study active thermal occurrences on the Martian surface in order to detect surface minerals by their spectral fingerprint. MARIE was designed to study the radiation from cosmic rays not only in the vicinity and surface of the planet but throughout the interplanetary space between Earth and Mars. GRS was designed to study Martian chemistry using gamma ray and neutron detectors. Odyssey arrived at Mars in October 2001 and entered orbit on the 24th. Its original mission was designed to end in August 2004. The spacecraft continues to operate on an extended mission more than a decade after its arrival.

The Odyssey mission has given us a better picture of both the planet and what a human mission would experience in travelling there. The results of MARIE sampling indicates that humans travelling between Earth and Mars would experience twice as much exposure to cosmic rays as humans on the International Space Station.

This image is compiled from a series of photographs taken by Mars Odyssey on March 13, 2006, combined with LIDAR laser altimetry readings made by the Mars Global Surveyor when it was in orbit. This is a view of the Valles Marineris, a canyon that spans 160 kilometers in width. The THEMIS team at Arizona State University have created a video fly through from which this image is taken. Source: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University

We also have learned from THEMIS that Mars polar ice caps unleash gas jets of CO2 every spring, that the Martian surface has extensive chloride salt deposits left behind when large bodies of liquid water evaporated, that the atmosphere can churn up dust storms and dust devils similar to those found in deserts on Earth, that at least one large crater, Aram Chaos, was once a lake, and that the planet has extensive water-eroded channels on its surface. From GRS data we have detected evidence of substantial subsurface ice as well as deposits of iron, silicon and potassium.

Spirit and Opportunity

In 2004 two robotic spacecraft arrived on the surface of Mars to deploy two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.  The mission for both rovers packed with scientific instruments was to last 90 days with the objective to explore the Martian terrain, study its geology, look for evidence of water in the past and present and relay images back to Earth receiving stations. Solar power and batteries have provided the power to all the instrumentation and cameras.

Deployed at landing sites on opposite sides of the planet both rovers exceeded expectations with Spirit the first to succumb to the harsh Martian environment as it became trapped in soft Martian terrain in spring of 2009, eventually falling silent during the winter of 2010.

Opportunity, however, continues to chug along as of May 2012, a remarkable feat of technological engineering supported by a dedicated team of Earth based scientists who continue to devise new experiments and missions for the rover.

This mosaic of images taken by Opportunity in January 2012 shows that despite the thinness of its atmosphere, Mars experiences winds that are the active shaper of its landscape today. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University

What both Spirit and Opportunity discovered shortly after landing included significant evidence that Mars was once a wet environment and that the evidence in the rocks shows that the planet has experienced wet and dry periods throughout its geological history.  While on the Martian surface Opportunity has far outpaced its sister rover, Spirit (7.7 kilometers or 4.8 miles before getting stuck) accumulating a total driving distance of 34.4 kilometers (21.4 miles). To experience a portion of Opportunity’s remarkable journey access the video created by the science support team’s piecing together of end-of-day images taken by the rover as it travelled almost 21 kilometers (13 miles) between the Victoria and Endeavour Craters on the planet’s surface.

Opportunity’s current location is on the edge of Endeavour Crater assignment where it is hunkered down in its fifth Martian winter. Acting as a stationary observation platform it is conducting a study of the interior of the planet using radio-tracking to measure any wobbles as the planet rotates. A significant wobble will indicate whether Mars has a molten core or not. As Martian spring and summer unfold Opportunity will resume its trek, an amazing accomplishment.

The story of our exploration of Mars will continue in our next Space and Humanity in the 21st Century blog.

 

 

 
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Quantum Computing Update: Experimental Quantum Simulator Eclipses Capacity of Current Supercomputers

Published on May 3, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Computers

Institutions and countries like to flex their computer muscle regularly by building the newest and most powerful supercomputers. As I write this blog today Japan’s K Computer is the reigning champion, four times more powerful than its nearest competitor and faster than the next top five supercomputers combined. With all this computing capacity what kind of research is done using this machine?

  1. Biomedical to find new medicines.
  2. Modelling of earthquakes and tsunamis.
  3. Modelling the universe to understand its origins and future.

If you don’t know the term petaflop, it is a measure of calculating speed. One petaflop equals one thousand trillion floating point operations per second. How does that compare with the computer that you may be using today? A single petaflop equals ten times the speed of all current networked computers in the United States. And the K Computer has a capacity of 10.51 petaflops.

The picture shows the hall in which the K Computer, the world's most powerful supercomputer, resides. Each of the 800 plus racks contains 100 CPUs. Source: RIKEN

Which brings us to the headline of today’s blog update. In the April 26 issue of Nature, researchers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, North Carolina State University and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa have collaborated to develop a quantum computer. Called a quantum simulator, the device is composed of single layer of 300 beryllium atoms which forms a pancake-shaped crystal. This programmable crystal although small has the computational potential to exceed all current supercomputers combined.

Quantum computers use a different computing measure than other computers. The term is qubits. For an explanation of qubits please read my previous blog, When will computers become more human? – Part 2: From Two Bits to Quantum and Neuromorphic Computing. Because quantum computers use calculations that are not limited to “0″ or “1″ there can be an infinite number of possibilities between those two values. A single beryllium atom equals one qubit. So 300 atoms equals 300 qubits.

When measuring quantum computers against computers using conventional floating operations per second there can be no comparison. Having said that the researchers who have built this beryllium quantum simulator project that its performance will exceed the capacity of any known computer by an 80 times factor, that’s only 20 short of a googol, a size equated with the total number of atoms in the entire known universe.

Containing 300 beryllium atoms hovering in space, the Quantum Simulator is less than a millimeter in diameter but has a 300 qubit capacity. Source: University of Sydney

With all of this capability housed in a crystal less than a millimeter in diameter and requiring far less energy input, theoretically only requiring the power of atoms to perform memory and processing tasks, it would seem that the days of supercomputers are numbered.

 
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Energy Update: Can We Develop a Battery that is Self Charging?

Published on May 2, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Energy, Storage

Carbon-based graphene was the topic around water coolers in materials science departments in the month of March as researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claimed to have invented a graphene-based battery running solely on ambient heat. If the results can be duplicated by other laboratories then these researchers may have found a new technology for self-charging portable devices.

What is graphene?  Discovered in 2004, graphene is a carbon-based material made from atoms bound together by double-electron bonds. It forms in thin films one atom in thickness. The picture below shows individual graphene crystals.

This electron microscopic picture shows individual graphene crystals. Researchers are exploring methods to develop graphene-based chip technology. Source: University of Houston

Graphene based ultrafast transistors would replace silicon-based technology. Graphene is seen as a potential high performance material replacing carbon fiber in avionics and aerospace construction.

In the Hong Kong study researchers did control tests on their graphene-based battery to ensure that the sustained energy output from the device was not coming from a chemical reaction. The jury remains out on this claim but if it is proven to be a workable technology then we may have a new power source for artificial organs that would be sustained by the heat generated within a body, or electronic devices that would continuously generate energy through interaction with a warm environment.

We’ll keep our eye on this one and let you know what the research community discovers when they attempt to duplicate these experimental results.

 
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Space and Humanity in the 21st Century – Part 1: Where We Are in 2012 with Human Space Flight

Published on May 1, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Robots, Space

The Space Race driven by ideology, economics, nationalism, and the military fuelled the technological advancements in rocketry,  robot spacecraft and human presence beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The ground shifted, however, with the end of the Soviet Union as a rival to the United States and NASA.

As the 20th century came to an end the outward urge to send humans to places like the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, and Mars, no longer were seen as imperatives of national policy. The big discoveries came from robot spacecraft, orbiters and mobile landers as they circled distant planets, journeyed to asteroids, or landed on and began exploring Mars.

Human occupation of space remained bound to low-Earth orbit. The International Space Station (ISS), conceived in the 1990s, assembled starting in 1998 and completed in 2011, represents the sole human-inhabited outpost in near-Earth space today. As impressive as it is, weighing 420,000 kilograms (925,00 pounds), and measuring 109 meters (357 feet) from end-to-end, the ISS lacks the cachet of the Apollo Program.

The International Space Station represents a significant technological achievement and a potential staging area for future space exploration initiatives. Source: NASA

The post-Apollo human era in space had been dominated by two very different space programs by the former ideological rivals. The American-built Space Shuttle program began in 1981 and ended in 2011. The Soviet MIR space station took ten years to build starting in 1986, became Russia’s program falling the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after completion in 1996 remained occupied continuously until 2001.

To date over 500 humans have travelled beyond Earth’s atmosphere, most into low-Earth orbit. Of these, 27 flew beyond Earth orbit and 12 walked on the surface of the Moon. In comparison our human population has grown from 3 billion at the time of Yuri Gagarin’s first human in space flight to 7 billion plus today.

Futurists of the 1960s predicted human space voyages to Jupiter and beyond. Arthur C. Clarke’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey, reflected in its timeline the outward spirit of adventure that came from early human space flight achievements. Those futurists envisioned lunar colonies, human voyages to near-Earth asteroids and Mars. But that’s not what happened. Instead the high tide of human space exploration ended with Apollo and the Moon landings. Space remained an important area for human activity but the romance of humans travelling beyond Earth was gone even though more countries were involved with space. Today, in fact, we have approximately 60 nations with formal space agencies and programs. Ten agencies have launch capability. And of these only three can launch humans into near-Earth orbit.

The European Space Agency has been a partner in the development of the ISS and has sent a number of its members to the space station on the American Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Other countries have also joined in among the 500 who have experienced space.

Recently China has launched its own human Shenzhou space flight program sending its first taikonaut (the Chinese equivalent to astronaut or cosmonaut, the American and Russian terms) into orbit in 2003. A second successful launch with two taikonauts in a multiple-day flight occurred in 2005 and a three-man crew followed with a spacewalk by one taikonaut in 2008.

Shenzhou-7 was an ambitious mission that coincided with Beijing being the host of the 2008 Olympic Games. This image was taken by the BX-1, a small monitoring satellite launched by the Shenzhou crew after achieving orbit. Note the similarity of Shenzhou to Soyuz spacecraft. Source: Xinhua

In 2011, China launched their first space station module, Tiangong and followed this with a successful unmanned Shenzhou-8 launch and docking of the two. China has announced its plans to build a 54,000 kilogram (120,000 pound) space station by 2020.

Not to be forgotten is the stirring of new players with space launch capability and ambitions to put humans in orbit. Inspired by the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award given to the first company to launch humans into suborbital flight twice over a two week period, the cheque was awarded to Scaled Composites and their spacecraft, SpaceshipOne. Scaled Composites were one of 25 companies who set out to win the award. Many of them continue to build their technologies with the goal to commercialize human spaceflight. SpaceShipTwo, the successor to the X Prize victor, is planning to launch commercial suborbital flights through its partner Virgin Galactic in 2015.

Virgin Galactic plans to add another 500 commercial passengers, nearly doubling the number of humans who have experienced the weightlessness of space. SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo appear in this picture. The latter appearing at the bottom of the image will begin commercial operations in 2013. Source: Virgin Galactic

SpaceX, a company that did not participate in the X Prize, has developed its own rocket launchers and capsules and is scheduled in May 2012 to send an unmanned cargo carrier to the ISS. Called Dragon, the spacecraft has been designed for both manned and unmanned low-Earth orbit missions.

SpaceX has built a complete launch system including unmanned and crewed capsules for low-Earth orbit. The company is the first to be commissioned by NASA to perform cargo missions to the International Space Station. Source: SpaceX

As we can see the end of the first decade of the 21st century our adventure into space continues to have very little of the human in it.  But that is about to change. Where we have truly experienced the thrill of new discovery has been through robotic space exploration, the subject of our next installment on space and humanity in the 21st century.

 
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Energy Update: Venture Partner Puts Money into Waste-to-Energy Projects

Published on May 1, 2012 by in 21st century technology, Biomass, Energy, Environment, Renewable

In a previous blog we talked about the challenges and promise of mining waste for energy. North America’s largest landfill and waste removal company, Waste Management Inc., today mines half of its 266 landfill sites in the United States and Canada for methane gas collected from decomposing garbage. The gas is used to fire turbines that generate electricity. Currently enough energy is produced to light up 1,300,000 homes and the company’s goal is to reach 2 million by 2020.

Waste Management Inc., although Houston based, has acquired companies or partnered with others overseas to deliver state-of-the-art waste-to-energy facilities for the United Kingdom and China. More recently it has launched a venture capital arm called the Organic Growth Group, to invest in companies working on breakthrough technologies that use garbage as a renewable resource.

In investing in new ventures Waste Management solves two challenges – finding technology that has commercial application for waste reduction, and being a supply source to deliver the waste it collects as fuel for these companies to exploit. As the company has made investments it has come to the realization that there is no single technology for turning waste into energy. Different waste streams exhibit different energy potential.

Three of the waste-to-energy projects that Organic Growth Group has invested in include:

Agilyx, a Portland, Oregon-based alternative energy producer that uses a patented system to gasify industrial plastics including those with contaminants and convert them into synthetic crude for diesel and other transportation fuels. The current system which is scalable converts 10 tons of plastic per day into 60 barrels (9,080 litres) of oil.

This Waste Management Inc., investment, Agilyx, has developed a process that takes difficult to recycle industrial and contaminated plastics and turns them into synthetic crude oil that can then be refined. Source: Agilyx

Enerkem Inc., a Montreal, Quebec company that has developed a proprietary thermochemical technology for converting waste into cellulosic ethanol, methanol  and industrial chemical byproducts. Enerkem uses sorted municipal solid waste, construction and demolition wood, and agricultural and forest residue as fuel sources. Currently the company has a demonstration facility, a pilot plant, and a third plant in the planning stage in Quebec. It is building its first full-scale commercial facility in Edmonton, Alberta, and another planned for Mississippi.

Enerkem uses a 4-step thermochemical process beginning with feedstock preparation, gasification, cleaning of the syngas and catalytic synthesis. Source: Enerkem

Harvest Power,  a Waltham, Massachusetts company, has developed a process for recycling food, yard and organic waste into renewable energy, compost and natural fertilizers. The company has developed a proprietary Covered Aerated Static Pile (CASP) system for composting. Its anaerobic digestion technology uses microorganisms to break down organic material producing bio gas containing methane and CO2. The bio gas is cleaned and can be distributed through natural gas pipelines or further compressed into liquid natural gas.

Harvest Power has developed one of the largest food scrap and yard debris composting facilities in Richmond, British Columbia using its CASP composting and odour control technologies. Source: Harvest Power

 
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