Thursday, September 12, 2013

Japanese astronaut to command space station in March

Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata is seen on a monitor during a training exercise in a cetrifuge at the Star City space centre outside Moscow, August 9, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Remezov


Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata is seen on a monitor during a training exercise in a cetrifuge at the Star City space centre outside Moscow, August 9, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Remezov

By Irene Klotz


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Aug 28, 2013 5:58pm EDT


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The first Japanese astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station is preparing for a return flight, this time to serve as commander, officials said on Wednesday.


Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, is due to leave in November with a pair of veteran astronauts from the United States and Russia.


Wakata, 50, is expected to take command of the orbital research outpost in March, marking the first time a Japanese astronaut will lead a human space mission.


"It means a lot to Japan to have its own representative to command the International Space Station," Wakata told a news conference broadcast from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.


"It's a big milestone for Japan ... to have this experience," he said.


In 2009, Wakata became the first astronaut from Japan to live aboard the $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above Earth.


Japan, one of 15 nations participating in the project, provided the station's largest and most elaborate laboratory, named Kibo, as well as cargo resupply ships.


Wakata, who was part of two missions on NASA's now-retired space shuttles, is training for his fourth flight along with NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, both 53.


Mastracchio, a veteran of three shuttle missions and one of NASA's most experienced spacewalkers, will be making his first long-duration flight. Tyurin will be living aboard the station for a third time.


Command of the station typically rotates between a U.S. astronaut and Russian cosmonaut. In 2009, Belgium astronaut Frank De Winne became the first European to command the station. Canada's first commander, Chris Hadfield, was in charge from March until May.


Wakata, a native of Saitama, Japan, holds a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering, a master's in applied mechanics and a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Kyushu University. Before being selected as an astronaut in 1992, he worked as an aircraft structural engineer for Japan Airlines.


Wakata's first two spaceflights, in January 1996 and October 2000, were aboard NASA space shuttles. He was Japan's first live-aboard space station resident from March to July 2009. Upon returning to the station in November, Wakata will serve as a flight engineer before taking over command in March.


(Reporting by Tom Brown,; Editing by Stacey Joyce)


View the original article here

Scientists discover key to normal memory lapses in seniors

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK | Wed Aug 28, 2013 2:24pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists have good news for all the older adults who occasionally forget why they walked into a room - and panic that they are getting Alzheimer's disease.

Not only is age-related memory loss a syndrome in its own right and completely unrelated to that dread disease, but unlike Alzheimer's it may be reversible or even preventable, researchers led by a Nobel laureate said in a study published on Wednesday.

Using human brains that had been donated to science as well as the brains of lab mice, the study for the first time pinpointed the molecular defects that cause cognitive aging.

In an unusual ray of hope for a field that has had almost nothing to offer older adults whose memory is failing, the study's authors conclude that drugs, foods or even behaviors might be identified that affect those molecular mechanisms, helping to restore memory.

Any such interventions would represent a significant advance over the paltry offerings science has come up with so far to prevent memory decline, such as advice to keep cognitively active and healthy - which helps some people, but not all, and has only a flimsy scientific foundation. By identifying the "where did I park the car?" molecule, the discovery could also kick-start the mostly moribund efforts to develop drugs to slow or roll back the memory lapses that accompany normal aging.

"This is a lovely set of studies," said Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, an expert on normal age-related memory decline who was not involved in the new study. "They provide clues to the underlying mechanism of age-related memory decline and will, hopefully, move us down the road toward targeted therapeutics."

About 40 percent of Americans age 85 and older say they experience some memory loss, a 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center found, as did 27 percent of those 75 to 84 and 20 percent of those ages 65 to 74.

BRAIN BANK

The researchers began with eight brains from the New York Brain Bank at Columbia University donated by people aged 33 to 88 who were free of brain disease when they died. They extracted two structures in the hippocampus, a vital cog in the brain's memory machinery: the dentate gyrus, a boomerang-shaped region whose function declines with age but is not affected by Alzheimer's, and the entorhinal cortex, which is largely unaffected by aging but is where Alzheimer's first takes hold, killing neurons.

The scientists then measured which genes had been active in each structure, and found one suspicious difference: 17 genes in the dentate gyrus became more active, or less, as the age of the brain increased.

The most significant change was that the gene for a protein called RbAp48 had essentially retired: The gene's activity tailed off dramatically the older a brain got. As a result, old brains had about half the RbAp48 of young brains, the scientists report online in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The scientists then sampled 10 more healthy human brains, ranging from 41 to 89 years at the time of death. Once again, the amount of RbAp48 protein declined with age in the dentate gyrus. They next confirmed that RbAp48 protein was also less abundant in the dentate gyrus of old mice compared to young ones.

For the final step, the scientists had to nail down whether the missing protein caused age-related memory loss. They genetically engineered mice whose RbAp48 genes were disabled. Result: The young mice had memories as poor as animals four times their age (the mouse equivalent of late middle age), and they had terrible trouble navigating a water maze or differentiating objects they had seen before from novel ones.

Crucially, the scientists also did the reverse experiment, engineering mice so their brains had extra doses of RbAp48. The mice's memories returned to the flower of youth.

"With RbAp48, we were able to reverse age-related memory loss in the mice," said Columbia's Dr Eric Kandel, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries of the molecular basis of memory and led the research. "Unlike in Alzheimer's, there is no significant cell death in age-related memory loss, which gives us hope it can be prevented or reversed."

Exactly how RbAp48 does that is not clear. The protein acts as a sort of genetic master key: By causing chromosomes to loosen their hold on the molecular spool they are wound around like thread, it allows genes to be turned on. Among the activated genes, Kandel explained, are those involved in forming memories.

The emerging picture is that levels of RbAp48 decline with age, allowing chromosomes to maintain a death grip on their spools. Memory genes remain dormant, and you can't remember that you promised your spouse you would make dinner.

The researchers plan to see what social and dietary factors might boost RbAp48 in mice, said Kandel, who will be 84 in November. Pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, physical and cognitive exercise are all candidates, said Columbia's Dr Scott Small, co-senior author of the study.

Testing such interventions in mice should be more useful to humans than tests of drugs for Alzheimer's, he said. RbAp48 "is different," Small said. "Alzheimer's does not occur naturally in the mouse. Here, we've caused age-related memory loss in the mouse, and we've shown it to be relevant to human aging."

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Prudence Crowther)


View the original article here

Insight: Research renaissance offers new ways out of depression

Prozac medicine is seen at a pharmacy in Los Angeles, California, in this October 18, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/Files


1 of 3. Prozac medicine is seen at a pharmacy in Los Angeles, California, in this October 18, 2010 file photo.

Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson/Files

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent


LONDON | Mon Sep 9, 2013 6:53am EDT


LONDON (Reuters)- As Susan sits chatting to a nurse in a London clinic, a light tapping sound by her head signals that parts of her brain are being zapped by thousands of tiny electro-magnetic pulses from a machine plugged into the wall.


The 50 year-old doctor is among growing ranks of people with so-called treatment-resistant depression, and after 21 years fighting a disorder that destroyed her ability to work and at times made her want to "opt out of life", this is a last resort.


Until recently, Susan and others like her had effectively reached the end of the road with depression treatments, having tied the best drugs medical science had to offer, engaged in hours of therapy, and tried cocktails of both.


But a renaissance in research into depression prompted by some remarkable results with highly experimental treatments has changed the way neuroscientists see the disorder and is offering hope for patients who had feared there was nowhere left to go.


Their drive to find an answer has taken neuroscientists to uncharted waters - researching everything from psychedelic magic mushrooms, to the veterinary tranquilizer ketamine, to magnetic stimulation through the skull, to using electrical implants - a bit like a pacemaker for the brain - to try and reset this complex organ's wiring and engender a more positive outlook.


Their sometimes surprising findings have in turn taught them more about depression - leading to a view of it not as a single mental illness but a range of disorders each with distinct mechanisms, yet all producing similarly debilitating symptoms.


"The thinking about depression has been revitalized," said Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta in the United States.


"We have a new model for thinking about psychiatric diseases not just as chemical imbalance - that your brain is a just big vat of soup where you can just add a chemical and stir - but where we ask different questions - what's wrong with brain chemistry and what's wrong with brain circuits."


ADD A CHEMICAL AND STIR?


There's little doubt that until this new breath of hope, depression had been going through a bad patch.


Affecting more than 350 million people, depression is ranked by the World Health Organization as the leading cause of disability worldwide. In extreme cases, depressed people kill themselves. Around a million people commit suicide every year, the majority due to unidentified or untreated depression.


Treatment for depression involves either medication or psychotherapy - and often a combination of both. Yet as things stand, as many as half of patients fail to recover on their first medication, and around a third find no lasting benefit from any medication or talking therapy currently available.


High hopes for "wonder" drugs like Prozac, Seroxat and others in their class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in the 1980s and 1990s were dimmed by studies in the 2000s that showed they helped a proportion of people, but left at least 30 percent of patients little or no better than before.


And as chronically depressed patients move from trying one drug to the next, or one type of therapy to another, their hopes too dim as it becomes clear that failing to get better with each depressive bout in turn also ups their chances of relapse.


For Susan, the battle seemed never ending.


When she was at her lowest, she dreaded each day, says she was "frightened of everything" and overwhelmed even by straightforward tasks like making a meal for her two children.


"I was taking double doses of antidepressants - two types at once - and because I was also very agitated I was on (the sedative) chloral hydrate to help me sleep," she told Reuters.


"So I was on this massive amount of medication, but with no effect whatsoever on my depression. Nothing was working."


Desperate to help patients like Susan, and alarmed by news of some pharmaceutical firms such as GlaxoSmithKline abandoning research and development in depression because it was proving too hard to find new drugs that could turn a profit, doctors began looking for new approaches.


"We often encounter patients who say 'I've tried a million things and nothing seems to be working'," said Rafael Euba, a consultant psychiatrist at the London Psychiatry Centre (LPC)where Susan was treated. "We want to instill a feeling of hope."


ELECTRO-THERAPY


In Susan's case, past experience with a controversial electrical intervention - electro convulsion therapy (ECT) - which she says was what eventually clawed her back from her severe depression 17 years ago, lead her to investigate the latest in electrical treatments - so-called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS


Approved by medicines regulators in the United States and in Europe it is a painless treatment that uses electro-magnetic induction to activate an area of the brain that psychiatrists know is involved in the regulation of mood.


Unlike ECT, which gained notoriety in the 1975 American drama film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, rTMS it does not induce "shock", but is far more targeted, delivering a pulse to neurons in the brain and that makes them fire again.


At the LPC - currently the only place in Britain where patients can get rTMS - a treatment course can be anything from 3 to 6 weeks of half an hour a day, five days a week.


It isn't cheap. The treatment costs 1,500 pounds ($2,300) per week, with the average course lasting four weeks. And some patients also need weekly or fortnightly "maintenance" sessions beyond that.


Patients put on a white fabric cap and the electro-magnetic coil is positioned over the part of the brain that needs help - normally the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, which is a few inches above the temple beneath the skull.


"Unlike with other psychiatric treatments, patients tend to find this experience quite pleasant," said Euba. "All you get is a slight tingling on the scalp - and some people like that because it's a physical sensation that something is happening."


Although they are from a controlled trial and show only a snapshot of the couple of dozen patients treated and monitored at one clinic, Euba's results so far have been striking.


Of 24 patients with depression ranging from mild to severe who received rTMS at the LPC, 18 of them - or 75 percent - got completely well and were classed as being in remission. Two more responded to treatment but did not get completely well, and only four - 17 percent - did not respond.


DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION


Mayberg and her colleagues in the United States had also been intrigued by the potential for electrical stimulation to ease severe depression, but they went in deeper.


After the success of using deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices made by firms such as Medtronic to treat tremors in patients with Parkinson's disease, her team conducted a trial using them in a small number of patients who'd had depression for decades and had not been helped by numerous different drugs.


Electrical stimulation devices were implanted into the brains of patients with severe depression and bipolar disorder.


"In this treatment the stimulation continues all the time - they implant the "pacemaker" and leave it switched on for years - and only sometimes they have to change the battery," said Jonathan Roiser, a reader in cognitive neuroscience at University College London.


According to study results published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal last year, the number of patients who had responded to treatment after two years was very high - at 92 percent - and the proportion who were completely well and in remission from their depression was 58 percent.


For psychiatrists more used to seeing patients fail again and again to get better on any kind of treatment, these results were unheard-of. "It was a remarkable finding," says Roiser.


Yet it's not just the brain's wiring that is getting more attention. Chemistry, too has thrown up some exciting results.


Researchers who looked, for example, at the veterinary tranquilizer ketamine - or "Special K" as it is called as a party drug - found that in some patients with depression it dramatically reduced their symptoms, sometimes within hours - and kept their mood stable for several weeks after treatment.


Inspired by these uplifting findings, several drug firms, including Roche, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson's Janssen unit, are in the early or mid stages of developing ketamine derivatives into what they hope will become successful new antidepressants.


DEFINE SUBTYPES AND TREAT ACCORDINGLY


Experts say the success these new and some still experimental treatments for depression emphasizes the re-thinking of it as not one but a cluster of disorders.


"We now have this increasingly influential model of what is causing mental health problems like depression - one focused on the brain circuits," said Roiser.


"We've learnt a lot about how these circuits operate, what kind of cognitive tasks they are involved in, how they interact and how they are connected to each other."


More evidence of this came in a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which researchers found that brain scans of depressed patients could help predict whether they would be more likely to respond to treatment with anti-depressant drugs or with psychotherapy.


The study focused on a part of the brain known as the insula, which plays a role in influencing emotions.


It found that in patients whose scans showed their insula consumed an excess of glucose, psychotherapy was more likely to help. In patients whose insula were less active, consuming less glucose, antidepressants were more successful.


"Our gut tells us there are subtypes (of depression), and this shows that if you look the brain, you should define the biology and treat accordingly - just as we do in other branches of medicine (like cancer or diabetes)," said Mayberg.


Far from being defeated by the emergence of depression as a more complex a disorder than first assumed, scientists say the renaissance in research is based in confidence that deeper knowledge will ensure new and better treatments can be found.


Roiser confesses to feeling "extremely excited and optimistic" about the future of treating mental illnesses.


"We're in a movement away from the traditional psychological and biological explanations for depression - which look increasingly outdated and simplistic - and we're in the middle of specifying these disorders in terms of their underlying brain circuits," he said. "That's a much better position than we were in 20 years ago."


($1 = 0.6398 British pounds)


(Reporting and writing by Kate Kelland; Editing by Peter Graff)


View the original article here

Glitch resolved, NASA probe on its way to the moon

The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky is pictured at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia September 5, 2013. REUTERS/NASA/Handout via Reuters


1 of 2. The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky is pictured at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia September 5, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/Handout via Reuters

By Irene Klotz


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Sun Sep 8, 2013 4:28pm EDT


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Engineers have resolved a minor glitch with a new NASA robotic lunar probe, which blasted off Friday night for the first leg of a 30-day trip to the moon.


Shortly after the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, spacecraft separated from its Minotaur 5 launch vehicle, its positioning system shut down due to what appeared to be a high electrical current.


Engineers quickly determined there was no problem with the reaction wheels, which are needed to steer and stabilize the spacecraft. Rather, the glitch involved a fault protection system designed to safeguard the wheels.


"The limits that caused the powering off of the wheels soon after activation were disabled, and reaction wheel fault protection has been selectively re-enabled," NASA wrote in a statement posted on its website.


Engineers will assess how to manage the fault protection system, added project manager Butler Hine, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.


LADEE blasted off aboard the Minotaur 5 rocket, which was making its debut flight, at 11:27 p.m. EDT/0327 GMT on Saturday from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.


The rocket, made up of three decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile motors and two commercial boosters, deposited LADEE into a highly elliptical orbit stretching as far as 170,000 miles from Earth. During its third pass around the planet, LADEE will be in position to fire its braking rocket and slip into lunar orbit.


A 30-day checkout of the probe's science instruments will follow. Engineers also will test a prototype two-way optical laser communications system that NASA is developing for use on future space probes.


LADEE's main mission is to analyze the thin shell of gases enveloping the lunar surface, a tenuous atmosphere known as an exosphere. It also will look for signs that the lunar dust rising off the surface.


Scientists believe the dust may be the cause of a strange glow on the lunar horizon spotted by the Apollo astronauts and NASA's 1960s-era Ranger robotic probes.


LADEE was the first deep-space probe to fly from the Wallops Island spaceport. On September 17, Orbital Sciences Corp. (NYSE: ORB) is scheduled to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo capsule on a trial run to the International Space Station for NASA.


The station, a project of 15 countries, flies about 250 miles above Earth.


(Reporting by Irene Klotz)


View the original article here

Baseball-sized meteor blows up over Alabama

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:02pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A baseball-sized meteor blasted over the southeastern United States on Monday night, creating a bright streak of light, a sonic boom and a ruckus on Twitter, officials said on Tuesday.

The meteor appeared at 9:18 p.m. EDT over Alabama, traveling at about 76,000 mph. It exploded 25 miles above Woodstock, Alabama, located about 30 miles from Birmingham.

"Objects of this size hit the Earth's atmosphere on a daily basis, but this one happened near Birmingham, which is a fairly decently sized city and lot of people saw it," Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, told Reuters.

Many of the more than 180 eyewitness reports came from people attending a Mumford & Sons concert in Birmingham.

"This one wasn't at 2 in the morning, so a lot of people were out and about," Cooke said.

"I saw what I first thought was a falling star and then it turned bright green," an observer from Anniston, Alabama, posted on the American Meteor Society website.

"I saw it near Dallas Highway in Marietta, (Georgia), near the National Battlefield," wrote another witness. "At first, I thought it was an errant firework, but it was bigger, neon green, came straight down and then disappeared."

Scientists calculated the meteor's orbit and determined that it came from an unknown comet. It exploded so low in Earth's atmosphere that it triggered a sonic boom.

The meteor was too bright to be picked up by NASA's All-sky Fireball Network, which tracks meteors brighter than Venus with 12 cameras in the eastern United States and New Mexico but whose parameters are set to screen out things like lightning.

The network did detect nearly two dozen other meteors on Monday night, including five that are part of the little-known annual Epsilon Perseids meteor shower, which peaks in early- to mid-September.

Sky watchers also are on the lookout for Comet ISON, which is due to pass by Mars this month and by Earth in November.

The comet, which was discovered last September by a pair of amateur astronomers in Russia, is expected to pass relatively close to the sun on November 28. As it approaches, heat from the sun vaporizes ice in the comet's body, creating a bright tail.

But so far, Comet ISON hasn't brightened as much as astronomers had predicted.

"People are no longer thinking it is going to be visible in daylight," Cooke said.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Phil Berlowitz)


View the original article here

Mouse body clock study offers clues to possible jet lag cure

LONDON | Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:22pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have found a genetic mechanism in mice that hampers their body clock's ability to adjust to changes in patterns of light and dark, and say their results could someday lead to the development of drugs to combat jet lag.

Researchers from Britain's Oxford University and from the Swiss drug firm Roche used mice to analyze patterns of genes in an area of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) - which in mammals pulls every cell in the body into the same biological rhythm.

They found that one molecule, called SIK1, is key to how the mice responded to changes in light cycles.

When the scientists blocked the activity of SIK1, the mice recovered faster from disturbances in their daily light and dark cycle that had been designed to induce a form of mouse jet lag.

If the corresponding mechanism can be found and similarly blocked in humans, jet lag may become a thing of the past, the researchers said in their study, published online in the journal Cell on Thursday.

"We're still several years away from a cure for jet lag, but understanding the mechanisms that generate and regulate our circadian clock gives us targets to develop drugs to help bring our bodies in tune with the solar cycle," said Russell Foster, director of Oxford's sleep and circadian neuroscience institute.

He said such drugs could also have broader potential value, including for people with mental illnesses where sleep disturbances are common.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)


View the original article here

NASA's Mars rover spies solar eclipse

Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, is pictured in the midst of an annular eclipse of the sun on August 17, 2013 in this combination of three handout photographs taken three seconds apart by NASA's Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars. REUTERS/NASA/Handout via Reuters


Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, is pictured in the midst of an annular eclipse of the sun on August 17, 2013 in this combination of three handout photographs taken three seconds apart by NASA's Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/Handout via Reuters

By Irene Klotz


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:49pm EDT


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity turned its cameras skyward to snap pictures of the planet's moon, Phobos, passing in front of the sun, images released on Thursday show.


Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012 for a two-year mission to determine if the planet most like Earth in the solar system has, or ever had, the chemical ingredients for life. It struck pay dirt in its first analysis of powder drilled out from inside a once water-soaked piece of bedrock.


The rover is now enroute to its primary hunting ground, a three-mile (5-km) high mountain of layered sediment called Mount Sharp. It paused on August 17 to snap pictures of Mars' larger moon, Phobos, making a dash in front of the sun. NASA released three pictures, taken three seconds apart, of the eclipse, taken with the rover's telephoto lens.


"This one is by far the most detailed image of any Martian lunar transit ever taken. It was even closer to the sun's center than predicted, so we learned something," Curiosity scientist Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University said in a statement.


Curiosity is scheduled to moonlight as an astronomer again in September and October when it tries to catch a glimpse of the approaching Comet ISON.


View the original article here

Biggest U.S. rocket blasts off with spy satellite

An unmanned Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the largest booster in in the U.S. fleet, lifts off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California August 28, 2013. REUTERS/Gene Blevins


1 of 7. An unmanned Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the largest booster in in the U.S. fleet, lifts off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California August 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Gene Blevins


LOS ANGELES | Wed Aug 28, 2013 9:09pm EDT


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An unmanned Delta 4-Heavy rocket, the largest in the U.S. fleet, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Wednesday to put a classified spy satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office, officials said Wednesday.


The 23-story-tall rocket lifted off at 11:03 a.m. local time/1803 GMT from a launch pad originally built for, but never used by, NASA's now-retired space shuttles.


No details about the rocket's spy-satellite payload were released.


With three main booster-rocket cores, the Delta 4-Heavy is capable of putting a satellite the size of school bus into an orbit around Earth's poles.


Wednesday's launch was the second Delta 4-Heavy to fly from California. The rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., also has flown five times from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.


"We are truly honored to deliver this critical asset to orbit," United Launch Alliance vice president Jim Sponnick said in a statement, praising the groups involved in the launch effort.


(Reporting by Irene Klotz from Cape Canaveral, Florida; Editing by Steve Gorman and Ken Wills)


View the original article here

Scientists grow "mini human brains" from stem cells

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON | Wed Aug 28, 2013 1:01pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have grown the first mini human brains in a laboratory and say their success could lead to new levels of understanding about the way brains develop and what goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.

Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab that allowed them to grow into so-called "cerebral organoids" - or mini brains - that consisted of several distinct brain regions.

It is the first time that scientists have managed to replicate the development of brain tissue in three dimensions.

Using the organoids, the scientists were then able to produce a biological model of how a rare brain condition called microcephaly develops - suggesting the same technique could in future be used to model disorders like autism or schizophrenia that affect millions of people around the world.

"This study offers the promise of a major new tool for understanding the causes of major developmental disorders of the brain ... as well as testing possible treatments," said Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research but was impressed with its results.

Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, described the work as "fascinating and exciting". He said it extended the possibility of stem cell technologies for understanding brain development and disease mechanisms - and for discovering new drugs.

Although it starts as relatively simple tissue, the human brain swiftly develops into the most complex known natural structure, and scientists are largely in the dark about how that happens.

This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of what might be going wrong in - and therefore how to treat - many common disorders of the brain such as depression, schizophrenia and autism.

GROWING STEM CELLS

To create their brain tissue, Juergen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain's Edinburgh University Human Genetics Unit began with human stem cells and grew them with a special combination of nutrients designed to capitalize on the cells' innate ability to organize into complex organ structures.

They grew tissue called neuroectoderm - the layer of cells in the embryo from which all components of the brain and nervous system develop.

Fragments of this tissue were then embedded in a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor - a system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids.

After a month, the fragments had organized themselves into primitive structures that could be recognized as developing brain regions such as retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex, the researchers explained in a telephone briefing.

At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimeters (0.16 inches), they said. Although they were very small and still a long way from resembling anything like the detailed structure of a fully developed human brain, they did contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue.

"This is one of the cases where size doesn't really matter," Knoblich told reporters.

"Our system is not optimized for generation of an entire brain and that was not at all our goal. Our major goal was to analyze the development of human brain (tissue) and generate a model system we can use to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting."

In an early sign of how such mini brains may be useful for studying disease in the future, Knoblich's team were able to use their organoids to model the development of microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which patients develop an abnormally small head, and identify what causes it.

Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory.

"The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and has a frighteningly elaborate number of connections and interactions, both between its numerous subdivisions and the body in general," said Dean Burnett, lecturer in psychiatry at Cardiff University.

"Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in the lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows - there is a connection there, but we're a long way from that sort of application yet."

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)


View the original article here

NASA adds more space launch platforms for sale to private firms

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Aug 20, 2013 7:11pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - While NASA considers competing bids to take over a shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, it added three mobile launch platforms to its list of excess equipment available to private industry, officials said on Tuesday.

Ideally, NASA wants a commercial launch company to take over one or more of the massive steel platforms, which were originally built in 1967 to support the Apollo moon program's Saturn rockets. The 25-foot (7.6-meter) tall platforms were later modified for the space shuttles, which flew from 1981 until 2011.

Recycling the platforms, which measure 160 feet by 135 feet is another option, a solicitation on NASA's procurement website shows.

The U.S. space agency also is interested in other uses for the mobile launch platforms, which served as bases to stack and assemble the shuttle and then transport it to the launch pad. The platforms provided power and umbilical connections and had open sections for flames and rocket exhaust to pass through.

"At this point, NASA is looking to gauge interest for potential use of the (platforms) and concepts for potential use," spokeswoman Tracy Young said.

Proposals are due September 6.

NASA is already assessing bids for the shuttle launch pad from two competing firms backed by Internet billionaires.

NASA is also turning over the shuttle's runway to Space Florida, a state-backed economic development agency. Space Florida, in turn, plans to make the runway and support facilities available to a variety of commercial companies, including privately owned XCOR Aerospace, which is developing a two-person, suborbital spaceship called Lynx that takes off and lands like an airplane.

Another potential customer is Stratolaunch Systems, an orbital space vehicle backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The most contentious - and highest profile - piece of shuttle equipment available is a Kennedy Space Center launch pad that has attracted competing bids from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal and chief executive of electric car company Tesla Motors.

Bezos and Musk, both billionaires, are vying for Launch Complex 39A. NASA intends to keep the second shuttle launch pad, 39B, for a new heavy-lift rocket under development called the Space Launch System.

Musk's Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, California, wants 39A to launch its Falcon 9 and planned Falcon Heavy rockets. The privately owned firm, also known as SpaceX, already flies from a leased launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, located just south of the Kennedy Space Center.

The first Falcon 9 rocket flight from a new launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is scheduled for next month. The company has a backlog of more than 50 launches, including 10 missions to fly cargo for NASA to the International Space Station.

SpaceX also is developing a version of its Dragon cargo ship to fly astronauts.

Startup Blue Origin, a Kent, Washington, firm owned by Bezos, submitted an alternative proposal to NASA to run pad 39A as a multi-user facility.

Both firms say they are ready to take over maintenance and operations of the launch pad on October 1.

United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, did not bid on the shuttle's launch pad, but has publicly endorsed Blue Origin's proposals. The company, which has a lucrative monopoly on launching U.S. military satellites, is facing its first competition for the business from rival launch pad bidder SpaceX.

The main NASA facilities that will remain are the shuttle launch pad 39B, plus various hangars for the Orion deep space capsule to be launched by NASA's heavy lift rocket, due to begin test flights in 2017.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)


View the original article here

Mothballed telescope gets new life as asteroid hunter

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Aug 21, 2013 7:24pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA will reactivate a mothballed infrared space telescope for a three-year mission to search for potentially dangerous asteroids on a collision course with Earth, officials said on Wednesday.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, telescope also will hunt for targets for a future mission to send a robotic spacecraft to rendezvous with a small asteroid and relocate all or part of it into a high orbit around the moon.

Astronauts would then visit the relocated asteroid during a test flight of NASA's deep-space Orion capsule, scheduled for launch around 2021. Orion and a heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System are slated for an unmanned debut test flight in 2017.

NASA is spending about $3 billion a year for Orion and Space Launch System development.

Launched in December 2009, the WISE telescope spent 13 months scouting for telltale infrared signs of asteroids, stars, distant galaxies and other celestial objects, especially those too dim to radiate in visible light.

As part of its all-sky mapping mission, WISE observed more than 34,000 asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and another 135 asteroids in orbits that come close to Earth.

Overall, scientists cataloged more than 560 million objects with WISE.

Most of the telescope's instruments were turned off when its primary mission was completed in February 2011.

NASA plans to bring WISE out of hibernation next month and operate it for another three years, at a cost of about $5 million per year, said NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown.

"After a quick checkout, we're going to hit the ground running," WISE astronomer Amy Mainzer, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

NASA already has found about 95 percent of the near-Earth asteroids that are .62 miles or larger in diameter.

The agency is about halfway through a 15-year effort to find 90 percent of all near-Earth objects that are as small as about 459 feet in diameter.

The search took on a note of urgency after a small asteroid blasted through the skies above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013 and exploded with 20- to 30 times the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. More than 1,500 people were injured by flying glass and debris.

Later that same day, a much larger but unrelated asteroid soared closer to Earth than the networks of communication satellites that ring the planet.

The events prompted Congressional hearings and new calls for NASA and other agencies to step up their asteroid detection initiatives.

The Obama administration proposes to double NASA's $20 million Near-Earth Objects detection programs for the 2014 fiscal year beginning October 1.

About 66 million years ago, an object 6 miles in diameter smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs, as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

(Editing by Kevin Gray)


View the original article here

Italian astronaut recounts near-drowning during spacewalk

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Aug 22, 2013 4:48pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - As his helmet filled with water, blurring his vision and cutting off radio communications, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano says his thoughts quickly turned to the possibility of drowning during a recent spacewalk outside the International Space Station.

Parmitano gave a blow-by-blow account of the terrifying incident, which occurred on July 16, in a blog published this week.

"I can't even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid," Parmitano wrote on the European Space Agency's website.

"It's vital that I get inside as quickly as possible ... but how much time do I have? It's impossible to know," he wrote.

NASA, which oversaw the spacewalk, is investigating the cause of Parmitano's helmet malfunction. Pieces of the failed spacesuit are due to be returned to Earth for analysis aboard an upcoming SpaceX Dragon cargo ship or Russian Soyuz capsule, NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said.

Parmitano was setting up an internet cable between the space station's Unity connecting node and the Russian Zarya module when he noticed liquid collecting inside his helmet.

"The unexpected sensation of water at the back of my neck surprises me - and I'm in a place where I'd rather not be surprised," Parmitano wrote.

NASA says the water did not come from a drink bag in the space suit. Engineers are focusing on the suit's backpack, which holds a water storage tank for a liquid-cooled undergarment.

A week before the incident, Parmitano had become the first Italian astronaut to walk in space.

THURSDAY SPACEWALK

In a far more routine spacewalk on Thursday, two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the $100 billion research complex, which flies about 250 miles above Earth, to do some maintenance work.

Flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin left the Russian Pirs airlock at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT) for their second spacewalk in less than a week.

Their main goal was to remove a laser communications system from outside the Zvezda module, the crew's main living compartment, and install a swiveling platform for a future telescope.

Yurchikhin and Misurkin removed the laser system, which had been used since 2011 for high-speed data transmissions from Russian science experiments to ground stations. But they ran into a problem as they prepared to install a base for a pair of cameras that comprise the new telescope.

The cosmonauts realized that if the base was attached as planned, the camera's steerable platform would have been misaligned, said a translator monitoring communications between the spacewalkers and Russian flight controllers.

Flight controllers told the spacewalkers to skip that work and bring the equipment into the airlock. They moved on to their next task - inspecting covers on antennas used to dock Europe's unmanned cargo ships after one cover was seen floating away from the station on Monday.

Halfway through their work tightening screws to keep the remaining covers in place, Russian flight controllers changed their minds and told the cosmonauts to retrieve the telescope platform from the airlock and go ahead with the installation.

"They realized the camera platform would only be out of alignment in the yaw axis, not in the roll or pitch axes," NASA mission commentator Pat Ryan, referring to the three directions of motion, said during a TV broadcast of the spacewalk by the U.S. space agency.

"They determined it would be possible to correct for that misalignment ... by using the pointing platform," he said.

Thursday's six-hour spacewalk came six days after a 7-1/2 hour outing by Yurchikhin and Misurkin, which set a Russian record. That spacewalk, as well as one that the cosmonauts made on June 24, were primarily to prepare the station for a new multipurpose Russian module that is scheduled for launch in December.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Additional reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel in Moscow; Editing by Tom Brown, Vicki Allen and Eric Beech)


View the original article here

Three space station crewmembers land after 166-day mission

The International Space Station crew members (L to R) U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin walk after donning space suits before the launch at the Baikonur cosmodrome March 28, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool


The International Space Station crew members (L to R) U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin walk after donning space suits before the launch at the Baikonur cosmodrome March 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool

By Irene Klotz


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Tue Sep 10, 2013 11:18pm EDT


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut left the International Space Station on Tuesday, leaving a skeleton crew to maintain the outpost until replacements arrive later this month.


Outgoing station commander Pavel Vinogradov, NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin bid their crewmates good-bye and climbed aboard their Russian Soyuz capsule to prepare for a 3.5-hour flight back to Earth after 166 days in orbit.


"The time has gone by so incredibly fast," Cassidy said during an inflight interview last week.


"It'll be really sad to leave. This is an incredible experience ... but by the same token, I'm ready to go. It's time for some other people to come ... and I'm really excited to go back and see my friends and family."


Before leaving, Vinogradov, a veteran of three spaceflights, transferred command of the $100 billion station, a project of 15 nations, to fellow cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who remains aboard with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Karen Nyberg.


"We had a great environment here, very friendly and very warm," Vinogradov said through a translator in a ceremony on NASA TV on Monday marking the change in command.


Strapped inside their Soyuz capsule, Vinogradov, Cassidy and Misurkin pulled away from the station's Poisk module at 7:35 p.m. EDT/1135 GMT as the two ships sailed 258 miles above Mongolia, said NASA mission commentator Brandi Dean.


Three hours later, the Soyuz hit the top of Earth's atmosphere, giving the men their first sampling of gravity since their launch on March 28.


The final leg of the journey took place under parachutes, with the capsule finally coming to a stop on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. EDT/0258 GMT, marking the end of the Expedition 36 mission.


The space station has been continuously staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.


Following medical checks, Vinogradov and Misurkin will be flown to Star City near Moscow. Cassidy will fly on a NASA jet back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.


A replacement space station crew, headed by veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and including rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy and Michael Hopkins, is due to launch on September 25.


(Editing by Christopher Wilson)


View the original article here

Scientists grow "mini human brains" from stem cells

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON | Wed Aug 28, 2013 1:01pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have grown the first mini human brains in a laboratory and say their success could lead to new levels of understanding about the way brains develop and what goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.

Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab that allowed them to grow into so-called "cerebral organoids" - or mini brains - that consisted of several distinct brain regions.

It is the first time that scientists have managed to replicate the development of brain tissue in three dimensions.

Using the organoids, the scientists were then able to produce a biological model of how a rare brain condition called microcephaly develops - suggesting the same technique could in future be used to model disorders like autism or schizophrenia that affect millions of people around the world.

"This study offers the promise of a major new tool for understanding the causes of major developmental disorders of the brain ... as well as testing possible treatments," said Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research but was impressed with its results.

Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, described the work as "fascinating and exciting". He said it extended the possibility of stem cell technologies for understanding brain development and disease mechanisms - and for discovering new drugs.

Although it starts as relatively simple tissue, the human brain swiftly develops into the most complex known natural structure, and scientists are largely in the dark about how that happens.

This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of what might be going wrong in - and therefore how to treat - many common disorders of the brain such as depression, schizophrenia and autism.

GROWING STEM CELLS

To create their brain tissue, Juergen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain's Edinburgh University Human Genetics Unit began with human stem cells and grew them with a special combination of nutrients designed to capitalize on the cells' innate ability to organize into complex organ structures.

They grew tissue called neuroectoderm - the layer of cells in the embryo from which all components of the brain and nervous system develop.

Fragments of this tissue were then embedded in a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor - a system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids.

After a month, the fragments had organized themselves into primitive structures that could be recognized as developing brain regions such as retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex, the researchers explained in a telephone briefing.

At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimeters (0.16 inches), they said. Although they were very small and still a long way from resembling anything like the detailed structure of a fully developed human brain, they did contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue.

"This is one of the cases where size doesn't really matter," Knoblich told reporters.

"Our system is not optimized for generation of an entire brain and that was not at all our goal. Our major goal was to analyze the development of human brain (tissue) and generate a model system we can use to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting."

In an early sign of how such mini brains may be useful for studying disease in the future, Knoblich's team were able to use their organoids to model the development of microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which patients develop an abnormally small head, and identify what causes it.

Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory.

"The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and has a frighteningly elaborate number of connections and interactions, both between its numerous subdivisions and the body in general," said Dean Burnett, lecturer in psychiatry at Cardiff University.

"Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in the lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows - there is a connection there, but we're a long way from that sort of application yet."

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)


View the original article here

Pentagon, NASA to spend $44 billion on space launches through 2018: GAO

Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria


Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria


WASHINGTON | Mon Sep 9, 2013 7:42pm EDT


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Defense Department and NASA expect to spend about $44 billion to launch government satellites and other spacecraft over the next five years, including $28 billion in procurement funding, the Government Accountability Office said on Monday.


The GAO, a congressional watchdog agency, said it was difficult to determine exact funding plans because both agencies used different accounting methods, but it arrived at the combined total by analyzing Pentagon and NASA budget documents, and looking at funding from other government agencies.


GAO said the projected funding data was an initial step toward answering a larger request from lawmakers who question the steep cost of space launches, and why efforts to inject more competition have not gotten more traction.


"Defense and civilian government agencies together expect to require significant funding, nearly $44 billion, in 'then-year' dollars that factor in anticipated future inflation, for launch-related activities from fiscal years 2014 through 2018," the agency said in a letter to the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.


Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the investigations subcommittee, and John McCain, the top Republican on the panel, had asked GAO to investigate space launch funding to get a better handle on the overall government effort.


GAO said it would continue to look into the larger question surrounding "impediments to economical procurement of government launch vehicles and launch services."


The Pentagon and NASA have sought in recent years to introduce more competition to the space launch business, which is largely dominated by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, the Pentagon's two largest suppliers.


Orbital Sciences Corp and privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, are trying to break into the market for launching large government satellites into space.


In a letter to the Levin and McCain, GAO said it hoped the aggregated data would help "inform plans to lower launch costs, increase competition, and invest in new programs."


GAO said planned procurement funding of $28 billion accounted for about 65 percent of the total amount through fiscal 2018, with the Pentagon accounting for about $16 billion of that amount.


Combined research, development and testing activities accounted for about $11 billion, or 26 percent, according to the GAO letter. NASA accounts for the lion's share of that projected funding, or $10.5 billion, including about $7 billion on its work on a launch vehicle and the ground systems needed to support human exploration of deep space.


(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Ken Wills)


View the original article here

NASA robotic spacecraft lifts off to probe lunar dust

By Irene Klotz

Sat Sep 7, 2013 5:17am EDT

n">(Reuters) - An unmanned Minotaur 5 rocket blasted off from the Virginia coast on Friday to send a small NASA science satellite on its way to the moon, officials said.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft, known as LADEE, was designed to look for dust rising from the lunar surface, a phenomenon reported by the Apollo astronauts decades ago.

"For the first time in 40 years, we have the opportunity to address that mystery," project scientist Richard Elphic, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a launch broadcast on NASA TV.

From an orbit as low as about 31 miles above the lunar surface, LADEE also will probe the thin pocket of gases surrounding the moon. The tenuous atmosphere, which contains argon, helium, sodium, potassium and other elements, may hold clues about how water came to be trapped inside craters on the moon's frozen poles.

"We're taught in grade school and probably junior high that the moon has no atmosphere," Elphic said.

"Indeed it does have an atmosphere, but it's utterly unlike our own atmosphere. It's very tenuous," he said.

LADEE's 30-day trip to the moon began with an 11:27 p.m. EDT/0327 GMT Saturday liftoff of a five-stage Minotaur rocket making its debut flight. The first three stages are decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile motors, and the last two stages are commercial motors manufactured by Alliant Techsystems Inc.

The rocket blasted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility, the first deep-space mission to fly from the Virginia spaceport.

Weather permitting, the rocket was expected to be visible from Maine to eastern North Carolina, and as far west as Wheeling, West Virginia. New Yorkers were due to be treated to a live televised view of the launch on the Toshiba Vision Screen in Times Square, just below the site where the famous New Year's Eve ball is dropped.

The use of decommissioned missile components drove the decision to fly from Wallops Island, one of only a few launch sites permitted to fly refurbished ICBMs under U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.

LADEE's month-long journey to the moon includes three highly elliptical passes around Earth, timed so that during the final orbit the probe will be far enough away to be captured by the moon's gravity after LADEE fires its braking rocket.

Once LADEE is in lunar orbit, scientists will check out the spacecraft's three instruments and test a prototype optical laser communications system. Science operations are expected to begin in November.

"This is a science mission, but it has some new technology," Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, told Reuters. "We're confident stuff will work, but we certainly will be watching very, very carefully as each of these new things unfolds."

The $280 million mission is expected to last about six months.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz in Portland, Maine; Editing by Jackie Frank and Eric Walsh)


View the original article here

Archaeologists use drones in Peru to map and protect sites

Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian archaeologist with Lima's Catholic University and an incoming deputy culture minister, flies a drone to take pictures of the archaeological site of San Jose de Moro in Trujillo July 18, 2013. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo


1 of 8. Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian archaeologist with Lima's Catholic University and an incoming deputy culture minister, flies a drone to take pictures of the archaeological site of San Jose de Moro in Trujillo July 18, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Mariana Bazo

By Mitra Taj


LIMA | Sun Aug 25, 2013 9:06am EDT


LIMA (Reuters) - In Peru, home to the spectacular Inca city of Machu Picchu and thousands of ancient ruins, archaeologists are turning to drones to speed up sluggish survey work and protect sites from squatters, builders and miners.


Remote-controlled aircraft were developed for military purposes and are a controversial tool in U.S. anti-terrorism campaigns, but the technology's falling price means it is increasingly used for civilian and commercial projects around the world.


Small drones have been helping a growing number of researchers produce three-dimensional models of Peruvian sites instead of the usual flat maps - and in days and weeks instead of months and years.


Speed is an important ally to archaeologists here. Peru's economy has grown at an average annual clip of 6.5 percent over the past decade, and development pressures have surpassed looting as the main threat to the country's cultural treasures, according to the government.


Researchers are still picking up the pieces after a pyramid near Lima, believed to have been built some 5,000 years ago by a fire-revering coastal society, was razed in July by construction firms. That same month, residents of a town near the pre-Incan ruins of Yanamarca reported that informal miners were damaging the three-story stone structures as they dug for quartz.


And squatters and farmers repeatedly try to seize land near important sites like Chan Chan on the northern coast, considered the biggest adobe city in the world.


Archaeologists say drones can help set boundaries to protect sites, watch over them and monitor threats, and create a digital repository of ruins that can help build awareness and aid in the reconstruction of any damage done.


"We see them as a vital tool for conservation," said Ana Maria Hoyle, an archaeologist with the Culture Ministry.


Hoyle said the government plans to buy several drones to use at different sites, and that the technology will help the ministry comply with a new, business-friendly law that has tightened the deadline for determining whether land slated for development might contain cultural artifacts.


Commercial drones made by the Swiss company senseFly and the U.S. firms Aurora Flight Sciences and Helicopter World have all flown Peruvian skies.


Drones are already saving archaeologists time in mapping sites - a crucial but often slow first step before major excavation work can begin. Mapping typically involves tedious ground-level observations with theodolites or pen and paper.


"With this technology, I was able to do in a few days what had taken me years to do," said Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian archaeologist with Lima's Catholic University and an incoming deputy culture minister who plans to use drones to help safeguard Peru's archaeological heritage.


Castillo started using a drone two years ago to explore the San Jose de Moro site, an ancient burial ground encompassing 150 hectares (0.58 square miles) in northwestern Peru, where the discovery of several tombs of priestesses suggests women ruled the coastal Moche civilization.


"We have always wanted to have a bird's-eye view of where we are working," said Castillo.


In the past, researchers have rented crop dusters and strapped cameras to kites and helium-filled balloons, but those methods can be expensive and clumsy. Now they can build drones small enough to hold with two hands for as little as $1,000.


"It's like having a scalpel instead of a club, you can control it to a very fine degree," said Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist with Harvard University who has worked at San Jose de Moro and other sites in Peru. "You can go up three meters and photograph a room, 300 meters and photograph a site, or you can go up 3,000 meters and photograph the entire valley."


Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, have flown over at least six different archaeological sites in Peru in the past year, including the colonial Andean town Machu Llacta some 4,000 meters (13,123 feet) above sea level.


Peru is well known for its stunning 15th century Machu Picchu ruins, likely a getaway for Incan royalty that the Spanish were unaware of during their conquest, and the Nazca Lines in southern Peru, which are best seen from above and were mysteriously etched into the desert more than 1,500 years ago.


But archaeologists are just as excited about other chapters of Peru's pre-Hispanic past, like coastal societies that used irrigation in arid valleys, the Wari empire that conquered the Andes long before the Incas, and ancient farmers who appear to have been domesticating crops as early as 10,000 years ago.


With an archaeology budget of around $5 million, the Culture Ministry often struggles to protect Peru's more than 13,000 sites. Only around 2,500 of them have been properly marked off, according to the ministry.


"And when a site is not properly demarcated, it is illegally occupied, destroyed, wiped from the map," said Blanca Alva, an official with the ministry charged with oversight.


DRONE 'DEMOCRATIZATION'


Steve Wernke, an archaeologist with Vanderbilt University exploring the shift from Incan to Spanish rule in the Andes, started looking into drones more than two years ago.


He tried out a drone package from a U.S. company that cost around $40,000. But after the small plane had problems flying in the thin air of the Andes, Wernke and his colleague, engineer Julie Adams, teamed up and built two drones for less than $2,000.


The drones continue to have altitude problems in the Andes, and Wernke and Adams now plan to make a drone blimp.


"There is an enormous democratization of the technology happening now," Wernke said, adding that do-it-yourself websites like DIYdrones.com have helped enthusiasts share information.


"The software that these things are run on is all open-source. None of it is locked behind company patents," he said.


There are some drawbacks to using drones in archaeology. Batteries are big and short-lived, it can take time to learn to work with the sophisticated software and most drones struggle to fly in higher altitudes.


In the United States, broader use of drones has raised privacy and safety concerns that have slowed regulatory approvals. Several states have drafted legislation to restrict their use, and one town has even considered offering rewards to anyone who shoots a drone down.


But in Peru, archaeologists say it is only a matter of time before drones replace decades-old tools still used in their field, and that the technology can and should be used for less destructive uses.


"So much of the technology we use every day comes from warfare," said Hoyle. "It is natural this is happening."


Some of the first aerial images taken of Peru's archaeological sites also have their roots in combat.


The Shippee-Johnson expedition in 1931 was one of several geographic surveys led by U.S. military pilots that emerged from the boom in aerial photography during World War I. It produced reams of images still used by archaeologists today.


After seeing one of those pictures at a museum in New York some 10 years ago, Wernke decided he would study a town designed to impose Spanish culture on the indigenous population in the 1570s. He describes it as "one of the largest forced resettlement programs in history."


"I went up the following year to see it and found the site, and I said, 'OK, that's going to be a great project once I can afford to map it," said Wernke. He said drones have mapped nearly half of his work site. "So it all started with aerial images in the '30s, and now we want to go further with UAVs."


(Editing by Kieran Murray and Douglas Royalty)


View the original article here

Sliced and diced, digitally: autopsy as a service

An Infovalley staff member shows the digital autopsy forensic application, which possesses three-dimensional capabilities to view and dissect the digital body in high definition visuals, at the company's office in Kuala Lumpur June 13, 2013. REUTERS/Bazuki Muhammad

1 of 9. An Infovalley staff member shows the digital autopsy forensic application, which possesses three-dimensional capabilities to view and dissect the digital body in high definition visuals, at the company's office in Kuala Lumpur June 13, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad

By Jeremy Wagstaff

SINGAPORE | Tue Aug 20, 2013 5:11pm EDT

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Malaysian entrepreneur Matt Chandran wants to revive the moribund post-mortem by replacing the scalpel with a scanner and the autopsy slab with a touchscreen computer.

He believes his so-called digital autopsy could largely displace the centuries-old traditional knife-bound one, speeding up investigations, reducing the stress on grieving families and placating religious sensibilities.

He is confident there's money in what he calls his Autopsy as a Service, and hopes to launch the first of at least 18 digital autopsy facilities in Britain in October, working closely with local authorities.

Around 70 million people die each year, says Chandran, and around a tenth of those deaths are medico-legal cases that require an autopsy. "That's a huge number, so we're of the view that this is a major line of services that is shaping up around the world," he said in an interview.

The poor common perception of autopsies has undermined their commercial appeal. "Unfortunately, because the process of the post-mortem is seen as gruesome, one tends to ignore that," says Chandran.

Humans have been cutting each other open for at least 3,000 years to learn more about death, but the autopsy has never been widely embraced outside TV crime dramas. Surgeons in 18th century Britain, for example, robbed graves for corpses to dissect, some even commissioning murders when supplies dried up.

By the 1950s, the autopsy was at its zenith, with pathologists performing post-mortems on more than 60 percent of those who died in the United States and Europe - helping uncover more than 80 major, and perhaps thousands of minor, medical conditions.

But the number of autopsies has fallen steadily: Today, fewer than 20 percent of deaths in Britain are followed by autopsy, and most of these are ordered by coroners in cases where the cause of death is unclear or disputed.

The fall has been blamed on a growing distaste for a procedure regarded by some as crude and outdated - a feeling fanned by the public discovery in Britain in 1999 that medical institutions had been retaining organs and tissue after post-mortems for decades.

DIGITAL MAKEOVER

Chandran, 45, wants to change all this by simply connecting his company iGene's 3D imaging software to any standard medical CT or MRI scanner. An expert can then inspect the virtual cadaver in 3D, removing layers of cloth, skin and bone with a mouse or by gestures on a tabletop touchscreen.

The advantages, Chandran says, are considerable.

The digital evidence remains intact and can be reviewed; experts can more easily spot and identify fracture, foreign objects such as bullets, and the tips of knife wounds; and grieving families can swiftly learn how their loved ones died and without having to cut open the body.

iGene isn't the first to run a scanner over a corpse. Radiology has been used on skulls for 30 years, and Israel first introduced the concept of a virtual autopsy in 1994. The U.S. military started conducting CT scans of all soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004 in addition to traditional autopsies.

The results have been encouraging. Researchers from University College London concluded that in fetuses and individuals aged 16 and younger, a minimally invasive autopsy incorporating an MRI scan identified the same cause of death as 90 percent of traditional autopsies.

COMMERCIALISE

But iGene is, Chandran says, the first to package the process and offer it commercially as a suite of services that stretches from the moment of death to the delivery of a post-mortem report.

His company provides a software suite that uses existing medical scanners from the likes of Siemens, General Electric, Toshiba and Philips. These form the heart of iGene's digital autopsy facilities which the company plans to build close to UK mortuaries. The first will open in October in the northern English city of Sheffield.

A spokesperson for Sheffield City Council confirmed it was working with iGene on such a centre, but declined to give details.

Chandran says his company will spend around $77 million to build and run the facilities and will make its money from those cases where a coroner demands a post-mortem. About 200,000 deaths require autopsies each year in Britain, he said.

Next of kin will be given the option of a classical autopsy, paid for by the state, or a digital autopsy, costing about 500 pounds ($780) and paid for by the family.

SKEPTICS

Not everyone believes the digital autopsy is ready for prime time. Some question whether it can spot some diseases. And even a pioneer like Guy Rutty, chief forensic pathologist at the University of Leicester and the first to use CT images as evidence in a criminal trial, says that while demand may be growing there are limits to what a digital autopsy can do - particularly determining where and in some cases when a patient died.

"There are centers providing such services, but others have been more cautious and are still at a research stage," he said in an email interview.

Chandran and his team are undeterred. They say the digital autopsy facility combines with other non-invasive diagnostic tools such as angiography and toxicology.

Pramod Bagali, chief operations officer of iGene's parent company InfoValley, says the system is "a complementary method, not a complete replacement" to traditional autopsies, but could handle 70 percent of routine cases. The others could be done digitally to start with and then a decision could be made about whether to open up the body. "It's not replacing one flawed system with another," he says.

Crucially, iGene offers a business model that overcomes concerns that scanning corpses is expensive, says Chandran. He estimates his UK operation will be profitable within three years. But that, he says, is just the start. By then, he says, he hopes to have built at least 10 more facilities in his native Malaysia, with interest also from the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere in Asia.

"The potential for this is global," said Mark Rozario, CEO of Agensi Inovasi Malaysia, a government body which this year bought a 20 percent stake in iGene for $21.5 million.

SUPPORTERS

Chandran and his supporters see this as the beginning of his innovation, not the end of it. The digital autopsy facilities are nodes in a broader ecosystem Chandran likens to Apple Inc's iTunes.

Michael Thali, a Swiss academic who has been promoting a "virtual autopsy" for more than a decade, said he tried and failed to get the scanner makers interested in developing such services. Now an adviser to iGene, Thali says this leaves open the field to other companies to deliver improvements in the chain of examination.

"The future will be for smaller companies who are bringing a service for this niche," he says. "The most important thing is that you have a real chain based on IT."

This is some way off - and may never happen.

Milos Todorovic, lead analyst at Lux Research and a specialist in medical innovation, says that while iGene's approach is intriguing, it faces hurdles - not least the fact that the company is starting from scratch in an expensive business. "A lot of things would have to fall into place for them to be able to succeed with something like this," he said.

That isn't stopping Chandran from dreaming big - including the idea of scanning the living as part of any regular medical checkup.

"Just like a birth certificate starts with the birth of a baby, the end of a person's life will end with a report in which the 3D body of a person is captured," he said. "In that way we can archive every person born on this planet."

(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)


View the original article here

New NASA spacecraft to investigate moon mystery

An artist's concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft seen orbiting near the surface of the moon. REUTERS/NASA Ames/Dana Berry/Handout


An artist's concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft seen orbiting near the surface of the moon.

Credit: Reuters/NASA Ames/Dana Berry/Handout

By Irene Klotz


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Sep 4, 2013 5:54pm EDT


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - More than 40 years after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, NASA is preparing to launch a small robotic spacecraft to investigate one of their most bizarre discoveries.


Crews reported seeing an odd glow on the lunar horizon just before sunrise. The phenomenon, which prompted a notebook sketch by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, was unexpected because the airless moon lacked atmosphere for reflecting sunlight.


Scientists began to suspect that dust from the lunar surface was being electrically charged and somehow lofted off the ground, a theory that will be tested by the U.S. space agency's upcoming Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Experiment.


The spacecraft, known as LADEE, is scheduled to be launched at 11:27 p.m. EDT on Friday from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.


"Terrestrial dust is like talcum powder. On the moon, it's very rough. It's kind of evil. It follows electric field lines, it works its way in equipment. ... It's a very difficult environment to deal with," said LADEE project manager Butler Hine of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.


In addition to studying fly-away lunar dust, LADEE will probe the tenuous envelope of gases that surrounds the moon, a veneer so thin it stretches the meaning of the word "atmosphere."


Instead, scientists refer to these environments as exospheres and hope that understanding the moon's gaseous shell will shed light on similar pockets around Mercury, asteroids and other airless bodies.


"LADEE is part of a much broader scientific exploration of the solar system," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science.


The $280 million mission also includes an experimental laser optical communications system that NASA hopes to incorporate into future planetary probes, including a Mars rover scheduled for launch in 2020.


The prototype is based on technology used in terrestrial fiber-optic communications systems, such as Verizon's FiOS. NASA says the system should be at least six times faster than conventional radio communications. Also, its transmitters and receivers weigh half as much as similar radio communications equipment and use 25 percent less power.


"On the Earth, we've been using laser communication and fiber optics to power our Internet and everything else for the last couple of decades," Grunsfeld said. "NASA has really been wanting to make that same technological leap and put it into space. This is our chance to do that."


LADEE's optical communications system, which includes three ground stations in addition to LADEE, will be tested before the probe drops into a low lunar orbit to begin its science mission about 60 days after launch.


Just getting to the moon will take LADEE 30 days - 10 times longer than the Apollo missions due to the probe's relatively low-powered Minotaur 5 launcher.


The rocket is comprised of three refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile motors and two commercially provided boosters. The Minotaur 5 configuration will be flying for the first time with LADEE.


The use of decommissioned missile components drove the decision to fly from NASA's Wallops Island facility, one of only a few launch sites permitted to fly refurbished ICBMs under U.S.-Russian arms control agreements.


(Editing by Tom Brown and Stacey Joyce)


View the original article here

Voyager left solar system last year, new research shows

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Aug 15, 2013 8:28pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's long-lived Voyager probe crossed into interstellar space last year, becoming the first man-made object to leave the solar system, new research shows.

Scientists have been waiting for Voyager to detect a magnetic field that flows in a different direction than the solar system's magnetic field. But the new research shows that scenario is not accurate.

"We think that the magnetic field within the solar system and in the interstellar are aligned enough that you can actually pass through without seeing a huge change in direction," University of Maryland physicist Marc Swisdak said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

That would mean that Voyager actually reached interstellar space last summer when it detected a sudden drop in the number of particles coming from the sun and a corresponding rise in the number of galactic cosmic rays coming from interstellar space.

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Voyager lead scientist Edward Stone, now retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Swisdak's research is interesting but different computer models are portraying different scenarios to explain the Voyager data.

"We know where Voyager is in terms of distance and we know what it is observing. The challenge is relating that to these complex models of the interaction between the interstellar medium and the heliosphere," Stone said, referring to the bubble of space that falls under the sun's influence.

Stone and other scientists believe Voyager is in a previously unknown region, dubbed a "magnetic highway," that exists between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

Voyager 1 and a sister probe, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to study the outer planets. Voyager 1 is now about 120 times farther away from the sun than Earth. Voyager 2 is heading out of the solar system in a different direction.

The probes are powered by the slow decay of radioactive plutonium. Voyager 1 will begin running out of energy for its science instruments in 2020. By 2025, it will be completely out of power.

If Swisdak and colleagues are correct, Voyager 1's magnetic field readings will stay pretty much the same throughout the remainder of its mission.

"If they see a strong shift in the magnetic field, a big jump, then that means that what we've outlined can't be correct," Swisdak said.

"I'm perfectly willing to be proven wrong here and if I were, that would be kind of cool. But it agrees with all the data that we have so far," he added.

More evidence may come when Voyager 2 crosses the solar system's boundary as well.

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Bill Trott)


View the original article here

China to land first probe on moon this year

China's Shenzhou 10 spacecraft and its carrier Long March 2-F rocket are seen being transferred to its launching site at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, Gansu province June 3, 2013. REUTERS/Stringer


China's Shenzhou 10 spacecraft and its carrier Long March 2-F rocket are seen being transferred to its launching site at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, Gansu province June 3, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stringer


BEIJING | Wed Aug 28, 2013 10:07am EDT


BEIJING (Reuters) - China will land its first probe on the moon at the end of this year, state media reported on Wednesday, the next step in an ambitious space program which includes eventually building a space station.


In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess, which took images of the surface and analyzed the distribution of elements.


That launch marked the first step in China's three-stage moon mission, to be followed by an unmanned moon mission and then the retrieval of lunar soil and stone samples around 2017.


The official Xinhua news agency said that the Chang'e Three was on track for a landing towards the end of the year.


"Chang'e Three has officially entered its launch implementation stage following its research and construction period," it cited a government statement as saying.


"The mission will see a Chinese orbiter soft-land, or land on the moon after using a technique to slow its speed, on a celestial body for the first time," Xinhua added, without providing further details.


Chinese scientists have talked of the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.


China successfully completed its latest manned space mission in June, when three astronauts spent 15 days in orbit and docked with an experimental space laboratory critical in Beijing's quest to build a working space station by 2020.


China is still far from catching up with the established space superpowers, the United States and Russia, which decades ago learned the docking techniques China is only now mastering.


Beijing insists its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted China's increasing space capabilities and said Beijing is pursuing a variety of activities aimed at preventing its adversaries from using space-based assets during a crisis.


(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Ron Popeski)


View the original article here

Cosmonauts prepare for new lab in record Russian spacewalk

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Fri Aug 16, 2013 6:36pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Friday to set up power and ethernet cables for a new research laboratory scheduled to arrive in December.

Flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin opened the hatch on the station's Pirs airlock at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) to kick off a 7-hour, 29-minute spacewalk, the longest ever by Russian cosmonauts.

The spacewalk eclipsed by 13 minutes the Russians' previous record set in July 2000 outside the Mir space station. The longest spacewalk overall was an 8-hour, 56-minute outing in 2001 by two NASA astronauts working outside the International Space Station.

Yurchikhin, who was making his seventh spacewalk, and Misurkin, on his second, spent most of their time routing two power cables and an ethernet line for a new Russian multipurpose laboratory called Nauka.

"There's a lot of intricate and delicate stringing (of the cables) through handrails and hook points," NASA mission commentator Rob Navias said during a televised broadcast of the spacewalk.

The outing is the third of six spacewalks Russia plans to conduct this year.

NASA meanwhile is still investigating the cause of a spacesuit helmet leak that forced two other crew members at the space station to abort a spacewalk on July 16.

Russia's Orlan spacesuits are different from NASA's but "due diligence was paid in preparation for this spacewalk," Navias said.

"Everything was in good shape," he added.

In addition to rigging cables between the Russian Zarya and Poisk modules, Yurchikhin and Misurkin attached a panel of experiments on a handrail on Poisk that will remain outside to expose sample materials to the space environment.

The cosmonauts are scheduled for another spacewalk on August 22 to install a swiveling platform for a telescope.

Russia's Nauka module, which will serve as research lab, docking port and airlock, will replace the Pirs docking compartment, which will be detached from the space station and flown into the atmosphere, where it will be incinerated.

The station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations, flies about 250 miles above Earth. It has been permanently staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Eric Walsh)


View the original article here

Japan's newest rocket fails to lift off

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO | Tue Aug 27, 2013 9:25am EDT

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's first new rocket in 12 years failed to lift off on Tuesday, dealing a potential blow to hopes that Japan may be able to take a larger share of the growing, multi-billion dollar satellite launch industry.

It was the second setback for the Epsilon rocket this month.

An earlier launch was postponed because of a computer glitch. No word was immediately available on the cause of the problem on Tuesday or when the launch might be tried again.

The countdown at Japan's Uchinoura launch centre was broadcast live over the Internet, with commentary in English as well as Japanese. But nothing happened at the end of the countdown.

JAXA, Japan's space agency, later said the launch was halted with 19 seconds to go. Japanese media said an "irregularity" had been detected.

A three-stage rocket, the Epsilon - named for the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet - is 24.4 meters (80 feet) high, about half the size of Japan's workhorse H2A rocket. It weighs 91 tons and has been touted as a new, low-cost alternative.

The rocket was scheduled to carry a telescope into space for observation of the solar system.

Analysts said it was not immediately clear how much of an impact the failure would have on Japan's ambitions to cash in on the international satellite launch industry.

"This was the first flight and it was already postponed once and now will be postponed again," said Yukihiro Kumagai, an analyst at Jefferies & Co securities in Tokyo.

"Inevitably, this will raise some questions, but overall it is unlikely to have much influence," he added, noting that the Epsilon is not scheduled for another flight until 2015.

The rocket's smaller size and a computer system that allows it to perform its own system checks means it can be assembled quickly, which is expected to cut both personnel and equipment costs.

Launch control can be carried out using conventional desktop computers, greatly reducing costs and making the launches more mobile since they could take place at more sites.

U.S. companies had a monopoly on the commercial launch business 30 years ago, but its hold has steadily declined, with most of the business going to the France-based Arianespace, a public-private European partnership that in 2012 reported revenue of 1.3 billion euros.

The market has been shaken up by the recent entry of the California-based Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX.

Russia also markets a variety of rockets for space launches. Its workhorse Soyuz spaceships have been the only vehicles delivering crews to the ISS since the U.S. Space Shuttle fleet was retired from service in 2011.

India and China also provide launch services to some extent.

(Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Robert Birsel and Ron Popeski)


View the original article here

U.S. scientist operates colleague's brain from across campus

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK | Tue Aug 27, 2013 5:26pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scientists said Tuesday they have achieved the first human-to-human mind meld, with one researcher sending a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motion of a colleague sitting across the Seattle campus of the University of Washington.

The feat is less a conceptual advance than another step in the years-long progress that researchers have made toward brain-computer interfaces, in which electrical signals generated from one brain are translated by a computer into commands that can move a mechanical arm or a computer cursor - or, in more and more studies, can affect another brain.

Much of the research has been aimed at helping paralyzed patients regain some power of movement, but bioethicists have raised concerns about more controversial uses.

In February, for instance, scientists led by Duke University Medical Center's Miguel Nicolelis used electronic sensors to capture the thoughts of a rat in a lab in Brazil and sent via Internet to the brain of a rat in the United States. The second rat received the thoughts of the first, mimicking its behavior. And electrical activity in the brain of a monkey at Duke, in North Carolina, was recently sent via the Internet, controlling a robot arm in Japan.

That raised dystopian visions of battalions of animal soldiers - or even human ones - whose brains are remotely controlled by others. Some of Duke's brain-computer research, though not this study, received funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

FINGERING A KEYBOARD

For the new study, funded by the U.S. Army Research Office and other non-military federal agencies, UW professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao, who has studied brain-computer interfaces for more than a decade, sat in his lab on August 12 wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain.

He looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game but only mentally. At one point, he imagined moving his right hand to fire a cannon, making sure not to actually move his hand.

The EEG electrodes picked up the brain signals of the "fire cannon!" thought and transmitted them to the other side of the UW campus.

There, Andrea Stocco of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences was wearing a purple swim cap with a device, called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coil, placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls the right hand's movement.

When the move-right-hand signal arrived from Rao, Stocco involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. He said the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily was like that of a nervous tic.

"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said.

Other experts suggested the feat was not particularly impressive. It's possible to capture one of the few easy-to-recognize EEG signals and send "a simple shock ... into the other investigator's head," said Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, who was not part of the research.

Rao agreed that what his colleague jokingly called a "Vulcan mind meld" reads only simple brain signals, not thoughts, and cannot be used on anyone unknowingly. But it might one day be harnessed to allow an airline pilot on the ground help someone land a plane whose own pilot is incapacitated.

The research has not been published in a scientific journal, something university spokeswoman Doree Armstrong admits is "a bit unusual." But she said the team knew other researchers are working on this same thing and they felt "time was of the essence."

Besides, she said, they have a video of the experiment which "they felt it could stand on its own." The video is here

The absence of a scientific publication that other researchers could scrutinize did not sit well with some of the nation's leading brain-computer-interface experts. All four of those reached by Reuters praised UW's Rao, but some were uneasy with the announcement and one called it "mostly a publicity stunt." The experiment was not independently verified.

(The story corrects funding source in fifth paragraph and eliminates reference to Skype in eighth)

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Cynthia Osterman)


View the original article here