Humans Might Not Be The Only Creatures That Care About The Welfare Of Other Animals. Scientists Are Beginning

Brain, Bone and Blood Vessels Coming Hot Off the Press

Could the days of custom clavicles and bespoke bladders produced just in the knick of time for suffering patients be around the corner?

While keeping an eye on tissue engineering studies, we’ve been seeing some significant wins in the lab that are bringing the sci-fi future of on-demand 3-D printed organs, bone and blood vessels closer. 

Harvard and Brown bioengineers are taking their own routes to build complex tissues in customized 3-D printers. And just the other week, we reported on newly unveiled work at the University of Florida to print complex soft structures in baths that could one day birth replacement human parts along with soft robots.

Now, Carnegie Mellon engineers reported on Friday that they had successfully printed simplified proof-of-concept anatomical structures like mini femurs, blood vessels and brains suspended in soft gelatin. Learn more and see a video below.

Keep reading

‘Gene drive’ mosquitoes could end malaria once and for all

Splish, Splash, Orion Takes a Bath

The Orion spacecraft is a capsule built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before, to deep space and eventually Mars. But before astronauts travel inside this new vehicle, we have to perform tests to ensure their safety.

One of these tests that we’ll talk about today simulates an ocean splashdown. Water impact testing helps us evaluate how Orion may behave when landing under its parachutes in different wind conditions and wave heights. The spacecraft has been undergoing a series of these tests at our Langley Research Center’s Hydro Impact Basin…which is our fancy way of saying pool.

The test capsule, coupled with the heat shield from Orion’s first spaceflight, swung like a pendulum into Langley’s 20-foot-deep basin on Aug. 25.

Inside the capsule were two test dummies – one representing a 105-pound woman and the other, a 220-pound man — each wearing spacesuits equipped with sensors. These sensors will provide critical data that will help us understand the forces crew members could experience when they splash down in the ocean.

This specific drop was the ninth in a series of 10 tests taking place at Langley’s Landing and Impact Research Facility. It was designed to simulate one of the Orion spacecraft’s most stressful landing scenarios, a case where one of the capsule’s three main parachutes fails to deploy. That would cause Orion to approach its planned water landing faster than normal and at an undesirable angle.

Under ideal conditions, the Orion capsule would slice into the water of the Pacific Ocean traveling about 17 miles per hour. This test had it hitting the pool at about 20 mph, and in a lateral orientation. Instead of being pushed down into their seats, astronauts in this scenario would splashdown to the side.

With this test’s success and one final drop in this series scheduled for mid-September, researchers have accumulated a lot of important information.

To find out more, visit nasa.gov or follow @nasaorion​ on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

What’s in a Name? Gaming Names Reveal Lots About the Player’s Personality

What’s in a name? In the case of the usernames of video gamers, a remarkable amount of information about their real world personalities, according to research by psychologists at the University of York.

The research is in Computers in Human Behavior. (full open access)

One thing we’re always doing as a species is expanding our knowledge of the heavens. We send out probes, robots, satellites, spacecraft, all to map out and add to our ever-expanding picture of what the Universe looks like.

But what if that picture suddenly became smaller? That is exactly what happened when new data from the Planck satellite tightened our previous notions of the observable universe, shrinking its area by 0.7%.

If you’ve never realized, we don’t actually see all of the stars in the Universe. If we did, night time sky would be a whole lot brighter. Instead, we see everything within a particular radius, the particle horizon. Any particle of light emitted outside that particle horizon is too far to have reached us.

So if we want to know just how large the observable universe is, we just have to figure out the distance between us and that particle horizon, right?

As it turns out, not quite.

The universe, specifically spacetime, is continuously expanding, with points in the universe moving further apart. This not only changes the distance between objects but also how fast light is moving in the universe. 

The movement of spacetime has an effect on which photons reach us and can be observed.

So how do you calculate the radius? Back in 2003, scientists came up with an equation that took an event called “the recombination” as a reference point in the universe’s history. They combined that with the rate of the expansion of the universe and several other factors, in the end coming up with a number.

Back in 2003, that number was a radius of 45.66 billion light-years. Now, new data revealed a far more accurate number: 45.34 billion light-years.

“A difference of 320 million light-years might be peanuts on the cosmic scale, but it does make our knowable universe a little bit cozier,” Nick Tomasello from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia writes over at Medium.

The study has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of Advances in Astrophysics.

Will Humans Ever Control the Weather? http://futurism.com/images/will-humans-ever-control-the-weather/

Teaming with Bots!

‪NSF-funded‬ Northwestern University roboticist Mike Rubenstein is helping NSF’s Science360 Radio pay homage to the National Robotics Initiative this week. We have his Big Picture Science interview about teeny tiny swarming robots called kilobots: 1.usa.gov/1r5QTz9

Self-assembly enables nature to build complex forms, from multicellular organisms to complex animal structures such as flocks of birds, through the interaction of vast numbers of limited and unreliable individuals. Creating this ability in engineered systems poses challenges in the design of both algorithms and physical systems that can operate at such scales. This work demonstrates programmable self-assembly of complex two-dimensional shapes with a thousand-robot swarm. Photo Credit: Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University

Cryovolcanoes: Meet the Frozen Volcanoes on Pluto

Scientists spotted a possible ice volcano on the surface of Pluto. At about 90 miles (150 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high. 

Scientists have assembled the highest-resolution color view of one of the cryovolcanoes.

If confirmed, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system. More at: http://go.nasa.gov/1mYCtyZ

a full day from space (x-post woahdude)

Source: https://imgur.com/mOpsxQu