Russian spacecraft returns to Earth with most of its furry crew dead

A Russian spacecraft containing 45 mice, 8 gerbils, and 15 newts returned to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft, a modified Bion-M life sciences satellite, was launched in April 2013 and was intended to study the biological effects of long-term weightlessness. However, due to a combination of equipment failure and what scientists referred to as "the stresses of space," fewer than half the mice (and none of the gerbils) remained alive after their month in space. The newts were fine, though.

The mission's Bion-M life sciences satellite being prepped for launch.

Russian Federal Space Agency

The low survival rate among rodents "was to be expected," according to Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, the agency conducting the experiment. The Bion-M satellite was equipped with internal cameras so that scientists could visually monitor the animals during flight, which orbited at an altitude of about 357 miles (575 km). This is far higher than the International Space Station's orbit of 250 miles (410 km).

That most organisms, including humans, undergo physical changes in prolonged microgravity is already well-understood; the United States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) have been conducting long-duration manned space flights as far back as the early 1960s, and there is a plethora of data on the subject. However, conducting detailed experiments on the biological deficits incurred through long exposure to microgravity—including skeletal and muscular deterioration—is ethically difficult because at least some amount of the damage could be irreversible. Astronauts and cosmonauts undergoing multi-month missions on the International Space Station follow a rigorous exercise schedule intended to stave off microgravity-induced health problems.

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More than 20,000 people apply for one-way ticket to Mars

Last week we mentioned Mars One, the combination space mission/reality TV show project that aims to send four lucky space travelers to the Red Planet... forever. Interest in the project had been quite high, with the company's latest press release noting that it had received "10,000 messages from prospective applicants from over 100 countries." But that was before it started taking actual, formal, paid applications from would-be astronauts.

Turns out that in the week since, at least 20,000 people have paid $38 to formally apply for Mars One. Various sources around the Internet, including China Daily, are reporting that the world is full of people who wouldn't mind living out the remainder of their days in a questionable camera-stuffed habitat on Mars. Around 600 of the applicants are Chinese citizens, and it's arguable that some might not understand what they're getting into. According to China Daily, some of the prospective astronauts are a little optimistic about what they might find waiting for them once they reach their destination:

Ma Qing, a 39-year-old bookseller, said, "I think the chance to be part of the project is a cool way for me to change a dull daily life. Besides, the air on Mars must be much cleaner and easier to breathe."

Spoiler alert: Mars has an average atmospheric pressure of about 0.6 percent of Earth's, measuring 0.087 psi compared to Earth's 14.7 psi. It isn't a vacuum, but it's not far off, either. Citizens of Mars will need to bring their atmosphere with them, at least until we figure out how to terraform the entire world (a feat which is utterly beyond our current level of technology, at least in part because it requires the ability to shift large amounts of cargo from Earth to Mars).

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Diluting the scientific method: Ars looks at homeopathy (again)

Aurich Lawson

Over the past couple of weeks, Ars has started receiving e-mails about a topic that doesn't really fit into our normal areas of coverage: homeopathy. The belief that the administration of nothing more than water can have a medicinal affect certainly isn't technology, and it only peripherally touches upon science, in the sense that any health benefits it provides seem to involve the placebo affect.

Nevertheless, many of the practitioners of homeopathy have tried to claim the mantle of science, creating scientific-sounding explanations for "water memory"—the idea that a substance can actually gain potency as it is diluted out of existence. These practitioners even formed a peer-reviewed journal to discuss their findings. Six years ago, the journal Homeopathy ran a special issue on these explanations, and the Ars writers teamed up to tackle the bizarre distortions of science that it contained.

So in honor of World Homeopathy Week (which we just received a press release for), we're going to run an updated version of that story. Not because we think there's a value in talking about homeopathy. Rather, by scientifically evaluating homeopathy's attempts to sound scientific and revealing it to be nothing more than "pseudoscience," we think it's possible to learn something about the scientific process and the reasoning that drives it. In turn, we can possibly learn to recognize other areas where scientific reasoning has ended up on the rocks.

This feature was originally published on September 11, 2007.

Welcome to Waterworld

Science can be a tricky thing to define, and it's sometimes easier to contrast it with some of the arguments that pose as science. Unfortunately, most of those issues are entangled with implications that keep the basic question—is this science?—obscured by emotional responses. Thus, the science of climatology has become entwined with political, economic, and policy issues. The science of evolution conflicts with the political and religious goals of some individuals. Even basic scientific questions about the nervous system get embroiled in family and personal health issues when topics like autism and radio frequency radiation are broached.

That's why a special edition of the journal Homeopathy appears to be a gift, allowing us to look at science and pseudoscience without getting entangled with politics and religion. Homeopathy claims to be a form of medical practice that's based on the principle that "like cures like." Given a set of symptoms, a homeopath will identify an herb or chemical that causes similar symptoms. Following a predefined ritual, the homeopath performs a series of dilutions of that chemical that continue well beyond the point where there should be no molecules of it left—the final solution is essentially well-shaken water.

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Inside science: Selling and upsizing the meal

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

By now, everyone who cares is aware of exactly what I want to do: you can't shut me up about this stuff. The application for funding is on its way in. But does the project really fit the institutional boundary conditions, and does it stand a chance of being funded?

If we recall part one of this series, I said that the science needs to be broken up into bite-sized chunks, each of which will turn out a good PhD or provide support for a post doc. I've done that: three good projects, each of which should succeed no matter what experimental results they obtain. In that sense, they are "safe." But, they also have elements that allow us to go for gold, producing results that will turn heads. In short, I think I've got a good balanced program in the works.

On the other hand, the laser system that enables it all seems... complicated. Certainly, the early work is going to involve a lot of set up time. And that should worry me, the funding agency, and the institution. I'm not going into this blind, however. I can't walk into a showroom and order a laser system, like you might a car. "Hi, I'd like the red M3 with the boy-racer body kit, low profile tires, mags, and red brakes. Oh, and because this is on the government ticket, please make it a diesel."

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From idea to science: Pouring concrete for an experiment and securing funds

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

"From idea to science" is a process, and as such, it's become a series here. We've discussed what I perceive to be the institutional boundary conditions that constrain my academic success, then followed that with a long exposition on the science that gets me out of bed in the morning. But now it's time to get specific. This is the part that I admittedly have difficulty with: turning ideas and desires into concrete plans. Or, at least making them into plans that are acceptable to people who provide money.

Today, let's take the general idea from last time and break it up into individual, graduate-student-sized projects. In one sense, this is easy—just come up with three sets of experiments. Unfortunately, they need to tie together intellectually. It isn't necessary that the students need to work together on everything, but, thematically, they should be sufficiently related. That way, the students can assist each other when problems arise.

Getting specific also means thinking about who I am going to ask for money and how much. The European Research Council is offering up to €2 million (about $2.59 million) over five years to a few clever and competent researchers fitting a certain profile. I need to be relatively young—you must have held your PhD for less than 12 years—and you should be looking to strengthen an existing research group. There are other criteria, but those are the two that give you the essence of what they are looking for: new researchers trying to get more independence. As for the money, it sounds like a lot, but, for what I want to do, it will provide for three PhD students over the entire period.

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The Internet-demanded, partially scientific testing of Ultra-Ever Dry (in HD!)

You've seen the video, right? An image of what looks like an azure-colored metal floor plate appears, backed by some "Streets Have No Name" guitar knock-off. A mysterious hand is getting ready to soak this thing with a squeeze bottle full of water, but the first squirt yields puzzling results. Water beads up and shoots off the surface, leaving the plate bone-dry. Then the title: "What is Ultra-Ever Dry?"

That sequence has played out nearly two million times through YouTube (it's literally more popular than some official Justin Bieber offerings). The video is an endless cycle of items shrugging off water, mud, oil, dirt, paint, and other stickiness with eye-popping ease. Ultra-Ever Dry claims to be a "revolutionary super hydrophobic coating that repels water and refined oils using nanotechnology." Clearly, either the company has made a pact with the devil and gained supernatural powers, or it's got some awesomely talented materials people.

We were just as amazed as most of you were, and we knew we had to try this stuff out. Two hundred dollars and one expense report later, I had a box full of Ultra-Ever Dry cans sitting on the floor of my office, ready to be applied to things various and sundry.

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Moon rocket engines recovered from bottom of Atlantic ocean

A year ago, Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos blogged on his Bezos Expeditions venture fund site that an undersea exploration (financed and directed by Bezos himself) had located some of the enormous F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11. The engines were about 14,000 feet (about 4,270 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to propel Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the Moon.

Bezos' intent was to recover one or more of the engines for display, and this morning he is reporting success: after more than 40 years resting on the seabed, components from several F-1 engines have been raised back to the surface.

A crewman sprays water over a recovered injector plate. Clearly visible are the holes through which 1 ton of RP-1 fuel and 2 tons of liquid oxygen was forced... per second.

Bezos Expeditions

Contrary to Bezos' original note, it's currently impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are indeed from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes that "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult." Every F-1 engine flown was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component of an F-1 engine had some form of serial number on it in order to track it through the manufacturing process. If the serial numbers on the recovered components can be deciphered, it will then be a simple matter to determine which Apollo flights they came from.

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Don’t read the comments! Online communities shape risk perception

For online science news, having a flaming-hot comments section may not be a good thing.

Library of Congress

In today’s media landscape, people are turning to blogs and other online-only media as their primary sources of information on science, and relying less on online versions of traditional news outlets. This transition to consuming science online may be a double-edged sword, according to a pair of professors from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their Perspectives article in the journal Science highlights the opportunities and unintended consequences that this shift to the web may present, and may force scientists and social scientists to rethink how the science community and the public interface online.

Almost half of Americans rely on nontraditional online sources, and only 12 percent get their science news from online versions of traditional print newspapers and magazines. This trend isn’t just for science news though—sixty percent of Americans turn to the Internet as their primary source of information on general scientific questions. All this time online has an encouraging effect on people’s views about science; time spent online not only has been linked to more positive attitudes towards science, but frequent Web users are more likely to support basic scientific research, even if they see no immediate benefits to society.

But the Internet-driven quest for science information provides some reasons for concern as well. Nine out of ten Internet users rely on search engines to find information on scientific information, but the selection and prioritization of content by search engine algorithms and audience metrics may prove problematic, as they can narrow our options for information. For example, Google’s autocomplete suggestions feature provides the most popular searches, which users often select, making those searches even more likely to appear as suggestions.

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NAND flash gets baked, lives longer

An article has been published in the December 2012 edition of IEEE Spectrum that highlights an interesting and potentially useful discovery by ROM manufacturer Macronix. Researchers there have discovered that applying heat to NAND flash cells can drastically extend their life, thus overcoming one of the biggest problems with the solid state storage technology.

NAND flash is used everywhere, from smart phones to SSDs to thumb drives, and we've written extensively before on how it works. The technology's biggest failing is that NAND flash only lives so long. Every time the flash cells are erased, they retain some residual charge; eventually, they get to where it takes so long to make them change their charge level that they stop being useful as a storage medium.

As NAND flash grows denser, it gets more delicate; in our discussion on the future of flash, we discuss the decreasing lifetimes of NAND flash and the potential alternatives. SSDs rely on complex mathematical gymnastics at the controller level to reduce writes and hence lengthen the life of their flash cells, but the need for those kinds of workarounds could be substantially lessened by the Macronix discovery.

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Putting the science back in Wasteland 2′s science fiction

Aurich Lawson

In the modern game industry, the term "realism" gets thrown around in a lot. A critic might praise the realistic physics in a game where faster-than-light spaceships carry players to fight building-sized bug-aliens, for instance. Or a developer might talk up the accuracy and realism of the weapon selection in a military shooter where a character can get shot in the face five times and be just fine 10 seconds later. There are obviously some limits to exactly how much realism we want in our escapist fantasy.

Still, it might be nice if the fantastical worlds we play in were at least plausible, if not exactly "realistic." That's where Thwacke Consulting comes in. The recently formed firm has set up a wide-ranging team of academic experts in fields ranging from geology and biology to nanotechnlogy and particle physics. Their goal: to provide scientific reference material to help flesh out even the most implausible fictional game worlds, a goal they'll try to realize for the first time with the post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape of InXile Entertainment's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter project.

After a year and a half of mulling over the idea, Thwacke's Sebastian Alvarado officially set up shop in April. He was pushed by a frustration with games that tend to use science and technology as a kind of unexplained magic to make things work in a fictional world. Take the "genetic memories" that power the time-spanning animus in the Assassin's Creed games. Alvarado, an expert in evolutionary genetics himself, says there's actually something to the concept of passing down learning through genes. Still, "DNA is such an easy cop-out these days," he told Ars. "It's an easy way to explain all that, and they just expect the player to say, 'Well he said DNA so now I have to buy the story.' It's like a magic gateway."

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