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Category Archives: Transhuman News

Nasas space shuttle successor Orion set for first test flight

Posted: December 4, 2014 at 8:48 pm

Orion on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Mankind will take its first steps on the path to landing on Mars on Thursday, according to Nasa. The first test flight of the Orion spacecraft, the intended successor to the space shuttle, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral just after dawn.

The unmanned $370m (235m) mission, formally known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), will last about four and a half hours. The success of this test is crucial for the future of Nasas human spaceflight exploration programme, said Dr David Baker, a former Nasa engineer.

Once in orbit, the conical Orion capsule will circle Earth twice, reaching a maximum altitude of 3,600 miles. At about 15 times higher than the International Space Station, it will have travelled further into space than any crew capsule has gone since the 1970s.

Orion will then plunge into Earths atmosphere at 20,000mph. This will generate temperatures of around 2,200C, which is representative of a re-entry from lunar orbit. A newly designed 16ft-wide heat shield will protect the spacecraft from burning up, allowing it to splash down off the coast of Baja California, in the Pacific, from where it will be recovered by Nasa and the US Navy.

Really this is just a test of the Orion heat shield, said Baker, who worked for Nasa for 25 years, including during the Apollo moon landings.

Beneath the hype and the excitement, there are worries that Nasas Mars programme lacks focus. The Nasa PR machine is good at bigging things up, but I think to say that this is the road to Mars is a bit much, said Ian Crawford, an astronomer and advocate of human spaceflight at Birkbeck, Univeristy of London.

Nasa says it is aiming to carry out a Mars mission in the 2030s, but there are no definite plans at the moment beyond the present one a collaboration with Sesame Street. Items including Ernies rubber ducky, Oscars pet worm, Slimey, and the Cookie Monsters cookie are being taken into space by Orion and will later be displayed on the childrens television show in the hope that they could inspire the next generation of astronauts. Nasa predicts that the first astronauts on Mars will be todays pre-schoolers.

The capsule itself is largely devoid of anything required for a human crew, such as life-support and command consoles. Instead it will be packed with 1,200 sensors to test its durability.

Orion is the first new Nasa spacecraft designed to transport humans into space for a generation. Its predecessor was the space shuttle, retired in 2011 after a 30-year programme during which there were 133 successful flights and two fatal disasters. With the shuttles retirement, Nasa lost its ability to launch astronauts into space. For the last three years it has been forced to buy seats on Russian Soyuz launches.

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Cosmic Radiation Less Of A Risk To Astronauts Than Previously Thought

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Cosmic radiation from space travel could be less harmful to astronauts than previously believed, data from experiments conducted on board and outside of the International Space Station (ISS) has revealed.

The MATROSHKA experiment, the first comprehensive measurement of long-term exposure of space travelers to cosmic radiation, brought together researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and colleagues from other institutions to determine precisely how much radiation astronauts are exposed to during long-term space travel.

The goal was to determine how long astronauts could remain in space without their health being threatened due to exposure to ionizing radiation. To do so, they developed a type of mannequin that was outfitted with several thousand detectors that recorded the doses of cosmic radiation from inside and outside the ISS over the course of several years. The data collected by those sensors has been analyzed, the researchers called the results surprising.

One may say that we found open space to be a bit less hostile to humans than expected. The effective doses, related to the health risk of the astronauts and calculated from measurements with our detectors, were lower than those indicated by dosimeters worn by the astronauts, Dr. Pawe Bilski from the Henryk Niewodniczaski Institute of Nuclear Physics (IFJ PAN), said in a recent statement.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov (left) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, both Expedition 23 flight engineers, work with the European Matroshka-R Phantom experiment in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station. Matroshka, the name for the traditional Russian set of nestling dolls, is an antroph-amorphous model of a human torso designed for radiation studies. Credit: NASA

The mannequin, a legless torso described by the researchers as a specially adapted humanoid phantom used in medical research, contained real human bones places inside a plastic shell simulating the shapes and densities of soft tissues and lungs in an astronauts body. It consisted of 33 slices 2.5 cm thickness each, and each of them contained measuring equipment and sets of passive thermoluminescent detectors placed in plastic tubes.

Using a total of six thousand thermoluminescent detectors, the researchers created a three-dimensional rectangular grid of measurement points inside the phantom. The design allowed the authors to accurately determine how much radiation would be absorbed by each of the bodys organs, and to calculate the so-called effective dose, which is considered to be an estimate of the radiation hazard to humans, IFJ PAN explained.

The main hazard to the astronauts health due to exposure to cosmic radiation is the increased probability of developing cancer in his or her body, the institute added. This probability however is quite dependent on the type of radiation the astronaut is exposed to. Most of the natural sources of ionizing radiation on Earth produce electromagnetic radiation of high energy gamma rays. On the other hand, in cosmic rays, energetic protons or heavier ions dominate, which are much more effective in creating cancer cells.

Interior structure of the phantom used in the experiment MATROSHKA. White tubes contain sets of thermoluminescent detectors. Half of these detectors was manufactured by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakw, Poland. Credit: DLR

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NASA 'go' for its next giant leap into space

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- It's the biggest countdown for NASA since the shuttle era ended in 2011. The space agency's new Orion spacecraft is scheduled to lift off on an uncrewed test flight at 7:05 a.m. ET Thursday from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"We haven't had this feeling in awhile, since the end of the shuttle program," Mike Sarafin, Orion flight director at Johnson Space Center, said in a preflight briefing on Wednesday. He said it's the beginning of something new: exploring deep space.

Orion looks like a throwback to the Apollo era, but it is roomier and designed to go far beyond the moon: to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

"It is, I think, consistent with those -- the beginning of shuttle and beginning of Apollo," said Mark Geyer, NASA Orion program manager. "I think it's in the same category."

Orion -- NASA's next giant leap

Orion -- NASA's next giant leap

Orion -- NASA's next giant leap

Orion -- NASA's next giant leap

Orion -- NASA's next giant leap

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Watch Live Tonight: The Challenges of Interstellar Flight

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Anthropologist Cameron Smith talks about the cultural and genetic implications of long-term space missions

Cameron Smith, author, anthropologist. Courtesy of Perimeter Institute

If humanity ever travels to another star, the trip could take generations. Such a journey would present serious technological challenges, of course, but the social difficulties of keeping a large population happy and healthy on a spaceship could be no less daunting. Anthropologist Cameron Smith of Portland State University has studied these questions and will discuss the biological and cultural science of long-term space travel during a lecture at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario that will be broadcast live here on this page.

Smiths talk, Interstellar Voyaging: An Evolutionary Transition, will begin Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET as part of the Perimeter Institutes public lecture series presented by Sun Life Financial. The lecture will be viewable on this page as well as at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca. Online viewers can pose questions to Smith by tweeting to @Perimeter and using the hashtag #piLIVE.

Scientific American spoke to Smith about what it will take to mount an interstellar voyage. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Is it really plausible to discuss a multigenerational space journey? Are we even close to being able to do something like this? Im presuming that the physics people will give us high-speed propulsion. Im playing the same game as [space research organization] Icarus Interstellar. Their project is not to build anything now. They want to give humanity the option at the end of this century, in a hundred years from now, of interstellar voyaging. I think thats a smart approach. Its a mind-boggling thing to imagine, but so was going to the moon 100 years ago.

I think its a very good idea to start thinking about it now, and to spend a century thinking about the genetics, the cultural implications, the propulsion and designs. I think its possible, but I think it should be done carefully. I dont want to see a brief flurry of interest and then see it flare outthe American moon program did that.

One of your first projects in this field was to research the population genetics of a space colonization journey. What did you learn? If youre going on multigenerational voyages and you have a closed population, you dont have the natural interbreeding links that all human societies have. We have good evidence that human populations need to be well over 5,000 and into the tens of thousands of people to maintain healthy genetic variability. I suggested recently in a paper that 40,000 is a safe number.

People have proposed that you could send fewer human beings and store frozen eggs and sperm and maintain viability that way. But there are cultural reasons why thats not so great. I think we should go in populations that are culturally familiar. In evolution, generally speaking, radical changes in the short term are not too typically likely to work. And so I would propose a larger starship with tens of thousands of people aboard and let them sort out the new variety of social and genetic interactions that need to happen as theyre going. Dont try to invent it all here.

What are the other human evolutionary challenges associated with such a voyage? Its largely going to be developmental genetics in non-Earth environments. When we think of space biology now, we tend to think of adults. But Im thinking about the developmental biology of the young.

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Preparing for Alien Life

Posted: at 8:47 pm

At a recent event sponsored by NASA and the Library of Congress, a group of scientists and scholars explored how we might prepare for the inevitable discovery of life beyond Earth.

n 1960, the astronomer Francis Drake pointed a radio telescope located in Green Bank, West Virginia, toward two Sun-like stars 11 light years away. His hope: to pick up a signal that would prove intelligent life might be out there. Fifty years have gone by since Drake's pioneering SETI experiment, and we've yet to hear from the aliens.

But thanks to a host of discoveries, the idea that life might exist beyond Earth now seems more plausible than ever. For one, we've learned that life can thrive in the most extreme environments here on Earth - from deep-sea methane seep and Antarctic sea ice to acidic rivers and our driest deserts.

We've also found that liquid water isn't unique to our planet. Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa harbor large oceans beneath their icy surfaces. Even Saturn's largest moon, Titan, could spawn some kind of life in its lakes and rivers of methane-ethane.

And then there's the discovery of exoplanets, with more than 1800 alien worlds beyond our Solar System identified so far. In fact, astronomers estimate there may be a trillion planets in our galaxy alone, one-fifth of which may be Earth-like. As Carl Sagan famously said: "The Universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."

Now some scientists believe the hunt for life beyond Earth may well pay off in our lifetimes. "There have been 10,000 generations of humans before us. Ours could be the first to know," said SETI astronomer Seth Shostak.

But what happens once we do? How would we handle the discovery? And what would be its impact on society?

This was the focus of a conference organized last September by the NASA Astrobiology Program and the Library of Congress. For two days, a group of scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians from around the world explored how we might prepare for the inevitable discovery of life - microbial or intelligent - elsewhere in our Universe.

The symposium was hosted by Steven J. Dick, the second annual Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. The video presentations can be viewed here.

"Three Horse Races" Of course, the impact of discovery will depend on the specific scenario. In a talk titled "Current Approaches to Finding Life Beyond Earth, and What Happens If We Do," Shostak described three ways - or three "horse races" - for finding life in space.

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CSHL Keynote Series, Dr. Christopher Voight, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Video

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CSHL Keynote Series, Dr. Christopher Voight, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Pushing the scale of genetic engineering" from the Synthetic Biology meeting in Suzhou China, CSHL-Asia 12/2/2014.

By: CSHL Leading Strand

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Duke Signs Exclusive Licensing Agreement with Leading Genome Editing Company

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Duke University has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Editas Medicine, a leading genome editing company, for genetic engineering technologies developed in the lab of Charles Gersbach, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. The agreement focuses on Gersbachs work with genome engineering technologies known as CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs.

Charles Gersbach

The agreement allows broad use of the technology developed in Gersbachs lab for the prevention or treatment of human disease. To this point, Gersbachs most notable work in that field is on Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease affecting one in 3,500 newborn males that currently has no approved treatment and causes muscular deterioration, paralysis and eventual death, usually by age 25. Gersbachs work is focused on using gene editing to correct the mutated gene that causes the disease, in contrast to treating the resulting symptoms of the disease. Gersbach has also pioneered the use of both CRISPR/Cas9 and TALEs for turning on genes in a way that could be used to treat degenerative disorders or compensate for genetic defects.

Charlies deep expertise in both genome editing and in this area of biology is a tremendous asset as we begin to understand how to apply genome editing technologies to specific diseases, said Katrine Bosley, chief executive officer of Editas Medicine. Gersbach is also serving as a scientific advisor to Editas.

Editas is a leading genome editing company and part of a transformational new area of healthcaregenomic medicine. The company was founded by the pioneers and world leaders in genome editing bringing specific expertise in CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs technologies. The companys mission is to translate its proprietary technology into novel solutions to treat a broad range of genetically-driven diseases.

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New single-cell analysis reveals complex variations in stem cells

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

4-Dec-2014

Contact: Kat J. McAlpine katherine.mcalpine@wyss.harvard.edu 617-432-8266 Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard @wyssinstitute

(BOSTON) -- Stem cells offer great potential in biomedical engineering due to their pluripotency, which is the ability to multiply indefinitely and also to differentiate and develop into any kind of the hundreds of different cells and bodily tissues. But the precise complexity of how stem cell development is regulated throughout states of cellular change has been difficult to pinpoint until now.

By using powerful new single-cell genetic profiling techniques, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Boston Children's Hospital have uncovered far more variation in pluripotent stem cells than was previously appreciated. The findings, reported today in Nature, bring researchers closer to a day when many different kinds of stem cells could be leveraged for disease therapy and regenerative treatments.

"Stem cell colonies contain much variability between individual cells. This has been considered somewhat problematic for developing predictive approaches in stem cell engineering," said the study's co-senior author James Collins, Ph.D., who is a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member, the Henri Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at MIT, and a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. "Now, we have discovered that what was previously considered problematic variability could actually be beneficial to our ability to precisely control stem cells."

The research team has learned that there are many small fluctuations in the state of a stem cell's pluripotency that can influence which developmental path it will follow.

It's a very fundamental study but it highlights the wide range of states of pluripotency," said George Daley, study co-senior author, Director of Stem Cell Transplantation at Boston Children's Hospital and a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. "We've captured a detailed molecular profile of the different states of stem cells."

Taking this into account, researchers are now better equipped to manipulate and precisely control which cell and tissue types will develop from an individual pluripotent stem cell or stem cell colony.

"The study was made possible through the use of novel technologies for studying individual cells, which were developed in part by collaborating groups at the Broad Institute, giving our team an unprecedented view of stem cell heterogeneity at the individual cell level," said Patrick Cahan, co-lead author on the study and Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

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Recommendations against mother-infant bedsharing interfere with breastfeeding

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

4-Dec-2014

Contact: Kathryn Ryan kryan@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News @LiebertOnline

New Rochelle, NY, December 4, 2014--Recommendations by physician groups to avoid bedsharing among mothers and their babies are intended to reduce sleep-related infant deaths. But evidence suggests that the risks of bedsharing have been over-emphasized, advice never to bedshare is unrealistic, and avoiding bedsharing may interfere with breastfeeding, according to an article in Breastfeeding Medicine, the official journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Breastfeeding Medicine website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/bfm.2014.0113 until January 4, 2015.

In "Speaking Out on Safe Sleep: Evidence-Based Infant Sleep Recommendations, Melissa Bartick, MD, MSC, Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School (Cambridge, MA), and Linda Smith, MPH, IBCLC, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University (Dayton, OH), discuss the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) recommendations against all bedsharing for sleep, the leading modifiable risk factors for preventing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and the potential for the AAP's bedsharing recommendations to interfere with the frequency, duration, and exclusivity of breastfeeding.

"The alternatives to feeding an infant in bed, such as on a couch, lounge chair, or rocker are far greater risks for SIDS," says Ruth Lawrence, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Breastfeeding Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics, University of Rochester School of Medicine. "Bed-sharing increases the risk of SIDS when the infant is bottle fed or the mother is obese or impaired by smoking, alcohol, or illicit drugs. These are correctable risks of SIDS. Breastfeeding is protective, and the editors of Breastfeeding Medicine are pleased that the AAP Task Force on SIDS is strongly supporting breastfeeding."

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About the Journal

Breastfeeding Medicine, the official journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, is an authoritative, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal published 10 times per year in print and online. The Journal publishes original scientific papers, reviews, and case studies on a broad spectrum of topics in lactation medicine. It presents evidence-based research advances and explores the immediate and long-term outcomes of breastfeeding, including the epidemiologic, physiologic, and psychological benefits of breastfeeding. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Breastfeeding Medicine website at http://www.liebertpub.com/bfm.

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Are there safe and effective treatments for hereditary angioedema in children?

Posted: at 8:46 pm

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

3-Dec-2014

Contact: Kathryn Ryan kryan@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News @LiebertOnline

New Rochelle, NY, December 3, 2014--Hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare genetic disease that causes recurrent swelling under the skin and of the mucosal lining of the gastrointestinal tract and upper airway, usually first appears before 20 years of age. A comprehensive review of the therapies currently available to treat HAE in adults shows that some of these treatments are also safe and effective for use in older children and adolescents. Current and potential future therapies are discussed in a Review article in a special issue of Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ped.2014.0412 until January 3, 2015.

Based on the current medical literature, Eveline Wu, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael Frank, Duke University Medical Center (Durham, NC), report that additional therapies are now approved for use in the pediatric age group. In their article "Management of Hereditary Angioedema in Childhood: A Review" they also discuss clinical trials and published experience among younger age groups for which data are most limited.

"HAE is a potentially life-threatening disease that until recently had very limited therapeutic options for children," says Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology Editor-in-Chief Mary Cataletto, MD, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY). "This special issue of Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology, developed in collaboration with Guest Editor Dr. Timothy Craig, has been created for physicians who care for children. It focuses on recent advances in HAE-related immunophysiology, as well as current and future therapies for acute and chronic care and prophylaxis."

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About the Journal

Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal published in print and online. The Journal synthesizes the pulmonary, allergy, and immunology communities in the advancement of the respiratory health of children. The Journal provides comprehensive coverage to further the understanding and optimize the treatment of some of the most common and costly chronic illnesses in children. It includes original translational, clinical, and epidemiologic research; public health, quality improvement, and case control studies; patient education research; and the latest research and standards of care for functional and genetic immune deficiencies and interstitial lung diseases. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology website at http://www.liebertpub.com/ped.

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