Category Archives: Transhuman News

Kerbal Space Program #4 Space Station Core v2
In this video we send up another space station core after losing our old save file. Thanks for watching, if you enjoyed it, please leave a like, helps alot 🙂

By: Zikmorfeous

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Kerbal Space Program #4 Space Station Core v2 - Video

The near drowning of a space-station astronaut from water that had collected in his helmet during a spacewalk stemmed from acceptance of unusual conditions known to increase risks.

Willingness to accept as routine minor amounts of water in a space-walking astronaut's helmet and a misdiagnosis of a previous water leak helped set the stage for an incident last summer that could have cost an International Space Station crew member his life, according to an analysis of the event.

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In a 122-page report released Wednesday, a mishap investigation board identified a range of causes for the near-tragedy, including organizational causes that carried echoes of accident reports that followed the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews in 1986 and 2003.

About 44 minutes into a 6.5-hour spacewalk last July, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano noted that water was building up inside his helmet the second consecutive spacewalk during which he reported the problem. Twenty-three minutes later, he and partner Chris Cassidy were ordered to end the spacewalk.

"The good news was that Luca was very close to the air lock when this happened," said Chris Hansen, space-station chiefengineer and head of the board,during a briefing Wednesday that outlined the findings. "When we terminated the EVA, Luca had a pretty close path to the air lock."

Still, as Parmitano worked his way back to the air lock, water covered his eyes, filled his ears, disrupted communications, and eventually began to enter his nose, making it difficult for him to breathe. Later, when crew mates removed his helmet, they found that it contained at least 1.5 quarts of water.

NASA officials immediately set up the five-member mishap investigation board to uncover the broader causes behind the incident, even as a team of engineers at the Johnson Space Center worked to find the precise mechanical cause for the buildup of water.

Engineers traced the leak to a fan-and-pump assembly that is part of a system that extracts moisture from the air inside the suit and returns it to the suit's water-based cooling system. Contaminants clogged holes that would have carried the water to the cooling system after it was extracted from the air. The water backed up and flowed into the suit's air-circulation system, which sent it into Parmitano's helmet. The specific cause of the contamination is still under investigation.

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Near-drowning of astronaut tied to wrong diagnosis, slow response (+video)

Image Caption: Dr. Dennis Morrison poses with the Microencapsulation Electrostatic Processing System flight hardware that was used on the International Space Station to produce microcapsules for cancer treatment delivery. Credit: NASA

Rebekah Eliason for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Although a necessary evil for a vast amount of people, systemic cancer treatment is an invasive procedure with devastating side effects.

People undergoing cancer treatment often experience nausea, immune suppression, hair loss and organ failure. All of this is endured with the hope of exterminating the cancerous tissues in the body. If a treatment were developed to specifically target the cancerous tissue instead of treating the patients entire body, it would provide a welcome alternative to using toxic levels of chemotherapy and radiation. Quality of life for patients with cancer would drastically improve with such treatments.

Fascinatingly, the research for such therapy began in space and could soon provide such treatment options here on Earth.

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), there is the unique opportunity to study substances in a microgravity environment. Currently there is a particular amount of research that has made substantial advancements in cancer therapy. This process is known as microencapsulation and provides the ability to create tiny, liquid-filled, biodegradable micro-balloons which contain particular mixtures of concentrated anti-tumor drugs. With the use of specialized needles, a doctor can inject the micro-balloons, also called microcapsules, into specific treatment sites within a cancer patient. New targeted therapy similar to this could revolutionize cancer treatment delivery.

In order to develop this type of technology, it was necessary to utilize the microgravity environment aboard the space station to understand microencapsulation before the experiments could be performed on Earth. Dennis Morrison, PhD, retired NASA principal investigator of the Microencapsulation Electrostatic Processing System-II (MEPS-II) study and current vice president and director for microencapsulation research and development at NuVue Therapeutics, Inc., explained, The technique that we have for making these microcapsules could not be done on the ground, because the different densities of the liquids would layer, but in space, since there is not sedimentation due to gravity, everything goes spherical.

Using a mixture of 80 percent water and 20 percent oil, the MEPS operations in microgravity were successful in uniting the two liquids in a way incapable of production on the Earth. In the unique conditions of space, the liquid-filled microcapsules spontaneously formed into spherical, tiny liquid-filled bubbles that were encased with a thin, semi-permeable outer membrane.

Since each molecule on a liquids surface in space is pulled with equal tension by its neighbors, the surface tension causes liquids to form into spheres. This MEPS-II system effectively allowed liquids to combine in a bubble shape that let the fluids interface instead of sit on top of each other.

We were able to figure out what parameters we needed to control so we could make the same kind of microcapsules on the ground, said Morrison. Now, we no longer have to go to space. Space was our teacher, our classroom to figure out how we could make these on Earth.

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Better Cancer Treatments May Follow Research In Outer Space

MOSCOW, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station will turn schoolteacher, conducting a lesson from space for Russian students, officials said.

The event will broadcast the cosmonauts live to students nationwide on April 11, an Education Ministry official told RIA Novosti Wednesday.

April 11 is the day before the 53rd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first manned spaceflight, which saw the cosmonaut and his Vostok spacecraft complete an orbit of the Earth in 1961.

In October, a teleconference was held with cosmonauts working on the station to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first woman to go into space, Valentina Tereshkova.

NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata conducted their own student-oriented activity last week, talking with college and high school students gathered at California State University in Los Angeles as part of NASA's Destination Station awareness campaign.

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Cosmonauts on space station to turn teacher for Russian students

February 28, 2014

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Life aboard the International Space Station (ISS) may seem like a carefree existence, but a wealth of evidence has proven otherwise. Years of research shows that the effects of microgravity wreaks havoc on the human body.

However, microgravity isnt the only thing that astronauts need to worry about in space. Going into space means exposure to radiation, which is known to damage our DNA. And when DNA tries to repair itself, errors can occur that increase the odds of developing cancer.

Between the two, humans face serious health risks when journeying into space. But mounting research is not only making spaceflight safer for our astronauts, it is helping to improve the health of people on terra firma as well.

A new study (Micro-7) is now examining the effect of gravity on DNA damage and repair. Because there is no controlled radiation source on the orbiting lab, cells will be treated with the chemotherapy drug bleomycin to induce DNA damage.

When a cell in the human body is exposed to radiation, DNA will be broken and repaired, which is considered the initiation stage of tumor development, explains principal investigator Honglu Wu, PhD, at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston.Cells damaged from radiation exposure in space also experience microgravity, which we know changes gene expressions even without radiation exposure.

This equals a space double-whammy for the human body, noted Wu.

Previous research exposed cells or organisms on Earth to high-energy charged particles to simulate space radiations. The resulting cell damage helped predict the risk of cancer for astronauts from space radiation. However, the research conducted on Earth in controlled environments do not address the effects of microgravity, which could make any results less accurate than this latest study.

The researchers believe the Micro-7 study will address that by examining the effects of bleomycin-induced DNA damage aboard the ISS.

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Studying The Effects Of Microgravity And Radiation On Human Cells

If you want to know how big the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) is at present, the answer depends on whether or not youre counting the robots on board. Some of the non-human residents will soon be getting smarter, with NASA announcing that the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) robots currently on the station will later this year get a new smartphone. The increased capability of the soon to be Smart SPHERES is designed to help transition them from engineering testbeds to workaday companions that can take over some of the duties of the station astronauts.

At the moment, there are three SPHERES robots aboard the ISS. These self-contained plastic polygonal spheres carry their own power, propulsion, computers, and navigation gear, as well as expansion ports for additional appendages. Theyre used for microgravity research as an engineering and robotics testbed, and for exploring the application of free-flying robots. According to NASA, some 77 experiments have been conducted so far, including testing technologies related to automated dockings, satellite servicing, spacecraft assembly, and emergency repairs. Last year, they were even decked out with goggles as part of experiments in 3D navigation and mapping.

Now as part of Project Tango, a new smartphone is being developed by Googles Advanced Technology and Projects division of Mountain View, California. An advance on the smartphones that are currently the brains of the SPHERES, the completed phones are scheduled to be brought to the ISS later this year. According to NASA, once the new smartphones are installed theyll give the SPHERES more computing power (making them into what NASA calls Smart SPHERES), cameras, WiFi connections, and an integrated bespoke 3D sensor, which will allow the robots to map their surroundings in real time. It will also give the robots the capability to carry out inspections using still images and videos and to directly communicate with the stations computers.

Before the phone can be sent into space, it needs to be tested in microgravity, so the next step will be to send on in an airplane on a parabolic trajectory to test its hardware and software. Once the smartphone has passed earthbound tests and has been sent to the ISS, it will be used to test controlling the SPHERES robots from the ground.

Currently, the SPHERES are designed to only operate inside the space station, but the eventual plan for the roots is that they will one day go outside to act as assistants to carry out routine inspections and inventories, monitor EVAs, or carry objects for an astronaut.

"With this latest upgrade, we believe the Smart SPHERES will be a step closer to becoming a mobile assistant' for the astronauts, says DW Wheeler, lead engineer with SGT Inc in the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames. "This ability for Smart SPHERES to independently perform inventory and environmental surveys on the space station can free up time for astronauts and mission control to perform science experiments and other work.

Source: NASA

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International Space Station's SPHERES robots to get new smarts