Month: February 2016

COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS—For years, the Hyperloop was a much buzzed-about myth. Finally, in 2013, Elon Musk provided a bit of substance by outlining the proposal in a research paper. People riding inside a tube, he said, could go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes at speeds exceeding 700mph. But Musk had rockets and electric cars and batteries to build, and he expressed a hope that others would step forward to help carry the idea forward as an open source project.

Now some help has arrived. While SpaceX is building a test track near its southern California headquarters, more than 100 teams of student engineers have spent the fall and winter months designing “pods” to run inside the Hyperloop. And perhaps more importantly still, this weekend US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said that the idea merits consideration for a public-private partnership to develop it further.

On Friday and Saturday, the student teams gathered in central Texas to show off their homegrown designs, taking the first step toward building pods and making the future Elon Musk a reality. In these teens and young twenty-somethings, Musk has found not only some of the world’s brightest minds but also believers. Musk had inspired them, and in the students he had found the youthful energy to push forward a brash idea like the Hyperloop.

For some, rejection of the human role in climate change reduces to a conspiracy: the world’s climate scientists are part of a socialist cabal falsifying research to justify energy regulations. Someone who has never met a climate scientist or looked closely at published studies can simply hold onto this idea rather than deal with the mountain of scientific evidence. Of course, it is patently ridiculous. The conspiracy would include an incredible number of scientists around the world, perfectly coordinating for decades, with nary a leak to give the game away—and that's before getting into all the socialists who would have to be involved.

In a recent paper, Oxford physicist and cancer researcher David Robert Grimes decided to try to create a mathematical measure for just how stupidly implausible that idea is—a sort of conspiracy probability equation. (Isn’t that exactly the kind of thing the cabal would use to throw the sheeple off the scent? Grimes must be in on it!)

The equation calculates the probability of a conspiracy-busting leak as 1-e^-tφ, where φ includes the (potentially changing) number of conspirators over time and the odds that one of those people leaks information in a given year. To estimate the odds that your average conspirator spills the beans, Grimes turned to some historical examples of events fitting the academic definition of “conspiracy”: the NSA’s PRISM program, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the FBI’s shoddy forensics uncovered by Frederic Whitehurst in the late 1990s.

February 1, 2016: One of the most tragic events in the history of space exploration is the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and all seven of its crew on February 1, 2003—a tragedy made worse because it didn’t have to happen. But just as it is human nature to look to the future and wonder what might be, so too is it in our nature to look at the past and wonder, “what if?” Today, 13 years after the event, Ars is rerunning our detailed 2014 examination of the biggest Columbia “what if” of all—what if NASA had recognized the danger? Could NASA have done something to save the crew?

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

—Astronaut Gus Grissom, 1965

It is important to note at the outset that Columbia broke up during a phase of flight that, given the current design of the Orbiter, offered no possibility of crew survival.

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

At 10:39 Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 2003, space shuttle Columbia lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A mere 81.7 seconds later, a chunk of insulating foam tore free from the orange external tank and smashed into the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing at a relative velocity of at least 400 miles per hour (640 kph), but Columbia continued to climb toward orbit.

The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued.

Efforts to secure a new data transfer pact between the US and the European Union failed to meet a January 31 deadline set by national privacy regulators in the 28-member-state bloc.

Data watchdogs in the EU will meet tomorrow to finalise their own views on how data can be transferred from one side of the Atlantic to another, following a European Court of Justice ruling in October last year, which deemed the EU-US Safe Harbour pact invalid.

It's expected that the national data authorities will publish their own judgment on Wednesday.

Modern chemistry can sometimes produce the most unlikely things, including materials familiar to everyone but with totally new—and useful—properties. A recent example of such a material is "flexiramics," which is being developed by Dutch startup Eurekite at the University of Twente.

As the name suggests, flexiramics is a foldable, tissue-like material that is also fireproof and non-conducting, like most other ceramics. As Eurekite commercializes flexiramics and prepares to take it to market, we decided to pay the startup a visit.

The startup's founding team consists of three people: two international students coming from Spain and Azerbaijan and their academic supervisor. Eurekite CEO Gerard Cadafalch Gazquez, who came to the Netherlands from Barcelona in 2010 to pursue a Master's and then a PhD degree, showed his favorite trick with a sheet of flexiramics: