Month: January 2016

The Falcon 9 first stage after successfully landing in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

Less than a month after successfully flying the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket booster back to a landing site along the Florida coast, SpaceX plans to try a seaborne return. The attempt will come as early as Sunday, when SpaceX plans to launch the Jason-3 satellite into space for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

SpaceX has tried twice to land its spent rocket on a barge, in January and April of 2015, but failed in part due to the inherent instability of a sea-based platform. For this launch the company cannot attempt a ground-based landing because the rocket will blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it doesn't yet have an established landing site. SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 is located in Florida, near Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Still, the company would like to perfect sea-based landings. After a rocket launch, the first stage flies several hundred miles downrange, and must expend propellant to fly back to land. For launches that require a maximum amount of energy, such as sending larger payloads to geostationary orbit, there will not be enough fuel to fly back to land. Company founder, Elon Musk has also said the central core of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, which remains under development, would probably need to be returned at sea.

(credit: Berkeley Computational Bio)

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is one of the most common fatal genetic diseases. It causes muscle degeneration and eventually death due to weakened heart and lung muscles.

Several new experiments published in Science demonstrate that we can now edit the genomes of mice with muscular dystrophy, effectively restoring a large portion of function in the heart and other muscles. These experiments show exciting promise for the use of CRISPR in mammalian gene editing, which could eventually lead to cures for this and other genetic diseases in humans.

Muscular dystrophy is a group of diseases that result in muscle weakness in involuntary and voluntary muscles. Often, this weakness is accompanied by muscle cell death. The specific disorder examined in this study is Duchenne muscular dystrophy, named after the French neurologist who first identified it. It’s a recessive form of dystrophy caused by mutations in the gene dystrophin, which is located on the X-chromosome. Because this is an X-linked recessive disease, it is more common in boys than girls—boys only have one copy of the X chromosome, so if their one copy carries the mutation, they will have the disease.

Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus VR and creator of the Oculus Rift, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a fully paid-up member of the PC Master Race.

During a recent Reddit AMA, Luckey was asked about the hardware specs of his PC. The first part of his response was to be expected, and probably straight out of the company's PR playbook:

I have lived on the bleeding edge of PC hardware for as long as I could scrape the money together, but for VR, I am sticking to hardware that sticks to our recommended specs: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/

That way, I get the same experience as most of my customers. I don’t want to become disconnected from the reality of how our hardware and software performs.

On the side, though, Luckey is working on something just a little bit more exciting:

Last weekend Muhammad Zakir Khan, an avid gamer and assistant professor at Broward College in Florida, booted up his PC and attempted to sign up for Epic Games' MOBA-inspired Paragon beta. Unbeknownst to Khan, however, was that his name name—along with many others—is on the US government's "Specially Designated Nationals list," and as such was blocked from signing up.

"Your account creation has been blocked as a result of a match against the Specially Designated Nationals list maintained by the United States of America's Office of Foreign Assets control," read the form. "If you have questions, please contact customer service at accounts@epicgames.com."

Understandably perturbed, Khan tweeted a screen grab of the form saying: "@EpicGames My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist. #Islamophobia"

Chunks of ancient tea are on the left, and the tomb where they were excavated near Xi'an is on the right. (credit: Houyuan Lu)

Researchers in China have positively identified a block of ancient vegetable matter as tiny tea buds that were lovingly tucked away in Han Yangling Mausoleum, a sumptuous tomb north of Xi'an. The city Xi'an was once known as Chang'an, seat of power for the Han Dynasty, and stood as the easternmost stop on the vast trade routes known today as the Silk Road. Previously, the oldest physical evidence of tea came from roughly 1,000 years ago. Coupled with another ancient block of tea found in western Tibet's Gurgyam Cemetery, this new discovery reveals that the Han Chinese were already trading with Tibetans in 200 BCE, trekking across the Tibetan Plateau to deliver the luxurious, tasty drink.

Though the tea was excavated over a decade ago, it wasn't until recently that researchers had access to tests that could determine whether the vegetable matter was in fact tea. By untangling the chemical components of the leaves, including their caffeine content, the researchers were able to verify that both blocks of leaves, from China and Tibet, were tea. In fact, they even figured out what kind of tea it probably was. In Nature Scientific Reports, they write:

The sample contains a mixture of tea, barley (Hordeum vulgare, Poaceae) and other plants. Therefore, it is likely that tea buds and/or leaves were consumed in a form similar to traditionally-prepared butter tea, in which tea is mixed with salt, tsampa (roasted barley flour) and/or ginger in the cold mountain areas of central Asia. Of course, methods of brewing and consuming tea varied from culture to culture along the Silk Road.

We also know the tea was what people today would call "fine plucked" or "Emperor's Tea," because it consisted only of the plant's buds with a few small leaves. These parts of the plant are considered the most valuable and are used to make especially high-grade tea.