Month: March 2017

Enlarge / Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has an important engine test coming up soon. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Key Blue Origin officials have begun to drop hints about the imminent hot-fire test of the company's new rocket engine, the BE-4. Jeff Bezos recently said to expect a full-scale engine test "in the coming weeks." And last Wednesday the company's director of business development, Brett Alexander, said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion the test "was coming soon."

For many people, a rocket engine is just a rocket engine. But Blue Origin's new engine is a big deal for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its 550,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, more powerful than a space shuttle main engine, which had 418,000 pounds of thrust. Beyond the brawn, however, there are other reasons to anticipate a successful test.

A new kind of engine

During a tour of his rocket factory in Kent, Wash., last year Bezos explained the philosophy behind the BE-4 engine. "In principle rocket engines are simple, but that’s the last place rocket engines are ever simple," he said. Nonetheless, Blue Origin sought to make an engine that was not too complex, nor one that required ultra-premium materials. The designers didn't want to create a work of art that pushed the limits engineering—rather, they wated a reliable workhorse that could be flown again and again, perhaps as many as 100 times as the company pushes the boundaries of reusable spaceflight.

Enlarge / A little needlework and blood has never looked better. (credit: © MaricorMaricar @ Handsome Frank)

Transplanted umbilical cord blood can be used to treat or cure more than 80 conditions, from leukemia to sickle-cell disease. For Mosaic, Bryn Nelson follows the story of one man, Chris. After being diagnosed with leukemia in his early 40s, his best chance of survival comes in the form of blood from three babies he’ll never meet, nor even know the names of. This article was first published by Wellcome on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A few hours before beginning chemotherapy, a man named Chris faces his cellphone camera with a mischievous smile and describes a perfectly absurd milestone at 1:37pm on a Wednesday. “There is no more beautiful moment in a man’s life…” he says with puckish glee. Because how can you not laugh when you’ve been invited to bank your sperm in advance of being “Godzilla-ed” with chemotherapy and radiation, all just four days after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 43 and given a 5 to 15 percent chance of survival?

Oh, and the fertility clinic forgot to send someone over with a specimen kit, and they’re closing in little more than 20 minutes, so you have to fire up your iPad for some quick visual stimulation to help you fill a sterile tube. Just try to ignore the legal consent paperwork all around you and the catheter that’s been surgically inserted into your jugular vein.

Mild spoilers ahead.

In his new novel The Collapsing Empire, bestselling writer John Scalzi builds a fascinating new interstellar civilization in order to destroy it. The Interdependency is a thousand-year-old interplanetary trade partnership in humanity's distant future. Its member planets were once connected to Earth by the Flow, a natural feature of space-time that allows ships to enter a kind of subspace zone. Once there, they can circumvent the unbreakable speed of light to travel between stars that are dozens of light years apart. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, nobody is asking that question. Humanity has created an entire civilization that relies on the Flow and its "shoals," where ships can enter and exit. Planets are colonized purely based on their proximity to the shoals, not on habitability. The result is not unlike a medieval trade guild society whose populace happens to live in domed cities, buried caves, and artificial habitats, completely dependent on trade for resources.