Month: August 2017

Jonathan Gitlin

The Internet—or at least the bits of it that like to think about cars—has over the years coalesced upon a few favorite vehicles. There's the Mazda Miata, championed as the perfect car by those idealize driving purity and bolt-action gear shifts. The Subaru WRX used to be another, before it lost its way a generation or two back. And the brown Volvo station wagon is often a contender, for the people of the Internet have broad and varied tastes—and perhaps a sense of irony. A four-wheel antidote to the boy racer, the brown Volvo station wagon stands for safety and practicality with some clever Scandinavian design values in there, too. Here, then, is the 21st century brown Volvo station wagon: the 2017 V90 Cross Country T6.

The past few years have been good ones for Volvo. Under Geely's ownership, it's been given a giant pile of cash with instructions to make good stuff, and that's what it's done. There's an all new platform to be used as the building blocks for a new line-up of medium and large vehicles, called Scalable Product Architecture. A very good infotainment system called Sensus comes along. And the latest iteration has class-leading driver assists, part of a corporate policy that wants 2020's Volvos to be the safest passenger vehicles ever. Our first taste of the new Volvo was the XC90 SUV. Then there was the S90 sedan, a nordic alternative to the default German luxury car. And now the V90 offers the missing piece of the 90-series Volvos: the station wagon.

Enlarge (credit: Science)

After a thorough antivirus scan, de-bugged pigs are a step closer to growing organs for us.

Researchers used the latest gene editing technology to deactivate 25 remnants of ancient viruses, called porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs), that had embedded in the DNA of a pig cell line. Pig genomes are rife with lurking PERVs, which threaten to emerge and infect humans. But with a genome wiped of active viruses, the researchers produced 37 piglets that are PERV-free. The creation of those clean little porkers, reported Thursday in Science, is progress toward using pigs as human organ donors, the researchers say.

“Our study highlighted the value of PERV inactivation to prevent cross-species viral transmission and demonstrated the successful production of PERV-inactivated animals to address the safety concern in clinical xenotransplantation,” the authors concluded.

Enlarge / Karen Nyberg, of Expedition 37, works with a plant experiment in the Destiny laboratory of the space station. (credit: NASA)

As it nears the end of its second decade, the International Space Station is starting to hit its stride. The large orbital laboratory offers private companies a chance to test business ideas in microgravity, serves as a testbed for astronaut health, and allows NASA to prove technologies for future missions into deep space.

One of the critical technologies NASA will need if it really does send humans beyond the Earth-Moon system within the next few decades is more powerful computers capable of operating in the deep space environment. Presently, the main command computers that operate the space station use Intel i386 processors. However, that is fine for the station because all of its critical systems are monitored around the clock by ground-based flight controllers who can work in real time with the crew to fix any problems that arise.

If humans do travel to Mars, they will face increasingly long communications delays—stretching out to more than half an hour—between Earth and their spacecraft. In that situation, the astronauts are likely to become more reliant on more powerful computers and artificial intelligence to make critical course corrections or decisions within seconds or minutes.