Month: April 2018

Enlarge / The Sun sets on Mars in 2015, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover. When might humans see this view with their own eyes? (credit: NASA)

When it comes to spaceflight, there are crazy optimistic schedules like those Elon Musk sometimes tosses about, and there is just plain crazy. Some recent comments from the chief executive of Boeing, an aerospace company that simultaneously holds the most lucrative contracts in NASA’s exploration, International Space Station, and commercial crew programs, seem to fall into the latter category.

Speaking about NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars at a recent forum, Boeing’s Dennis Muilenburg offered his own opinion. "I anticipate that we will put the first person on Mars in my lifetime,” he said. “I think in this decade, and the first person that gets there is going to be on a Boeing rocket."

This is a preposterous statement. NASA may one day send humans to Mars on a “Boeing rocket”—the Space Launch System—but it will not happen in this decade or the next. In fact, on the present schedule, and because the staggering development costs of Boeing’s rocket will measure in the tens of billions of dollars, NASA seems unlikely to land humans even on the Moon in the 2020s. Mars remains a distant, evanescent dream.

Enlarge / The silhouette of three camels at sunset. (credit: Getty | AFP)

A newly identified form of prion disease may have been quietly spreading in the brains of African camels for decades, according to a report published in the June issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The spread of the new, fatal neurodegenerative disease—similar to the well-known “mad cow disease” caused by misfolded proteins in the brain—is a major concern for communities and public health. There are tens of millions of camels in Africa in a rapidly evolving camel farming system. The animals are crucial sources of meat, milk, and transportation for millions of people there. But perhaps most concerning is that prion diseases are known to be able to spread across species, potentially posing a disease risk to consumers.

This "makes it necessary to assess the risk for humans and develop evidence-based policies to control and limit the spread of the disease in animals and minimize human exposure,” the authors of the new report conclude.

Enlarge (credit: Mack Male)

A California man has been ordered to prison for 15 months after having been convicted of "counterfeiting" thousands of Windows Reinstallation Discs. Curiously, Microsoft routinely gives away this Windows download at no cost.

In short, Eric Lundgren, who runs a 100-employee Los Angeles-area e-waste company known as IT Asset Partners, was sentenced to prison for selling something that is otherwise generally free.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court affirmed Lundgren’s sentence, as he had pleaded guilty in 2017 to criminal copyright infringement in connection to his unauthorized sale of the discs.

Enlarge (credit: Bustos et al. 2018)

More than 10,000 years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers chased a group of giant ground sloths along the shores of an ancient lake, and their footprints still preserve the story. West of the sparkling white gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument at a site called Alkali Flat, layers of mud and sand left behind by a long-vanished lake holding over 100 human and giant ground sloth tracks—rare evidence of Pleistocene hunters stalking, and sometimes cornering, giant sloths.

Most of them are so-called “ghost tracks,” visible only under very specific conditions.

“Most of the time they are invisible. There is a lot of salt in ground, and when it rains, the salt dissolves. And, crucially, as it dries out, the fill dries at a different rate and the difference between the fill (footprint) and the surrounding sediment makes the track visible for a brief time while it dries out,” explained paleoecologist Sally Reynolds of the UK’s Bournemouth University, a co-author on the paper. The team, led by the US National Parks Service’s David Bustos, used aerial photography to spot the tracks and then selected a few groups for careful excavation and study.

Enlarge / Warning: Reading this article may send you into a portal that involves a lot of Craigslist browsing, research into Japanese auto brokers, and increased familiarity with foreign-language parts websites. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Did you grow up playing Gran Turismo, marveling over the weird and wonderful Japanese market (JDM) cars that never made it to these shores? If you, too, always wanted to drive JDM exotica like a Nissan Skyline, Toyota Century, or Mazda Cosmo, prepare yourself for good news.

H.R.2628, the "Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988," has long been a thorn for automotive enthusiasts in the USA. This is the official reason why, after you discovered those cars in Gran Turismo, you couldn’t actually buy one. Known as the ‘25 Year Rule,' H.R.2628 essentially requires auto enthusiasts to wait 25 years to the month from when a vehicle was first manufactured before it can be legally imported if the vehicle wasn’t originally meant for sale in the US market.

Take something like the Nissan Skyline mentioned above. The company never offered it for sale in the US, which means Paul Walker’s famous R34 Skyline GT-R in 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t legal for import. The R34 was first manufactured in 1999, placing the earliest year for importing under H.R. 2628 at 2024. Sure, there are various places in the US that will smuggle vehicles newer than 25 years into the country and play the ‘state legal’ game (where they act like state legality somehow overrides federal law), but this isn't true. At any time, a Nissan Skyline-importer can be caught and have their car taken away with zero recourse.