Month: April 2018

Enlarge / A Russian 3-stage Proton rocket blasts into the sky in 2000. (credit: NASA)

As recently as 2013, Russia controlled about half of the global commercial launch industry with its fleet of rockets, including the Proton boosters. But technical problems with the Proton, as well as competition from SpaceX and other players, has substantially eroded the Russian share. This year, it may only have about 10 percent of the commercial satellite launch market, compared to as much as 50 percent for SpaceX.

In the past, Russian space officials have talked tough about competing with SpaceX in providing low-cost, reliable service to low-Earth and geostationary orbit. For example, the Russian rocket corporation, Energia, has fast-tracked development of a new medium-class launch vehicle that it is calling Soyuz-5 to challenge SpaceX.

On Tuesday, however, Russia's chief spaceflight official, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, made a remarkable comment about that country's competition with SpaceX.

Jonathan Gitlin

In 2017, Nissan sold 403,465 Rogue crossovers. That makes it the fifth best-selling vehicle in the US, narrowly losing out to the Toyota RAV4 (407,594) and the trio of domestic trucks that always sweeps the podium. It's easy to see why vehicles like this have displaced the sedan as America's go-to for driving a family around. It's spacious, easily carrying four large humans—or five, if some of them are smaller—and their stuff. It's pretty good value for money; even the cheapest $24,800 front-wheel drive Rogue S comes with a lot of standard equipment. IIHS rates it highly, and I even think it looks pretty good, if a bit fussy. All of which is to say, it's not a bad vehicle.

Yet if that sounds like I'm damning the Rogue with faint praise, I am. A week with one of America's best-selling vehicles once again proves I'm out of the mainstream, or too many people are happy to settle. The Rogue is fine, but it's not great. The infotainment system needs work. The cabin is fussy. The steering is so light it's almost disconcerting. And the hybrid version that was available for model year 2017 is missing in action.

Jonathan Gitlin

In 2017, Nissan sold 403,465 Rogue crossovers. That makes it the fifth best-selling vehicle in the US, narrowly losing out to the Toyota RAV4 (407,594) and the trio of domestic trucks that always sweeps the podium. It's easy to see why vehicles like this have displaced the sedan as America's go-to for driving a family around. It's spacious, easily carrying four large humans—or five, if some of them are smaller—and their stuff. It's pretty good value for money; even the cheapest $24,800 front-wheel drive Rogue S comes with a lot of standard equipment. IIHS rates it highly, and I even think it looks pretty good, if a bit fussy. All of which is to say, it's not a bad vehicle.

Yet if that sounds like I'm damning the Rogue with faint praise, I am. A week with one of America's best-selling vehicles once again proves I'm out of the mainstream, or too many people are happy to settle. The Rogue is fine, but it's not great. The infotainment system needs work. The cabin is fussy. The steering is so light it's almost disconcerting. And the hybrid version that was available for model year 2017 is missing in action.

Enlarge (credit: Bhattacharya et al. 2018)

In 2003, Oscar Munoz found a mummy in the Atacama Desert ghost town of La Noria. The six-inch-long mummy, now called Ata, has an elongated skull, oddly shaped eye sockets, and only ten pairs of ribs... which helped fuel wild speculation that she was an alien hybrid. Ata was sold several times—probably illegally—and ended up in the private collection of Barcelona entrepreneur and UFO enthusiast Ramón Navia-Osorio. A 2013 documentary called Sirius soon helped immortalize Ata, focusing heavily on the alien hybrid claims.

When a team led by University of California, San Francisco bioinformatics researcher Sanchita Bhattacharya recently sequenced the tiny mummy’s genome, however, it revealed only a girl of Chilean descent. There were a complicated set of genetic mutations, including some usually associated with bone and growth disorders and a few more that have never been described before. Those mutations, the researchers claim, may help explain her unusual appearance.

It’s easy to see why the team's March paper attracted so much interest: a high-profile urban legend was fully debunked at last, but now there were hints at compelling medical discoveries. Most press outlets presented the results as conclusive, cut-and-dried science—except for a few UFO fan sites that loudly insisted the study was part of a cover-up. But even beyond the extraterrestrial exchanges, things have gotten very complicated, both in terms of the scientific claims and in terms of whether the research should have been done at all.