Pangea Fun

Re-generatively cooled RL10 Thrust Chamber Assembly test validates 3D printing process

West Palm Beach FL (SPX) Jun 18, 2018 Aerojet Rocketdyne recently achieved a significant milestone by successfully completing a series of hot-fire tests of an advanced, next-generation RL10 engine thrust chamber design that was built almost entirely using additive manufacturing; commonly known as 3-D printing. “This recent series of hot-fire tests conducted under our RL10C-X development program demonstrated the large-scale add Full article

Don't drink dihydrogen monoxide. Everybody dies who does!

Dihydrogen Monoxide Bottle

Scientists make research ‘jelly’ grow more like biological tissues

Opens up new possibilities in tissue engineering and soft robotics

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have found a way to direct the growth of hydrogel, a jelly-like substance, to mimic plant or animal tissue structure and shapes.

The team’s findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, suggest new applications in areas such as tissue engineering and soft robotics where hydrogel is commonly used. The team has also filed a patent at CMU and NTU.

In nature, plant or animal tissues are formed as new biomass is added to existing structures. Their shape is the result of different parts of those tissues growing at different rates.

Mimicking this behaviour of biological tissues in nature, the research team comprising CMU scientists Changjin Huang, David Quinn, K. Jimmy Hsia and NTU President-designate Prof Subra Suresh, showed that through manipulation of oxygen concentration, one can pattern and control the growth rate of hydrogels to create the desired complex 3D shapes.

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Cracking eggshell nanostructure: New discovery could have important implications for food safety

How is it that fertilized chicken eggs manage to resist fracture from the outside, while at the same time, are weak enough to break from the inside during chick hatching? It’s all in the eggshell’s nanostructure, according to a new study led by McGill University scientists.

The findings, reported today in Science Advances, could have important implications for food safety in the agro-industry.

Birds have benefited from millions of years of evolution to make the perfect eggshell, a thin, protective biomineralized chamber for embryonic growth that contains all the nutrients required for the growth of a baby chick. The shell, being not too strong, but also not too weak (being “just right” Goldilocks might say), is resistant to fracture until it’s time for hatching.

But what exactly gives bird eggshells these unique features?

To find out, Marc McKee’s research team in McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry, together with Richard Chromik’s group in Engineering and other colleagues, used new sample-preparation techniques to expose the interior of the eggshells to study their molecular nanostructure and mechanical properties.

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It's nap time little martian

Happy 5,000th Martian Day!

Today was Opportunity Rover’s 5,000 Martian Day! Yay! Just in case you don’t know Opportunity, here are a few little facts. 

First, The opportunity Rover was launched on July 7th of 2003. It was lauched with another rover named Spirit. They landed on Mars in Janurary of 2004. Unfortunately Spirit stopped working in 2010 , but Opportunity is still alive and helping us understand Mars. 

Initially Opportuinity was only supposed to be around for 90 Earth days, but instead it’s gotten tons of extensions and is still collecting data today. 

Opportunity is run by a solar panel and is almost 5 feet tall. The solar panels hold enough energy for 14 hours, and the batteries help store energy for use at night. All of that helps to keep our little robot running. He currently holds the record for longest distance travelled “off-world.”

As of right now Opportunity is “hibernating” through the Martian winter and will wake up again in March (yay!) to help with more scientific discoveries. 

Happy 5,000 Martian Day Opportunity! And thanks for everything you do <3

Metal Rover Model Kit

Opportunity Poster

A woman in Nevada dies from a bacterial infection that was resistant to 26 different antibiotics. A U.K. patient contracts a case of multidrug-resistant gonorrhea never seen before. A typhoid superbug kills hundreds in Pakistan. These stories from recent years — and many others — raise fears about the possibility of a post-antibiotic world.

The development of antibiotics in the early 20th century was one of the greatest leaps forward of modern medicine. Suddenly, common illnesses like pneumonia, strep throat and gonorrhea were no longer potential death sentences.

But even in the infancy of antibiotics, it was clear that their misuse and overuse could lead to antibiotic resistance and eventually create untreatable superbugs.

In this video, we explain how antibiotic resistance happens — and what we can do to avoid living in a post-antibiotic world.

Video: NPR

On November 9, 1967, the uncrewed Apollo 4 test flight made a great ellipse around Earth as a test of the translunar motors and of the high speed entry required of a crewed flight returning from the Moon. https://go.nasa.gov/2zybcxC

It`s hunting season!

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

There is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It's TESS, short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which, if all goes well, will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well, the new telescope will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

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And also math is a common language for spanish and chinese people. The original esperanto :)

Cooking With Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Science gets one horsepower fast

Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA

In a first, researchers converted a movie into a DNA sequence and inserted it into bacteria. They hope to someday use the technology to record cell behavior.

It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in motion ever become truly airborne.

More than a century later, that clip has rejoined the cutting edge. It is now the first movie ever to be encoded in the DNA of a living cell, where it can be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host divides and grows.

The advance, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard Medical School, is the latest and perhaps most astonishing example of the genome’s potential as a vast storage device.

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