Archives for May 2015

You are what you eat is one of the most overused cliches of all time. In this case, it also happens to be true. Because people know that and not much else it also tends to be the basis for a wide variety of specious, and occasionally harmful, diet fads. The Paleo diet is a great example. First off it has nothing to do with how Paleolithic people ate. Their diet included cannibalism. Not exactly a “go to” food choice for most folks. Secondly, it is not a well balanced diet and can cause numerous health issues if actually adhered to. As some of you know I recently lost a little over 200 lbs. I did it by going to a dietitian and getting a diet designed to help me. It would not be a good diet for many others. Before I went to see her my old boss kept trying to get me to go on the Atkin’s diet. While I would have lost weight if I had done so I would also have died. It seems my body was no longer processing proteins properly. It would have, literally, clogged my heart. Because of that knowledge I tend to strongly advise people to see a medical professional before embarking on any diet. You have no way of knowing what is or is not wrong with you just by looking in a mirror.

One thing you can, and should, do is follow the government guidelines. Despite what you may have heard they don’t ban meat. They just strongly advise that you eat less of it and avoid the processed stuff as much as possible.

Sam P.K. Collins takes a look at how people who know nothing about health tend to shape guidelines.

Or, at least, they used to.

In 2012, meat industry leaders also derailed President Barack Obama’s attempt to weaken Tyson Foods’ stranglehold on rural farmers. Under the status quo, chicken farmers didn’t own the beef, pork, and chicken they raised, instead working for Tyson for a small percentage. If the Obama administration’s plans would have come to fruition, then farmers could sue meatpackers more easily and worked autonomously under what Vilsack called the “new rural economy.” However, the meat lobby killed those plans, creating what veteran agribusiness journalist Christopher Leonard described as a “spectacular failure.”

Whether the meat industry’s most recent organization strategy will be successful has yet to be seen. But if it does fail, a potential move toward a more plant-based diet could serve as a challenge to a lobbying powerhouse and possibly the final blow to a food culture that has waned in popularity in recent years.

Meat serves as the primary part of the diet in many industrialized countries, with the United States counting as the second-largest consumer per capita. Even with a 12 percent decline in meat consumption within the last decade, the average American still eats more than 200 pounds annually.

While experts contend that eating beef moderately has health benefits, attention has turned to the consequences of excess production, especially since prices have declined. For many, the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and the greater likelihood of early mortality have become too much to ignore. Additionally, a growing body of research has tied meat production to a larger carbon and water footprint, another point that has galvanized support among environmentalists, especially as California reels from a drought.

That’s why one in 10 millennials has adopted a vegan diet and one third of Americans say they’re cutting back on their meat intake. Those changes have, in part, played a role in the introduction of more vegetarian food choices in fast food restaurants.

Dietician Julieanna Hever raised these points in her op-ed that appeared in The Hill last month, speculating that there’s not much standing in the way of HHS and the USDA finalizing the dietary recommendations later this year as they appeared in February, even with the meat industry’s political connections.

“It is telling that nearly every spokesperson not representing the meat, dairy, egg, and junk food industries who provided oral comments on the committee’s report wholeheartedly embraced this recommendation,” Hever wrote. “The fact is that Americans get it. We’re already eating less meat, and many of us are trying to cut back even further. A diet richer in vegetables, fruits, beans, and grains — and lower in animal products — is what our country needs and wants. And it’s not so controversial after all.”

A quick note here to help you avoid confusion. Any moron with a tinfoil hat can claim to be a “nutritionist.” That lovely industry is entirely unregulated. A dietitian, however, has a medical degree and knows what those things inside your body are supposed to do and how to help them do it. Put simply, just because Bob down the block once fixed a lawnmower doesn’t mean you should trust him with your car.

Granted, even if you know what’s good for you it’s sometimes a pain to take the time to make it. Well, I have some good news for you. A group of scientists, inspired by Star Trek’s replicator, have built a device that can make a 100% healthy meal in thirty seconds.

And the latest example of Star Trek tech becoming reality is the Genie, a device that echoes Trek’s food replicators. Created by a pair of Israeli entrepreneurs, Ayelet Carasso and Doron Marco, it relies on pods—akin to the inner workings of espresso machines—to turn natural baking ingredients and freeze-dried fruits and vegetables into personalize meals… in just 30 seconds.

Eventually, Marco told the news service Reuters, Genie will know a person’s microbiome and will prepare the pod specifically for that person. “You will eat better, even tastier and healthier,” he said. Marco also shared his desire for the Genie to be put to use in countries without enough food to feed their populations.

“In our world, we are getting fat and we are throwing away a lot of food, (and) in their world, they don’t have any food,” he said. “So if you use Genie, you can distribute the food better, you can have the shelf life much longer without the preservatives, give the people better food for them. We can even the food distribution in the world. That’s a very, very important goal for us.”

If you CLICK HERE you can see a video of the Genie in action. It will be available in the US next year.

If you want some diversity in the fruits you eat we’ve got you covered there too. Science Alert tells the tale of a tree that produces forty different types of fruit.

An art professor from Syracuse University in the US, Van Aken grew up on a family farm before pursuing a career as an artist, and has combined his knowledge of the two to develop his incredible Tree of 40 Fruit.

In 2008, Van Aken learned that an orchard at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station was about to be shut down due to a lack of funding. This single orchard grew a great number of heirloom, antique, and native varieties of stone fruit, and some of these were 150 to 200 years old. To lose this orchard would render many of these rare and old varieties of fruit extinct, so to preserve them, Van Aken bought the orchard, and spent the following years figuring out how to graft parts of the trees onto a single fruit tree.

Working with a pool of over 250 varieties of stone fruit, Van Aken developed a timeline of when each of them blossom in relationship to each other and started grafting a few onto a working tree’s root structure. Once the working tree was about two years old, Van Aken used a technique called chip grafting to add more varieties on as separate branches. This technique involves taking a sliver off a fruit tree that includes the bud, and inserting that into an incision in the working tree. It’s then taped into place, and left to sit and heal over winter. If all goes well, the branch will be pruned back to encourage it to grow as a normal branch on the working tree.

After about five years and several grafted branches, Van Aken’s first Tree of 40 Fruit was complete.

Aken’s Tree of 40 Fruit looks like a normal tree for most of the year, but in spring it reveals a stunning patchwork of pink, white, red and purple blossoms, which turn into an array of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds during the summer months, all of which are rare and unique varieties.

Not only is it a beautiful specimen, but it’s also helping to preserve the diversity of the world’s stone fruit. Stone fruits are selected for commercial growing based first and foremost on how long they keep, then how large they grow, then how they look, and lastly how they taste. This means that there are thousands of stone fruit varieties in the world, but only a very select few are considered commercially viable, even if they aren’t the best tasting, or most nutritious ones.

Van Aken has grown 16 Trees of 40 Fruit so far, and they’ve been planted in museums, community centres, and private art collections around the US. He now plans to grow a small orchard of these trees in a city setting.

Of course, the obvious question that remains is what happens to all the fruit that gets harvested from these trees? Van Aken told Lauren Salkeld at Epicurious:

“I’ve been told by people that have [a tree] at their home that it provides the perfect amount and perfect variety of fruit. So rather than having one variety that produces more than you know what to do with, it provides good amounts of each of the 40 varieties. Since all of these fruit ripen at different times, from July through October, you also aren’t inundated.”

This is the tree.

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

– Joyce Kilmer

While true in the sense that Van Aken didn’t make the tree it’s still pretty cool to see it in action. Hopefully they’ll be able to streamline the process and make it more readily available to the masses. Until then it’s heartening to know it exists.

One thing I discovered on my diet is that you can eat a lot of different things. You’d actually be amazed at the number of healthy choices you can make without going hungry. In fact I’d have to say that my diet now is far more diverse than the one that almost killed me.

Oh, side note, had I not gone on the prescribed diet I would have died within a couple of months. No way I knew that looking in a mirror.

Actual Food Porn from Jessica Saia on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

Thanks to the nice people at Geekly for putting this together.

This is going to come as a shock for certain sections of the internet (yeah, I’m talking to you fan-boy) but not everything needs your approval. When CBS greenlighted Supergirl it was clear that their whole line of thought was “Arrow is popular, Flash is popular and these guys made both.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is a bit shortsighted. Fortunately Andrew Kresiberg, the show’s creator, is not. Instead of trying to make Supergirl an estrogen powered Superman, he decided to develop a character who’s interesting in and of herself. Which means she needs a real secret identity and a life outside of wearing a cape. And since she’s a girl, she needs a girl’s life. More specifically, a 24 year old insecure girl’s life. Because, unlike her famous cousin, she did not embrace what she was right away. The reasons for that could be myriad, but just wanting to fit in is hinted at several times in the trailer. Speaking of the trailer, CBS, once they realized what they had, did something unprecedented. They didn’t release a minute or two of a teaser, they released six minutes that showed both her day to day life as well as her super powered one. I watched that trailer with my nieces, aged 14 to 19. To say they were exuberant would be a massive understatement. They finally had a super hero built just for them. And like Kara Zor-El in the show, they squealed on the couch as they watched things unfold. This, of course, has made fan-boys livid. The attacks on the show devolved quickly. Simply put, unless women are secondary (at best) characters they hate it. CBS, trembling in fear, is ready to laugh all the way to the bank. You see, as of this writing, 8 of the top 20 films are female oriented. And this is a family friendly female led show. Plus they get the tone right. When she does her serious face in the scene with alien hating military dude, that is a face that every parent has seen and knows well. It is not the face of a mature woman making a reasoned decision. It is just the face of raw determination. She even got the nod right. Assuming the show doesn’t suck, and my friends who have seen completed episodes assure me it doesn’t, then CBS will be sitting on a gold mine and millions of young woman will have something fun to dream about.

Okay, off my soapbox.

James Hunt, over at Den of Geek, has a point by point breakdown of all the fan-boy complaints if you feel the need to delve into this further.

Another show that came out of nowhere and is catching some fan-boy ire is Legends of Tomorrow. This is a show that no one asked for, should never have made it off an assistant’s desk and it’s going to be fucking awesome. That link will take you to the first look trailer for the show. Fun fact, they assembled the cast, got them in costumes and stuck them on a roof just to shoot the trailer. Not a frame has been shot for the show. As far as I know that scene may not even be part of the show. They just needed something to show the nice people at CW that they hadn’t lost their fucking minds. And, when you watch the trailer, you can understand the concern. The “rag tag group of misfits who have to come together” trope has been played to death. Plus, aside from Arrow and Flash making appearances here and there, all of the characters are nobodies. As one fan-boy so eloquently put it “NO NO NO NO THAT’S FUCKING WRONG!! WHERE IS LANTERN? WHERE IS ANYONE BUT THESE ASSHOLES?!?!?!?!” And so on, but you get the idea. Couple this with the fact that this show will have two strong female characters with interesting back stories (a recently dead assassin and a reincarnated alien) and you have a recipe guaranteed to piss off fan-boys the world over. And, guess what? The nice people at DC and CW just don’t care. Not anymore. The fan-boys held the comics world hostage through the 80’s and early 21st century. If it wasn’t white and in tights it wasn’t right. However, during that same period is when DC & Marvel began noticing a growing movement of fans who weren’t all that pale and some of them had curves in all the right places. So characters representing an array of different lifestyles and ethnicities started coming to the fore. And people who connected with those characters started joining the comic book universes and coming to conventions and basically making themselves known. This show, which will have a wide array of diverse characters surrounding the leads, comes directly from that. And they don’t need to have famous characters from the comic books, they just need to have interesting ones. And if they can’t make a recently dead assassin and a reincarnated alien interesting they may as well just stay home.

The Sy-Fy Network has also greenlighted a show that was clearly designed by someone who spent way too much time experimenting with hallucinogens. The show, called The Magicians, is kind of like Harry Potter on acid. And I say that as a good thing. While there is a complete lack of spandex there is plenty of leather, knee high, boots and floating women and playing cards. It’ll all make sense when you click on the link. “Magic is a drug” is a common theme. Oddly, this show is based on the books of Lev Grossman whose characters have been called “the least likable people on the planet.” And yet …. I can’t wait to see this.

In bizarre news, over thirty years after the original came out, Jonathon Betuel is preparing to foist a sequel to The Last Starfighter. Not a remake, not a reboot, an honest to God sequel. This is such a dangerously bad idea that it might work. A film featuring a forty-something dude who lives in a trailer park and plays video games may be just what the fan-boys need.

Another movie that no sane person asked for, Underworld 5, has been greenlit and will, once again, feature Kate Beckinsale as Salene. If you know what that means you’re excited. If you don’t, let’s move on.

A move that fan-boys and rational humans alike have been asking for is finally getting made. Marvel Studios head, Kevin Feige, confirmed that they have taken over the rights to Gargoyles and will be making it into a live action film.

“I’ve always wondered why the hell Disney never decided to turn Gargoyles into a blockbuster movie event,” Feige added. “But when I expressed an interest they literally begged me to take it off their hands, along with Quack Pack and The Mighty Ducks. The sci-fi animated version of The Mighty Ducks, not the good one. Man, the things we could do at Marvel with that Emilio Estevez movie… but if Gargoyles goes over well, maybe they’ll let us take a crack at it.”

Kevin Feige noted that although Marvel Studios will be producing the Gargoyles movie, they’re not seriously considering connecting the franchise with the Marvel Cinematic Universe… yet.

“Although Marvel Studios will be producing the Gargoyles movie, we’re not seriously considering connecting the franchise with the Marvel Cinematic Universe… yet,” Kevin Feige elaborated. “But the good news is we have tons of actors under multiple film contracts, and we could literally throw them into any movie if we wanted to. Robert Downey Jr. would make a great Xanatos, and we may force him to play Brooklyn as well, because why the hell not? People love that dude. What day is it again? I have stuff to do.”

He’s kidding about the Robert Downey Jr. stuff, I promise you. That said, this is the perfect guy to be in charge of this franchise. He knows and loves the characters and he has the resources to pour into a project to ensure it comes out top notch.

Of course, if you like your super-heroines to be created with a budget akin to a bag of Cheetos, here you go.

"Ferus" Full Trailer #1 (NSFW) from Ferus on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

I spent yesterday’s radio show talking about all the fun stuff that is happening in pop culture with superheroes and the like. It was a lot of fun but it lasted longer than I’d planned and I didn’t get to get to any of the cool stuff that’s happening in the real world. For example, guys will be pleased to note that now, instead of being forced to fend for themselves, science has created the robo-handjob. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. And what’s fun about this is that, since it was invented in Japan, the images used for titillation, if you will, feature animated images of pre-teen girls in the nude. If you click the link you can watch the video and see for yourself. They seem quite proud of it. Astute readers will already know that the staff here at World News Center has been following the development of “sexbots” for years. Of course, women have had their mechanical aids for centuries in one form or another so it seems only fair that the men catch up.

All well and good you say. But it’s just a thing. I understand your thoughts but this “thing” learns and reacts. The very basis of artificial intelligence. Oh cool, you say, what could possibly go wrong?

According to The Economist it could result in the death of every human on the planet. Including you.

“THE development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warns. Elon Musk fears that the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, may be the biggest existential threat humanity faces. Bill Gates urges people to beware of it.

Dread that the abominations people create will become their masters, or their executioners, is hardly new. But voiced by a renowned cosmologist, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the founder of Microsoft—hardly Luddites—and set against the vast investment in AI by big firms like Google and Microsoft, such fears have taken on new weight. With supercomputers in every pocket and robots looking down on every battlefield, just dismissing them as science fiction seems like self-deception. The question is how to worry wisely.

You taught me language and…
The first step is to understand what computers can now do and what they are likely to be able to do in the future. Thanks to the rise in processing power and the growing abundance of digitally available data, AI is enjoying a boom in its capabilities (see article). Today’s “deep learning” systems, by mimicking the layers of neurons in a human brain and crunching vast amounts of data, can teach themselves to perform some tasks, from pattern recognition to translation, almost as well as humans can. As a result, things that once called for a mind—from interpreting pictures to playing the video game “Frogger”—are now within the scope of computer programs. DeepFace, an algorithm unveiled by Facebook in 2014, can recognise individual human faces in images 97% of the time.

Crucially, this capacity is narrow and specific. Today’s AI produces the semblance of intelligence through brute number-crunching force, without any great interest in approximating how minds equip humans with autonomy, interests and desires. Computers do not yet have anything approaching the wide, fluid ability to infer, judge and decide that is associated with intelligence in the conventional human sense.

“Computers do not yet ….” is kind of scary.

There is a brilliant scientist named Stephen Wolfram who is teaching computers how to think. How to use everything from image recognition to speech.

You have probably already encountered versions of his work. Facial recognition on Facebook? Voice recognition on your phone? All of that is coming from him and and a select few others.

To be fair, there are scientists who do not see Armageddon in every microchip. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has been around since 1979 promoting and funding research into electronic minds.

Here’s their mission statement.

Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. AAAI aims to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence, improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.

Arthur C. Clarke often posited that A/I could be a great boon to mankind. His final works included a space borne intelligence named Aristotle which handled all the infrastructure of the world and took the place of Google as well as having the added benefit of being a companion to anyone who needed one.

Clarke was a brilliant writer and known atheist but not known for his sense of humor. Certainly he missed the irony of placing a benevolent electronic god in space to replace, or fulfill the function of, the allegedly fictional one.

In fact in his book Sunstorm he had Aristotle flanked by two lesser A/Is. You can fill in the allegories on your own.

As of this writing true A/I isn’t possible. Nothing has even come close to passing the Turing Test. That said, tremendous advances in that direction have been made.

And, as I’ve noted before, getting humans addicted to robo-sex is a good first step to our eventual subjugation.

Could be a fun ride, though.

I Love You, Eve from Jay Nolan on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

Because I have the Internet I can search and find things that would, otherwise, elude me. This can be a mixed blessing. For example, I was recently doing some research on the Wizard of Oz. And if you click that link you’ll be bombarded with Oz trivia. But as I happily clicked link after link I suddenly found myself on a midget porn site. Click on that at your own risk. Truly the miracle of Rule 34 in action. If you don’t believe that almost any subject has a related porn site just Google NASA porn and prepare to be aroused and or shocked, depending on your tastes. Anyway, the more salient point is that I use the Internet for research. As such I find that I have to slog through reams of stupid shit to get to what I want. Which is why, in a moment of frustration I Googled for “stupid shit” and ended up completely fascinated by what I’d found.

I’m odd like that.

Anyway, let’ start with that tired Internet terror alert that all beards contain more poop than a toilet. I’ll let Aahmna Modin, from IFL Science, patiently explain why you’re an idiot if you believed that.

Contrary to what you have seen in the media, beards do not harbor more poo than a toilet. The story, which originated from the TV news network ‘KOAT’ in New Mexico, has gone viral even though it has little scientific merit.

As Nick Evershed from the Guardian points out, the story wasn’t based on a scientific study. The investigation instead consisted of a reporter taking swabs of a small number of men’s beards and then sending those samples to a microbiologist to analyze. The microbiologist John Golobic identified ‘enteric’ bacteria, which normally reside in the intestines. He told the presenter that these bacteria are usually found in feces, but bacteria associated with feces is not necessarily feces—an important distinction that many people seem to have ignored.

Enteric bacteria are in the family Enterobacteriaceae and are often harmless, though some can cause disease. You, however, do not need to worry about these bacteria because they are everywhere. Phillip M. Tierno, a microbiologist at New York University, told New York Magazine that “we, as a society, are literally bathed in feces.” From the keyboard on your desk to the bag you carry around, fecal bacteria can be found in a number of places and they are not a cause for concern.

I saw the orignal story when it first came around and laughed at it. Just a quick memo to KOAT, and any other ratings desperate media outlet, if you’re going to site science please make sure to run it past someone who actually knows what science is. And how it works. And … you know what, just avoid the science stuff all together. It’s safer that way.

So you don’t have a fuzzy poop broom hanging off your chin. And I can see that you’re disappointed. After all, Fuzzy Poop Broom would be a great name for a Mumford and Sons tribute band.

But what if I told you that, while you need not comb it out of your beard, you can actually make good money with your poop? Feel better now?

Lisa Winter has the whole story.

Everybody poops. That’s not just the name of a popular potty training book, but it’s an essential fact of life. However, most people merely flush it away without a second thought. In the spirit of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure, the non-profit company OpenBiome is actually paying for stool samples in order to create lifesaving fecal transplant treatments for those infected with Clostridium difficile, a bacteria which is highly resistant to antibiotics.

Infections of C. difficile result in severe diarrhea, hospitalizing 250,000 Americans each year and causing about 14,000 deaths. It can actually come about after using antibiotics for too long, which ties into what makes it exceptionally difficult to treat. The patient’s gut microbiota is nearly wiped out, and conventional probiotics are not sufficient to replace them.

The best treatment for C. difficile infections is a fecal transplant, and yes, it has traditionally been as horrible as it sounds. Doctors have relied on highly invasive nasogastric tubes (NG tubes) or colonoscopies to put donor fecal matter into the gut of their infected patients. As difficult as the process may be, it is highly successful. A new method uses capsules of frozen fecal matter, which thaw out in the body and release the contents in the small intestines. The success rates of the capsules is comparable to traditional treatments, around 90 percent.

These frozen fecal capsules are OpenBiome’s wheelhouse, as they collect and screen stool samples, and turn them into the ready-to-administer treatments for hospitals. Of course, the feces needs to be sourced from somewhere. OpenBiome pays donors who are committed to providing multiple samples per week.

Though everybody may do it, not everyone is an ideal candidate to get paid to do it. First and foremost, OpenBiome needs donors to be near their lab in Medford, Massachusetts to join the registry to donate. Candidates who meet the requirements for age, BMI, and health pre-screening questions are then invited to get blood and stool testing. Donations are then made at least four times per week for 60 days, when each donor is re-evaluated. Once the next round of blood and stool tests come back clear, the previous samples are then converted into capsules and sent to patients across the country.

The going rate is $40 per donation, with a $50 kicker for those who come five days a week. This translates into $250 per week, or $13,000 per year. OpenBiome tries to make the experience as fun as they can by offering prizes to donors who make the most donations, provide the biggest sample, etc. However, there’s no word on if OpenBiome offers a fun sticker to show off your donation to friends and family, such as the “Be nice to me, I gave blood today” badge handed out by the Red Cross.

If you meet the qualifications you can contact OpenBiome by just clicking their name.

“But Bill,” you say pleadingly, “what if I can’t sell my poop? How do I use my poop for the betterment of humanity?”

I’m glad you asked.

Become an astronaut. Or at least learn the skills needed to be wanted by NASA. It’s actually quite a long list. Anything from medical doctor to computer expert to astrophysicist will get you a look see. Just stay in school, get good grades, and you can be one of the lucky people who gets to power a space ship with their poop.

No, I am not insane.

Brian McConnell from i09 says that you too can be a super pooper.

If we’re going to venture out into the Solar System and beyond, we’re going to need versatile and reliable spaceships. One possible solution comes in the form of “spacecoaches” — reusable vessels that are self-sufficient and capable of carrying explorers to virtually any destination. Here’s how they’ll work.

Imagine the kind of spaceship we’ll need as we begin to expand the human presence into the nearby Solar System. We’d like something completely reusable, a vessel able to carry people in relative comfort everywhere from Mars to Venus, and perhaps as far out as the asteroid belt, where tempting Ceres awaits. Capable of refueling using in situ resources, these are ships not crafted for a single, specific mission but able to operate on demand without entering a planetary atmosphere. Brian McConnell, working with Centauri Dreams regular Alex Tolley, has been thinking about just such a ship for some time now. A software/electrical engineer, pilot and technology entrepreneur based in San Francisco, Brian here explains the concept he and Alex have come up with, one that Alex treated in a previous entry in these pages. The advantages of their ‘spacecoach’ are legion and Brian also offers a sound way to begin testing the concept. — Paul Gilster, Editor, Centauri Dreams

“What if a spacecraft, like a cell, was made mostly of water?”

That’s what Alexander Tolley and I asked when we were working on our paper for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, “A Reference Design For A Simple, Durable and Refuelable Interplanetary Spacecraft”. The paper explored the idea of a crewed spacecraft that used water as propellant in combination with solar electric propulsion. We dubbed them spacecoaches, as a nod to the stagecoaches of the Old West. Alex also gave the concept an excellent fictional treatment in Spaceward Ho!, also published on Centauri Dreams. We are currently finishing a book about spacecoaches, to be published by Springer this fall.

The idea of crewed solar electric spacecraft is hardly new. In 1954, Ernst Stuhlinger proposed a “sun-ship” powered by solar steam turbines and cesium ion drives. Since then solar electric propulsion has been used in a wide variety of uncrewed craft. Meanwhile, the convergence of several technologies will make crewed solar electric vehicles feasible in the near future.

A Spaceship That is Mostly Water

The core idea behind the spacecoach architecture is the use of water, and potentially waste streams, as propellant in electric engines. Water, life support and consumables are critical elements in a long duration mission, and in a conventional ship, are dead weight that must be pushed around by propellant that cannot be used for other purposes. Water in a spacecoach, on the other hand, can be used for many things before it is reclaimed and sent to the engines, and it can be treated as working mass. This, combined with the increased propellant efficiency of electric engines, leads to a virtuous cycle that results in dramatic cost reductions compared to conventional ships while increasing mission capabilities. Cost reductions of one or two orders of magnitude, which would make travel to destinations throughout the inner solar system routine, are possible with this approach.

Water is, for example, an excellent radiation shielding material, comparable to lead on a per kilogram basis, except you can’t drink lead. It is an excellent thermal battery, and can simply be circulated in reservoirs wrapped around the ship to balance hot and cold zones (this same reservoir doubles as the radiation shield). When frozen into fibrous material to form pykrete, it forms a material as tough as concrete, which can potentially be used for debris shielding or for momentum wheels, and if positioned correctly, can double as a supplemental radiation shield. If mixed with dilute hydrogen peroxide, which is safely stored at low concentrations, oxygen can be generated by passing it through a catalyst, similar to a contact lens cleaner. Dilute H2O2 is also a potent disinfectant, and can also be used to process human waste, as is done in terrestrial wastewater treatment plants. Anything the crew eats or drinks can be counted as propellant, as the water can be reclaimed and used for propulsion. This greatly simplifies planning for long missions because the longer the mission is, the more propellant you have in the form of consumables. This will also provide excellent safety margins and enable crews to survive an Apollo 13 scenario in deep space.

A spaceship that is mostly water will be more like a cell than a conventional rocket plus capsule architecture. Space agriculture, or even aquaculture, becomes practical when water is abundant. Creature comforts that would be unthinkable in a conventional ship (hot baths anyone?) will be feasible in a spacecoach. Meanwhile, inflatable structures will eventually enable the construction of large, complex habitats that will be more like miniature O’Neill colonies than a conventional spaceship.

“Okay, cool,” you’re saying, “but what does a space ship made of water have to do with my poop?”

Quite a bit actually.

As noted, tastefully, above, “Anything the crew eats or drinks can be counted as propellant, as the water can be reclaimed and used for propulsion.” Simply put, your output becomes input for the engines and for the shielding.

That’s right, NASA can, as of today, build an Inter-Solar Poop Ship.

And you thought science wasn’t cool.

Le Sexoflex – Poop On Face from Le Sexoflex on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

As anyone who’s ever written a blog knows, sometimes you get email. Sometimes it’s of the “Good job, here’s your tummy rub” variety and other times it’s more akin to “U MUST DI! U R LIZZERD PERSUN!” I prefer the tummy rubs but can deal with the lizzerd stuff. What amazes me, however, is the growing number of people for whom facts are negotiable. If I write that water is made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, a/k/a our old pal H2O, I will get emails informing me that hydrogen kills people and that I’m an idiot. That actually happened. While true, in the sense that if you were trapped in a room filled with nothing but hydrogen you would die, it’s also completely oblivious of reality and the facts of the initial statement. For the record, if you were trapped in a room filled with H2O it would be just as fatal. That still doesn’t change its composition. It’s almost as if about 25% of our country is made up of mentally challenged people with ADHD.

But for the remaining 75% of you playing along I’d like to continue moving forward with our hydrogen theme. Justine Alford is reporting that China has developed the first, commercially viable, hydrogen powered tram.

As the world’s biggest polluter, China may have earned its reputation as the big bad wolf of greenhouse gas emissions. That being said, officials left many with their mouths open recently after their rare admission that they are aware of the negative impacts emissions have on global climate, which could threaten the country’s infrastructure projects, crop yields and environment.

Although still reluctant to set a target for slashing emissions, China is investing a substantial amount into green energy and was even a world leader in renewable energy production back in 2013. They generate more wind power than any other country in the world and their contributions accounted for almost 30% of all global investment in clean energy. Now, continuing with their push for clean energy developments, China has just announced the production of the world’s first hydrogen-powered tram.

The vehicle was developed by Sifang, a subsidiary of China South Rail Corporation, and was rolled off the assembly line in Qiangdao, Shandong Province, last week. Although hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a while and are currently being used and tested in various vehicles, including buses, nobody had managed to master the technology for trams before.

“It took two years for Sifang to solve key technological problems, with the help of research institutions,” said chief engineer Liang Jianying, according to Xinhua news agency. But Liang did not give any indication as to when the tram would be in operation.

As pointed out by RT, hydrogen-powered trams are an attractive mode of transport for numerous reasons. Hydrogen is extremely abundant and can be extracted from a variety of sources, both renewable and non-renewable. Furthermore, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are zero emission, producing only water. The newly designed vehicle will also help slash energy running costs as one tank will last for around 100 kilometers (62 miles), and it only takes three minutes to refuel.

“The average distance of tramcar lines in China is about fifteen kilometers [nine miles], which means one refill for our tram is enough for three round trips,” said Liang.

If they’ve solved the problem of it requiring more than three parts raw stock to produce one part hydrogen, then they could be on to something. Even if they haven’t, China has vast resources and this is a renewable form of power.

Continuing in a hydrogen vein, Audi announced that they made diesel fuel out of water. And, no, this is not one of those internet hoaxes or an article in the Onion. Jameson Parker has the whole story.

For those of us in coal dust-choked America, it may seem bizarre, but Germany, along with other countries around the world, have become increasingly consumed with finding renewable energy solutions to climate change and oil addiction. It has led them to look to wind and solar at scales that environmentalists in America can only dream of. And guess what? It hasn’t killed jobs. The results have been just the opposite.

Audi, for example, has been toying with cheap, renewable energy to power its vehicles for years. Recently, they announced that they believe they finally cracked the code.

It operates according to the power‑to‑liquid (PtL) principle and uses green power to produce a liquid fuel. The only raw materials needed are water and carbon dioxide. The CO2 used is currently supplied by a biogas facility. In addition, initially a portion of the CO2 needed is extracted from the ambient air by means of direct air capturing, a technology of Audi’s Zurich‑based partner Climeworks.

Engineers also believe the efficiency of the fuel is at around 70 percent – compared to regular diesel’s mid-30’s.

Many critics of “e-diesel” point to the fact that it takes dirty energy to make this “cleaner” energy. Doesn’t this mean that the diesel isn’t really clean? Only if your country depends on coal and oil to power its electrical grid. Germany has the unique position of being at the very forefront of the solar energy revolution. Despite its cloudy skies, the European country out-solars every other nation by a wide margin. In this way, Audi can realistically say that its e-diesel is created using no fossil fuels at all.

To prove that their product wasn’t just wishful thinking, Audi asked Germany’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka, to fill up her personal Audi A8 and drive it around. She seemed sold:

“If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources, and put the fundamentals of the ‘green economy’ in place.”

It’s hard not to draw an unflattering comparison to lawmakers in the United States, who seem bent on clinging to fossil fuels until the last drop is pulled from the earth. President Obama and his administration have tried to make inroads into renewable energy, but have been met with stiff opposition. Recently, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Coal Country) fired off an angry letter to the governors of all 50 states instructing them to simply ignore any efforts to address climate change by the Obama administration.

There’s a lot of snark in Jameson’s article but also a lot of truth. Japan and China both have train systems that can safely top 200 mph on a regular basis and both are hell bent on developing safe energy sources. The same holds true in most of Europe. By comparison, AMTRACK, here in the US, has recently announced that it can now safely get trains up to speeds of 110 mph over select sections of track. This is the same as the top speed a coal powered train could achieve in 1930 on any section of track.

That’s not really progress.

There’s a reason this is important. Trains can hold several thousand people at one time. Almost four times as much as an air plane. If all regional travel can be transferred to trains without inconveniencing the travelers then the amount of released pollutants decreases dramatically. If, as in China, the amount of pollutants can be reduced to near zero, including the process for making the fuel, then the amount of pollution related diseases can also be reduced by the same margin.

Think of it this way. It is just under 283 miles from Chicago to Detroit. Figure it can take up to four and a half hours to drive that far. The average direct flight from Chicago to Detroit takes about an hour and a quarter but you have to be at the airport an hour early for security reasons and deplaning and collecting luggage adds another half an hour. So that adds up to around two hours and forty five minutes all total. Still better than driving, I must admit. A train traveling two hundred miles per hour would also take about an hour and a quarter to make the trip. But trains load by the car so the onboarding time is much shorter and you can carry more luggage than you can on a plane. Even if you check your baggage the return time when you get to your destination is usually less than ten minutes. Add in boarding and leaving and you add a half an hour to the trip or a total time of an hour and forty five minutes.

So let’s see how that impacts the world around us. A car or van can take a maximum of eight people in four and a half hours and use an average of fifteen gallons of fuel.

A plane can get five hundred people out of the Detroit airport in around two and half hours after using around a thousand gallons of jet fuel.

A train can get two thousand people to Detroit in under two hours after using around eight hundred gallons of fuel.

Yes, I am aware they are different types of fuel, but we’re looking at impact and economy here.

So, the train is the fastest route and uses 2.5 gallons of fuel per person. Planes are next and, to get the same number of people to Detroit as a train, they would need four flights which comes out to five gallons of fuel per person. To make that work for a car … let’s not even bother. You’d need two hundred and fifty cars just to get the ball rolling.

Now, what about those longer trips? Say, for example, you want to go to …. oh, let’s just say, Mars. Last year NASA was saying that colonization was a one way trip. Not so fast says Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz. Or, more correctly, not so slow. Or fatal.

Ed Mazza reports that NASA’s well on its way to getting and there and back in record time.

A new type of rocket that could send humans to Mars in less than six weeks instead of six months or longer may be one step closer to reality.

NASA has selected Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company for a round of funding to help develop the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR. The new rocket uses plasma and magnets, not to lift spacecraft into orbit but to propel them further and faster once they’ve escaped the planet’s atmosphere.

“It is a rocket like no other rocket that you might have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket,” Dr. Franklin Chang-Díaz, a former shuttle astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra said in a video describing the rocket. “The VASIMR engine is not used for launching things into space or landing them back but rather it is used for things already there. We call this ‘in-space propulsion.'”

While missions near Earth would be able to use solar energy to power the rocket, a mission to Mars would require something far more powerful — most likely nuclear power, which the company has called “an ideal power source in space.”

In ideal conditions, the rocket could propel a spacecraft to Mars in just 39 days.

So, in five and a half weeks, not to be confused with Nine and a Half Weeks, you can be standing on an alien world. Plus, the nice thing about using nuclear power in space is that it’s controllable and predictable. Two very important things when the slightest mistake could kill everyone on board.

Okay, now we’re getting in the realm of commercially viable inter-solar travel. But what if that isn’t fast enough for you? Not to worry. Mary-Ann Russon says that NASA may have, accidentally, invented a warp drive.

Yes, just like the one in Star Trek (more on that in a moment).

Nasa has been testing a highly controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology called EmDrive and has found evidence that it may indeed work, and along the way, might even have made a sci-fi concept possible.

The EmDrive is a technology that could make it much cheaper to launch satellites into space and could be key to solving the energy crisis, if solar power could be harnessed off the satellites and sent back to Earth.

It was thought up and developed by a British scientist called Roger Shawyer, who spent years having his technology ridiculed by the international space community even though Boeing licensed it and the UK government was satisfied it worked.

Nasa has been testing the technology for a while and it confirmed on 29 April that researchers at the Johnson Space Center have successfully tested an electromagnetic propulsion drive in a vacuum, and although it did not seem possible, the technology actually works.

“Thrust measurements of the EmDrive defy classical physics’ expectations that such a closed [microwave] cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum,” Nasa’s José Rodal, Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson wrote in a Nasa Spaceflight blog.

What is EmDrive?

EmDrive is based on the theory of special relativity that it is possible to convert electrical energy into thrust without the need to expel any form of repellent.

Shawyer’s critics say according to the law of conservation of momentum, his theory cannot work as in order for a thruster to be propelled forwards, something must be pushed out of the back of it in the opposite direction.

However, EmDrive does preserve the conservation of momentum and energy – to put it simply, electricity converts into microwaves within the cavity that push against the inside of the device, causing the thruster to accelerate in the opposite direction.

Shawyer proved that if you had a 100kg spacecraft, the thrust would be in a clockwise direction and the spacecraft would then accelerate in an anti-clockwise direction.

Nasa says it works when tested in a vacuum

The researchers explain that the reason why Shawyer’s EmDrive models and EmDrive experiments carried out by Chinese researchers had been criticised in the past was because none of the tests had been carried out in a vacuum.

Physics says particles in the quantum vacuum cannot be ionised, so therefore you cannot push against it, but Nasa says Shawyer’s theory does indeed work.

“Nasa has successfully tested their EmDrive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organisation has reported such a successful test. To this end, Nasa Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection,” the researchers wrote.

Nasa says its researchers joined forces with a large community of enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists on several continents to discuss EmDrive theories on the NasaSpaceflight.com EmDrive forum, and “despite considerable effort within the NasaSpaceflight.com forum to dismiss the reported thrust as an artefact, the EmDrive results have yet to be falsified”.

At least now Shawyer’s work is being validated and he continues to work on a souped-up second generation version of the EmDrive that uses super conductors and an asymmetrical cavity to increase the thrust by up to five orders of magnitude.

In an interview with IBTimes UK in August 2014, Shawyer said: “There was an element of not wanting to disrupt the industry, but also a total ignorance in the laws of physics. They did make life difficult for me for a while.

“The space industry doesn’t want to know about it as it’s very disruptive. If the customer will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on launching a satellite, why would you want to make something that could do it cheaper?

“This technology is a quantum leap – it would enable vertical take-off and landing for airplanes, it’s quiet and it uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, so it’s green too.”

Star Trek warp drive might also now be possible

Apart from the excitement over EmDrive possibly being a real thing, internet users also noticed Nasa could possibly have accidentally invented the warp drive – a faster-than-light propulsion system that enables spacecraft to travel at speeds that are greatly faster than light in sci-fi movies such as Star Trek.

Nasa researchers posted on the Nasa Spaceflight forum that when lasers were fired into the EmDrive’s resonance chamber, some of the laser beams had travelled faster than the speed of light, which would mean the EmDrive could have produced a warp bubble.

A post by another user analysing the EmDrive experiment said “the math behind the warp bubble apparently matches the interference pattern found in the EmDrive”.

The EmDrive could change everything. Not only is it more powerful than anything ever developed it could cut travel times into days instead of months. And that WARP drive thing? I had to make sure it wasn’t a satirical article.

Try this; the NASA engine is an EM Pulse. Star Trek called their slower than light engine Impulse. The new discovery is a space time contraction bubble, or warp. We all already know what Star Trek called their super cool faster than light drive. So the EmDrive is the perfect combination of both Star Trek visions with the added bonus of being something real.

That’s too many coincidences for me. I’m going to start scanning the skies for a Vulcan trading ship tonight.

The point of all this is simple. Take a look at each of the articles again. Faster, more efficient, and safer forms of travel are available. They can take us from the shortest distance to the farthest reaches of your imagination. And not one of them pollutes a damn thing.

Bonus, three out of four involve our good friend hydrogen.

Sheldon Speed – Human (NSFW) from Sheldon Speed on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!