Archives for May 2015

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.

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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.
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