The good folks at spaceref have linked to all the sections in the PDF document that describes just about everything you wanted to know about this technological marvel we call ISS.

Here’s the quote from SpaceRef:

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Well here we are two minutes closer to midnight, and I feel fine. Seriously though, for those who are not aware, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who created the “Doomsday” clock in 1947 to warn of the impending dangers of global nuclear annihilation, have moved the ominous timepiece forward two minutes which puts us squarely at five minutes till midnight. Why have we moved closer to the end? According to the folks who run the program, the threat from rogue states possessing nuclear weapons and starting a nuclear war combined with the danger of climate change destroying human habitats factored into their calculations.

Here’s an excerpt from the Reuters article:

“We foresee great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change,” famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge, a member of the bulletin’s board of sponsors, told reporters in London.

Yikes, hole up with your favorite comfort food and put Busta Rhyme’s “Extinction Level Event” on loop, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Read the full story from Reuters

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I love all the things nano, from the ipod nano to nano materials. However, many of these nano-materials have not been fully investigated as to what would be the outcome should an accidental exposure from these substances happen to a person or merely to the environment. Remember asbestos? That really good fire-proof insulating material, remember how it turns out that inhalation of nano-scale particulates of it can give you mesothelioma and incurable lung cancer? Yeah, so perhaps use of nano engineered materials could turn out to have some unforseen and very unwelcome health consequences. The good folks at Sciam have written an article on the study of how carbon nanotubes would behave if released into a natural water system. The results weren’t good. It turns out that even though the nanotubes are hydrophobic, instead of clumping together and sinking to the bottom, the particles interacted with the negatively charged organic material in the water and this organic material turned out to be a better disperser for the material than the chemical surfactants that had been used in the lab for that very purpose. Hit the link for a very interesting read.

Safety study for Carbon Nanotubes

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Here’s the direct quote:

The Z-Man Program will develop climbing aids that will enable an individual soldier to scale vertical walls constructed of typical building materials without the need for ropes or ladders. The inspiration for these climbing aids is the technique by which geckos, spiders, and small animals scale vertical surfaces, that is, by using unique biological material systems that enable controllable adhesion using van der Waals forces or by hooking surface asperities. This program seeks to build synthetic versions of those material systems and then utilize them in a novel climbing aid optimized for use by humans. The overall goal of the program is to enable an individual soldier using dry adhesive climbing aides to scale a vertical surface at 0.5 m/s while carrying a combat load.

‘Nuff Said

Z-MAN PROJECT

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Wow, I love finding extremely bold blog entry titles on New Scientist, but, I digress. You, dear readers, know that here at the Unsayable podcast we love the idea of space elevators, and in the spirit of full disclosure our parent company, OmniTech DigiCorp Unlimited, is actually working on it’s own prototype. However, there are a few small hurdles that need to be overcome before we can begin enjoying a leisurely ride to the stars. Namely, the Van Allen radiation belts. These belts are chocked full of charged particles that have been captured by the earth’s magnetic field, and are not compatible with our form of life, which is to say that they aren’t good for you. So, it looks like some innovative science will be needed to overcome this death-beam circling the planet. Hit the link to New Scientist to see what they think.

New Scientist

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I kid, I kid, they would never let Chris anywhere near sensitive government software projects, or would they….?

Anyways apparently one of the satellites we sent to Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor, has been lost due to a software programming error. Here’s a quote from Nasa’s John McNamee:

“We think that the failure was due to a software load we sent up in June of last year. This software tried to synch up two flight processors. Two addresses were incorrect - two memory addresses were over written. As the geometry evolved, we drove the [solar] arrays against a hard stop and the spacecraft went into safe mode. The radiator for the battery pointed at the sun, the temperature went up, and battery failed. But this should be treated as preliminary.”

Tsk tsk tsk. What’s the moral of this story? What do you do with software before you upload it to a crazy expensive spacecraft orbiting an alien world? Test! Test! Test!

Read the full story at SpaceRef

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