27th December 2015
Lions added to endangered species list
In response to the alarming decline of lion populations in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed two lion subspecies as endangered and threatened. Without action to protect them, African lions could see their populations halved by 2035.
This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced it will list two lion subspecies under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Panthera leo leo – located in India and western and central Africa – will be listed as endangered, while Panthera leo melanochaita – found in eastern and southern Africa – will be listed as threatened.
In the last 20 years, lion populations have declined by 43% due to a combination of habitat loss, loss of prey base, trophy hunting, poaching for skins and uses in Chinese traditional medicine, and retaliatory killing of lions by a growing human population. The killing of Cecil the lion in July of this year served to further highlight this issue. Coupled with inadequate financial and other resources for countries to effectively manage protected areas, the impact on lions in the wild has been substantial. Having once been present in south-eastern Europe and throughout much of the Middle East and India, the animals have now lost 85% of their historic range, as shown on the map below.
Their numbers could be halved again by 2035, according to a recent study in the journal PNAS: "Many lion populations are either now gone or expected to disappear within the next few decades, to the extent that the intensively managed populations in southern Africa may soon supersede the iconic savannah landscapes in East Africa as the most successful sites for lion conservation," the study said.
In 2011, the USFWS received a petition to list Panthera leo leo as endangered under the ESA. In 2014, the agency published a 12-month finding and agreed to list the subspecies as threatened with a special rule under section 4(d) of the ESA. Based on newly available scientific information on the genetics and taxonomy of lions, the agency assessed the status of the entire lion species and subsequently changed its earlier finding.
The new science resolved that the western and central populations of African lion are more genetically related to the Asiatic lion. These lions are now considered the same subspecies, P. l. leo. There are only about 1,400 of these lions remaining; 900 in Africa and just 523 in India. Considering the size and distribution of the populations, the current trends and the severity of the threats, the agency has found that this subspecies now meets the definition of "endangered" under the ESA.
The other subspecies – Panthera leo melanochaita – likely numbers between 17,000-19,000 and is found across southern and eastern Africa. The agency determined that this subspecies is less vulnerable and is not currently in danger of extinction. However, although lion numbers in southern Africa are increasing overall, they are declining significantly in some regions, due to various ongoing threats. As a result, the agency finds this subspecies meets the definition of a "threatened" species under the ESA.
With an endangered listing, imports of P. l. leo will now be prohibited – except in certain rare cases, such as when it can be found that the import will enhance the survival of the species. To strengthen conservation measures for the threatened subspecies P. l. melanochaita, a new permitting mechanism will regulate the import of all P. l. melanochaita parts and products into the USA. This process will ensure that any imported specimens are legally obtained in range countries as part of a scientifically sound management program that benefits the subspecies in the wild. A third and final rule will enable the agency to support changes that strengthen the governance and accountability of conservation programs in other nations.
Protected areas are vital to the future survival of lions; and the building of corridors or funnelling mechanisms between protected areas is equally critical so that lions can be directed to other suitable habitat, away from potential conflict areas. It takes around $2,000 per square kilometre per year to properly protect these animals in Africa. Scientists from both the USA and the UK have, in recent years, begun collaborating to better understand how lions move across the African landscape and to model ways to conserve genetic diversity and populations across the continent.
“The lion is one of the planet’s most beloved species and an irreplaceable part of our shared global heritage,” said USFWS Director Dan Ashe. “If we want to ensure that healthy lion populations continue to roam the African savannas and forests of India, then it’s up to all of us – not just the people of Africa and India – to take action.”
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Monday, 28 December 2015
InSight mission to Mars postponed until at least 2018
NASA has postponed its launch of the InSight Mars mission in March 2016, due to an air leak in one of the primary scientific instruments. It is currently unclear if the mission will be cancelled entirely or delayed until 2018.
After thorough examination, NASA managers have decided to suspend the planned March 2016 launch of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission. This follows unsuccessful attempts to repair a leak in part of the prime instrument in the science payload.
"Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era," said John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA's HQ in Washington, D.C. "We push the boundaries of space technology with our missions to enable science, but space exploration is unforgiving, and the bottom line is that we're not ready to launch in the 2016 window."
The instrument involved is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), a seismometer provided by France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES). Designed to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of a single atom, it could detect signals from marsquakes, meteorite impacts, local events like dustdevils or landslides, and even the tiny tidal deformation of Mars induced by its moon Phobos. The SEIS requires a vacuum seal around its three main sensors to withstand the harsh conditions of the Martian environment.
"InSight's investigation of the Red Planet's interior is designed to increase understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved," explains Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. "Mars retains evidence about the rocky planets' early development that has been erased on Earth by internal churning Mars lacks. Gaining information about the core, mantle and crust of Mars is a high priority for planetary science, and InSight was built to accomplish this."
A leak earlier this year that had previously prevented the seismometer from retaining vacuum conditions was repaired, and the mission team was hopeful the most recent fix would be successful. However, during testing last week in extreme cold temperature (-49°F/-45°C) the instrument again failed to hold a vacuum. NASA officials have now determined that there is insufficient time to resolve another leak, and complete the work and thorough testing required to ensure a successful mission.
"It's the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built," said Marc Pircher, CNES Director. "We were very close to succeeding – but an anomaly has occurred, which requires further investigation. Our teams will find a solution to fix it, but it won't be solved in time for a launch in 2016."
The relative positions of Earth and Mars mean the best launch opportunities occur for only a few weeks every 26 months. The current launch window for InSight runs from 4th–30th March 2016.
"When you know you’re going to miss the window, it’s essentially game over, at least for this opportunity," said Grunsfeld. "This is a case where the alignment of the planets matters, and to get from Earth to Mars in the most efficient manner, they’re aligned about every 26 months. So we’re looking at some time in the May 2018 timeframe for the next opportunity."
The mission could even be cancelled altogether: "That is a question that's on the table," according to Grunsfeld. NASA has already spent $525 million on research and development of the spacecraft; a launch delay from 2016 to 2018 automatically triggers a review on its future. NASA is unsure how much the delay and repairs will cost, or whether it will exceed the mission's budget cap. "A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months," Grunsfeld says.
"The JPL and CNES teams, and their partners, have made a heroic effort to prepare the InSight instrument, but have run out of time given the celestial mechanics of a launch to Mars," said JPL Director Charles Elachi. "It is more important to do it right than take an unacceptable risk."
"In 2008, we made a difficult, but correct decision to postpone the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory mission for two years to better ensure mission success," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division in Washington. "The successes of that mission's rover, Curiosity, have vastly outweighed any disappointment about that delay."
Since there is still a chance it will go ahead, we have moved the InSight mission from 2016 to 2018 on our timeline.
Monday, 21 December 2015
Science of Solar Racing
The World races. Earth wins!
The World races. Earth wins!
Why would one of the biggest innovation companies in the world spend its time and treasure to help a bunch of solar savvy students race across the Australian Outback? The reason is simple. By taking its solar forecasting and cognitive technologies out of the research lab and onto the World Solar Challenge raceway, IBM scientists and engineers will be able to start learning from these extreme experiences to better normalize solar power into a dependable part of our electrical energy grid. That could mean less fossil fuels, less carbon emissions and less money spent on your energy bill. It’s a win-win-win.
After John F. Kennedy’s famous speech about space research, news sources everywhere were abuzz with opinions. 53 years and a moon landing later, IBM Watson Personality Insights can now offer an unbiased analysis of any given body of text in matter of seconds.Try it out here →
Take a trip back to the early ‘80s when a new kind of computer started making our home and work lives a whole lot more awesome. Happy IBM PC Day!
Sunday, 20 December 2015
Amazon reveals new Prime Air drone prototypes
Online retail giant Amazon has revealed its new drone prototype, which aims to deliver packages in less than 30 minutes. The drones weigh 55 pounds and can carry packages weighing up to 5 pounds. They fly under 400 feet and use "sense and avoid" technology to dodge potential obstacles en route to their destination. In March, the Federal Aviation Administration granted Amazon approval to fly drones for research purposes, after first revealing its plans in 2013. If regulators approve the latest version, this futuristic new service could one day become a reality. For more info, see Amazon.com.
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New microscope is 2,000 times faster
A new atomic force microscope developed by MIT can scan images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. This allows it to capture near-real-time video of nanoscale processes.
State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometre – a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from DNA strands to individual bonds changing between molecules. But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs have therefore been used mostly for static samples as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.
Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.
In one demonstration of the instrument’s capabilities, the researchers scanned a 70- by-70-micron sample of calcite as it was first immersed in deionised water and later exposed to sulphuric acid. Zooming into an area of interest, they observed the acid eating away at the calcite, expanding existing nanometre-sized pits in the material that quickly merged and led to a layer-by-layer removal of calcite along the material’s crystal pattern, over a period of several seconds.
 Calcite immersed in deionised water. |  Sulphuric acid creating pits in the calcite. |
Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Kamal Youcef-Toumi, says the instrument’s sensitivity and speed will enable scientists to watch atomic-sized processes play out as high-resolution “movies.”
“People can see, for example, condensation, nucleation, dissolution, or deposition of material, and how these happen in real-time – things that people have never seen before,” he says. “This is fantastic to see these details emerging. And it will open great opportunities to explore all of this world that is at the nanoscale.”
The MIT researchers' achievement was made possible through an innovative new technique. This involved controlling the movement of the needle over the sample surface with two actuators (a small, fast scanner and a larger, slower one) in combination with a set of algorithms to ensure they never interfered with each other. At present, this method provides scans at eight to 10 frames per second, but further research is underway to increase this.
“We want to go to real video, which is at least 30 frames per second,” Youcef-Toumi says. “Hopefully we can work on improving the instrument and controls so that we can do video-rate imaging while maintaining its large range and keeping it user-friendly. That would be something great to see.”
The team's design and images, which are based on the PhD work of Iman Bozchalooi – now a postdoc in the Department of Mechanical Engineering – appear in the journal Ultramicroscopy.
"OpenAI" – a new venture to create benevolent artificial intelligence
A team of world-class researchers, engineers and technology experts have announced a non-profit collaboration – OpenAI – that will work to encourage the development of AI that benefits humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
OpenAI is a brand new artificial intelligence (AI) research organisation that has just been announced in San Francisco, California. The company aims to advance and develop "friendly" AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. One of the largest differences between OpenAI and other organisations working on artificial intelligence, is OpenAI's non-profit status. In a press release explaining its founding, OpenAI states that their research will therefore be "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return", allowing them to "better focus on a positive human impact."
Related to this, another major goal of the organisation is to prevent corporations and governments from gaining too much power by them employing advanced AI, and instead making sure that the benefits of AI are divided as equally as possible. To meet that objective, the organisation will aim to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers, by making their research open source.
The team's co-chairs are Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Sam Altman. Former research scientist at Google, Ilya Sutskever, is the research director. Former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman is the CTO. They are supported by $1 billion in commitments from various sources. In the past, many of the employees and board members have openly stated their concern of existential risk from advanced AI – most notably, Elon Musk, who has openly declared his desire to personally oversee research done in this area.
"It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly," the company says in a statement. Artificial intelligence "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely."
You can read more on the company's website, OpenAI.com. They can also be followed on Twitter at @open_ai.
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Does Gold Make This German Supercar Flashier That Its Italian Rivals?
Gold makes this supercar a stunner.
The new Audi R8 V10 Plus may be an incredible supercar, but it’s not like a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
Instead of being flash and overly flamboyant, the new R8 is discreet,
but just as fast. It seems like the automaker has caught gold fever as
the second-generation of the R8 gets a ridiculous gold wrap to
commemorate the fact the supercar received the Golden Steering Wheel
award in the “sports car” category.
Readers of the German magazine Auto Build voted the R8 V10 Plus as the best model in its class.
Monday, 14 December 2015
Why we should go to Mars
Dr Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author, best known as the driving force behind Mars Direct – a proposal for human settlement of Mars intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission. Disappointed with the lack of interest from government in Mars exploration and following the success of his book, The Case for Mars, he established the Mars Society in 1998, an organisation devoted to the colonisation of Mars, by private funding if possible. In this recent video, he explains the three main reasons for going to the Red Planet.
Fusion reactor begins testing in Germany
The first helium plasma test has been successfully conducted at the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device in northeastern Germany. Tests with hydrogen plasma will begin in 2016.
The first helium plasma was produced yesterday in the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, northeastern Germany. Following more than a year of technical preparations and tests, experimental operation has now commenced according to plan. Wendelstein 7-X, the world's largest stellarator-type fusion device, will investigate the suitability of this type of device for a commercial power station.
After nine years of construction work and over a million assembly hours, the Wendelstein 7-X was completed in April 2014. Operational preparations have been underway ever since. Each technical system was tested in turn, the vacuum in the vessels, the cooling system, the superconducting coils and the magnetic field they produce, the control system, as well as the heating devices and measuring instruments.
On 10th December 2015, the day had arrived: the operating team in the control room started up the magnetic field and initiated the computer-operated experiment control system. This fed around one milligram of helium gas into the evacuated plasma vessel, switched on the microwave heating for a short pulse of 1.3 megawatts – and the first plasma was observed by the installed cameras and measuring devices. The exact moment of ignition was captured in this video.
“We’re starting with a plasma produced from the noble gas helium,” explains project leader, Professor Thomas Klinger: “We’re not changing over to the actual investigation object, a hydrogen plasma, until next year. This is because it’s easier to achieve the plasma state with helium. In addition, we can clean the surface of the plasma vessel with helium plasmas.”
The first plasma in the machine had a duration of one tenth of a second and achieved a temperature of around one million ºC. “We’re very satisfied”, concludes Dr. Hans-Stephan Bosch, whose division is responsible for the operation. “Everything went according to plan.” The next task will be to extend the duration of the plasma discharges and to investigate the best method of producing and heating helium plasmas using microwaves. After a break for New Year, the confinement studies will continue in January, which will prepare the way for producing the first plasma from hydrogen.
The Wendelstein 7-X fusion device. Photo: IPP, Thorsten Bräuer
The Wendelstein 7-X is the largest fusion device created using the "stellarator" concept, which refers to the possibility of harnessing the power source of the Sun, a stellar object. It is planned to operate with up to 30 minutes of continuous plasma discharge, demonstrating an essential feature of a future power plant: continuous operation. By contrast, tokamaks such as ITER can only operate in pulses without auxiliary equipment.
The Wendelstein 7-X is based on a five field-period Helias configuration. It is mainly a toroid – consisting of 50 non-planar and 20 planar superconducting magnetic coils, 3.5 m high – which induce a magnetic field that prevents the plasma from colliding with the reactor walls. The 50 non-planar coils are used for adjusting the magnetic field. It aims for a plasma temperature of 60 to 130 million K.
Stellarators were popular in the 1950s and 60s, but the much better results from tokamak designs led to them falling from favour in the 1970s. Wendelstein 7-X, however, aims to put the quality of the plasma equilibrium and confinement on a par with that of a tokamak for the very first time, potentially offering a new pathway to reliable fusion power.
 Scheme of coil system (blue) and plasma (yellow) of the Wendelstein 7-X. A magnetic field line is highlighted in green on the plasma surface shown in yellow. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics [CC BY 3.0] |
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