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A dollar-driven spaceflight Extracting collagen from tobacco plants TRENDS
Rights group aims to stop killing of Canada GMO pigs Permafrost thaw, glacier melt releasing methane Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE |
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A dollar-driven spaceflight THE era of privately-funded space travel was born this week with the launch from Cape Canaveral of a rocket developed by the Space X corporation, complete with an unmanned capsule. Destination: the orbiting International Space Station. The successful blast-off of the Falcon 9 rocket marks the beginning of a new era for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which retired its own fleet of space shuttles last year and has been counting on private companies to fill the breach with vehicles capable of taking goods and eventually humans into low orbit. Still considered a test flight, the capsule on the Falcon, named Dragon, bears 1,000 lbs of cargo for delivery to the space station. If all goes to plan, it will manoeuvre to within a mile of the station today before moving alongside on Friday, when astronauts on board will attempt to tether it with a robotic arm. Hitching a ride also were the ashes of more than 300 people, including those of actor James Doohan who played the role of chief engineer “Scotty” in the original Star Trek television series. Rather than been “beamed up” all the way to the space station, his and all the other human ashes were consigned to a weightless oblivion with the jettisoning of the launch rocket. “Falcon flew perfectly!!” SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, also a co-founder of PayPal, said via Twitter minutes after the lift-off. “Dragon in orbit... Feels like a giant weight just came off my back.” A first attempt last week was abandoned one second before lift-off after a faulty valve was detected. Musk later told reporters: “I feel very lucky... For us it’s like winning the Super Bowl”. Also applauding was NASA itself, which for now relies on the Russian Soyuz vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. “The significance of this day cannot be overstated,” said Nasa administrator Charles Bolden. “It’s a great day for America. It’s actually a great day for the world because there are people who thought that we had gone away, and today says, ‘No, we’re not going away at all.’” That NASA must now turn to private firms has not been welcomed by every one, with critics decrying the loss of America’s own shuttle capacity as a national scandal and questioning the safety of capsules developed by profit-seeking corporations. Those dismayed by the retirement of the shuttle fleet have included the former astronaut John Glenn who has called it a “drastic error”. NASA contributed $381m to the development of the Dragon programme, while Musk has supported it with a part of his PayPal fortune. The company is said to have spent a $1bn altogether. However, if this week’s test run is successful, the company can expected to be contracted by NASA to start a cycle of 12 delivery missions over the next several years for which it will receive $1.6bn. “It demonstrates what we said was the future of American space exploration and it’s actually using private industry to provide for access to low-Earth orbit while NASA goes off and does what Nasa does best, and that’s exploring,” said Bolden.
— The Independent |
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Extracting collagen from tobacco plants Dammed
as “injurious to health”, tobacco is all set to bring about a revolution in medical sciences, especially for the treatment of orthopedic, diabetics, cardiology and other patients. Scientists in Israel have developed a new technology for the production of human recombinant collagen in transgenic tobacco plants, facilitating the use of tobacco plants as inputs to the factory for building blocks of the human body, thus charting a new future for agriculture. Professor Oded Shoseyov of Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), has succeeded in producing a “replica” of human collagen from green tobacco plants, an achievement with tremendous commercial implications for its use in a variety of human medical procedures. Collagen is an essential component for hundreds of medical products used in orthopedics, diabetes, cardiology, wound healing and many other diseases, as human skin contains 70 per cent collagen. Collagen-based products are of tremendous use for wound care, surgical meshes, vascular grafts, drug delivery solution, surgical sutures and corneal shields. CollPlant, a company established on the basis of new technology developed by Shoseyov’s Laboratory, has raised $15 million to establish the first commercial molecular farming company in Israel. The company grows the plant, extracts and purifies the collagen and manufactures the Vegencies product line of orthopedic and wound-healing medical implants. Though collagen is produced from animals like cows and pigs as well as human cadavers, it is prone to harbour human pathogens, such as viruses and prions (mad cow disease). The human cadaver, on the other hand, is scarce and also raises serious ethical issues. The current market for collagen-based medical devices in orthopedics and wound healing exceeds $30 billion and the industry has now focused on the supply of new biomaterials (face pack to remove wrinkles), as collagen is the principal protein found in skin, tendons, cartilage, bone and connective insulin. Producing human recombinant Type I pro-collagen requires the coordinated expression of five different genes and Prof. Shoseyov, a recipient of Kaye Innovation Award of Hebrew University in June 2010, has established the only laboratory in the world that has reported successful co-expression all the five essential genes in transgenic tobacco plants for the production of processed pro-collagen. |
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Rights group aims to stop killing of Canada GMO pigs WINNIPEG, Manitoba: A US animal rights group hopes to save a herd of genetically modified pigs from early deaths after funding dried up for a Canadian research project that has stoked controversy about altering animal genes to produce food. Possible euthanisation of the nine so-called Enviropigs, descendants of swine first bred 13 years ago by the University of Guelph in Ontario to lessen the environmental impact of pig waste, has drawn opposition from Farm Sanctuary, a New York state-based group that places abused animals in new homes.
Permafrost thaw, glacier melt releasing methane ANCHORAGE, Alaska: Methane from underground reservoirs is streaming from thawing permafrost and receding glaciers, contributing to the greenhouse gas load in the atmosphere, a study led by scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has found. The study, published online in the journal Nature Geoscience, is the first to document leakage of deep geologic methane from warming permafrost and receding glaciers, said its lead author, Katey Walter Anthony.
— Reuters |
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THIS UNIVERSE
I am a mechanical engineer. I would love to work as an astronomer and want you to please guide me so that I am on the right path to become one. There is no reason that you should not like astronomy. One of the failings of our formal education system is that opportunities for wandering into subjects and topics we like are not easily available. Schools, colleges and universities should make it easy for students to do such things and also get credit for such involvement. A formal course in astronomy may not be available in your college, but you should be able to take this course in another institution. These days, opportunities for learning a lot of things through open systems have become available. What one might need are methods and arrangements for recognition of the competence you might have acquired on your own or by taking courses outside. People with expertise in engineering, physics, chemistry or biology can associate themselves with many problems or programmes in astronomy. Many great astronomers came into the field in this manner, with great benefit to the field, the neighbouring fields and to themselves. How were the alpha particles rebounding at 180 degrees in the scattering experiment of Rutherford detected? Rutherford was surprised for the same reason as you are. That is what persuaded him that the obstacle the alpha particle scattered against must be many times heavier than the alpha particle itself. In other words, the mass of the atom is largely concentrated in a tiny volume. Yet, in other words, atoms must have a nucleus. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at palyash.pal@gmail.com |
