Apr 232015
 

As mentioned here previously, the Chinese have been experimenting on genetically modifying human embryos. This would not only “fix” genetic flaws in that individual, but would also be passed down to any descendants he or she might have. Well, they’ve finally published their results:

Scientists Make History By Genetically Modifying Human Embryos

And, well, how’d those initial experiments turn out?

The resulting embryos were a total mess. After applying CRISPR to 86 embryos, 54 of the surviving 71 embryos were genetically tested. Only 28 spliced successfully, and only a fraction of them contained the replacement genetic material. What’s more, the researchers found a surprising number of unintended mutations. The scientists decided to stop the experiment at this stage.

Yeeeep.

Since the experiments were carried out on human embryos, the experiment was considered unethical – and thus un-publish-worthy – by the likes of Nature and Science. In the article linked above, several quotes are included from NYU School of Medicine bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan. He says some appropriately nasty things, but reaches a conclusion that I find dubious. Yes, there are many ethically dubious issues here… how the embryos were obtained, whether proper approvals were given b the parents, so on. But the bioethecist concludes that since the study failed on ethical grounds, “I don’t think there’s much scientifically here of interest.”

Hmmmmph.

In science, you learn from failure. The attempt to modify the embryos appears to have been a complete bust, but history is littered with science experiments that failed but led to later successes. And I find the idea that if the ethics were bad, there’s nothing of scientific interest. If someone invents a warp drive or a teleporter, and uses drunken or crazy bums as unwitting test subjects… yes, the ethics is bad, but buy howdy do I want to get a look at the test results. Similarly: if this embryo study had been a complete 100% success, the fact that the ethics was bad would not negate the scientific value.

 Posted by at 10:37 am
Apr 222015
 

So the actors from “Avengers: Age of Ultron” are doing the usual round of meaningless interviews with the press. When the interviewers go beyond the usual “So how much fun is it to blah blah blah,” things can get real uncomfortable, real fast. Such as here, where the interviewer tries to dig into Robert Downey Juniors history of drugs and prison. Count how many times RDJ looks away from the interviewer and towards someone else… someone else presumably in charge of setting up the interviews and in charge of keeping them on track and on schedule, and presumably in charge of making sure that the Star isn’t annoyed to the point of standing up and walking away in the middle of the questioning.

 Posted by at 3:42 pm
Apr 222015
 

Astronomers detect starlight reflected off an extrasolar planet

Well, *seen* is you stretch the definition a bit. It seems what’s actually going on is that the light from the star is carefully examined spectrographically; some tiny fraction of the light is red or blue shifted compared to the rest. This is the sunlight reflected off the planet and shifted due to the orbital motion of the planet towards or away from Earth relative to the star.

 Posted by at 3:08 pm
Apr 222015
 

Appears to be an S-300 (NATO: SA-10 “Grumble”) surface-to-air missile demonstrating what happens when the pneumatic launch system poots the rocket out of the launch tube, but the main rocket motor fails to ignite.

This is not exactly an unprecedented event:

If only *all* the Russian anti-aircraft missiles worked this way, maybe there’d be one more Malaysian 777 in the world…

Of course, it’s difficult to beat *THIS* classic:

 Posted by at 9:23 am
Apr 222015
 

Paris extremist’s misfire thwarts imminent attack on church

In short: a Surt worshipper had his car all loaded up with guns and even had notes on churches he was planning to shoot up… when he shot himself in the leg and called for an ambulance. He has been arrested and is linked with the murder of an apparently random woman.

Note: the title of the AP story seems to be badly written. The guy wasn’t an extremist about Paris, but about his death cult.

 Posted by at 8:31 am
Apr 212015
 

Along with the knowledge that you’re helping support the cause of preserving and spreading aerospace history, if you become an Aerospace Projects Review patron you get the first crack at stuff that might be of interest. For example… a little while back I sold off some one-off test prints, and more recently 85 or so old issues of Analog/Astounding science fiction magazines dating from the 1940’s into the 1970’s.

APR Patreon patrons get not only the first crack at these things (more such sales are coming, including a whole bunch of aerospace books), but also get them at a discount. The $10-level patrons have the opportunity at first dibs, followed by $4 and up patrons.

If interested, check out the APR Patreon HERE.

Image1s Image2V Image4F

WP_20150419_002

More stuff will be coming soon…

WP_20150419_004

 Posted by at 7:25 pm
Apr 212015
 

A new publicity blitz from the state government of South Dakota:

Having been there, South Dakota is a pretty awesome place. *North* Dakota, though… I can’t honestly say that it would be better than Mars. Yeesh.

 Posted by at 6:35 pm
Apr 212015
 

Neato:

NASA 3-D Prints First Full-Scale Copper Rocket Engine Part

elg39671

It’s come equipped with internal cooling channels; this sort of thing is kind of the dream of rocket designers. A thin-walled highly thermally conductive combustion chamber with built in regen cooling? Sign me up! But don’t start planning on your rocket powered cars just yet; neat as it is, there are still some problems. First: cost.

A selective laser melting machine in Marshall’s Materials and Processing Laboratory fused 8,255 layers of copper powder to make the chamber in 10 days and 18 hours.

A terribly expensive machine ran (presumably non-stop) for a week and a half to make one part. The direct cost of the part wasn’t given but I’d guesstimate somewhere between “A Lot” and “A Whole Lot.”

Second: quality. If you look closely, you’ll find not only the rough surface standard with 3D printed parts, but also some spots that look like something went a little off, like the part slumped locally:

blips

With all the nitpicks, though, the importance of the piece isn;t the piece itself, but what it represents. A combustion chamber like this would be essentially *impossible* just a few years ago. In a few years more, the quality of this sort of chamber will be much improved, while cost will go down.

 Posted by at 4:32 pm
Apr 212015
 

So, first we have this:

Toni Morrison: ‘I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman’

Ms. Morrison is apparently an author of some kind (not science fiction, so who cares). According to the article, she thinks that America remains a terribly racist place, and that our racial problems won’t be over until two things happen:

1) “I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.”

And…

2) “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

As for #1, the tale of Dillon Taylor comes close to fitting.

I figured #2 would be easy enough to counter. Surely white rapists of black women get convicted on a regular basis. But as it turns out, finding such a conviction is kinda difficult. According to the US FedGuvs Bureau of Justice Statistics:

Table 42. Personal crimes of violence, 2008:
Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, by type of crime,
race of victim, and perceived race of offender

In short, whites were the victims of rape/sexual assault 117,640 times in 2008, while blacks were the victims 46,580 times. Whites were raped by other whites 74.9% of the time, and by blacks 16.4% of the time, and by other/unknown 8.7% of the time. These percentages kinda-sorta match up with the racial breakdown of US society as a whole. But where it gets interesting… blacks were raped by other blacks 74.8% of the time, by other/unknown 25.2% of the time and by whites 0.0% of the time. Once again: zero reported rapes of black people by white people. Granted, in the 25.2% of the time that’s “unknown” there could well be white rapists, but you’d generally expect that the breakdown of the “unknowns” to be more or less similar to the breakdown of the “knowns.”

What’s the lesson here? It’s pretty simple. For Toni Morrison to finally start feeling good about America… black people would need to start getting raped by white people at vastly higher levels than what’s currently happening.

This might not be what Toni Morrison actually wants. But then again, she’s  a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and if the Peace Prize is anything to go off of, the non-science Nobels are markers of incompetent dumbassery more than anything else.

 Posted by at 10:03 am
Apr 212015
 

So there I was, typing in another award-worthy blog post when suddenly I couldn’t save it. Opening another window, I found that the blog was unavailable. And that the up-ship.com/blog website as a whole was unavailable, yanked off ye olde interwebs.

Long story short: there were some problems with some of the files in the innards of the blog. And the anti-malware alert went off at the web hosting service, so they shut down the entire website (including aerospaceprojectsreview.com) until I resolved it. This took many hours, but everything *seems* to be back up and running now.

Not really how I wanted to spend the night, but there it is. If anyone encounters anything wonky, let me know.

I need a nap.

 Posted by at 7:32 am