SoylentNews

Posted July 21, Rejected around Aug 1

      ScienceDaily reports on a unique project:

For the first time ever, individuals will have the opportunity to send their own personal message and/or data into space via microchip. The project entitled "Voices of Humanity" is the creation of the Santa Barbara-based team of UCSB Physics Professor Phil Lubin, Ph.D. and Travis Brashears, an engineering physics major at U.C. Berkeley. Philip Lubin, a professor in physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, is the leading scientist on the endeavor. With his student Brashears who is working at the UCSB Physics Department this summer and went to San Marcos High School, they have launched a Kickstarter campaign called Voices of Humanity. They are inviting individuals to join them in a journey that will take their personal data to the stars via directed energy propulsion.

      The purpose of the campaign is to collect data of the dreams, visions, images, movies, DNA, and literal voices of all of humanity, place them on a Humanity Chip, download them onto their wafer scale spacecraft, and then launch them in a series of increasingly sophisticated missions into outer space.

      From the Kickstarter project page:

Once we reach our stretch goal of $100,000, we will be able to build a sophisticated ground-based laser and robotic telescope that allows your data to be optionally transmitted via laser to the target of your choice in space. We will then be able to "beam you up" by encoding and sending your data to the stars so you will travel at the speed of light into the universe. In both cases, we will be able to "back up humanity", using the universe as our "cloud" with your images, pictures, text, tweets, video, and DNA! Your data will live forever in the universe. You will be immortalized.

      [...]

      Voices of Humanity is brought to you by the same people that are working on the recently announced laser propelled, first interstellar missions through the DE-STAR project at University of California Santa Barbara and the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) funded project Phase I DEEP-IN and Phase II DEIS programs. Professor Philip Lubin is the leading scientist on all of these projects and is a professor at UC Santa Barbara. Travis Brashears has worked with Prof. Lubin on all of these projects and is an Engineering Physics major at UC Berkeley.

      (This project should not be confused with the similarly-named project at CCI)

Submitted July 20, REJECTED around Aug 1

      As many have anticipated, Turkish president Erdogan's retaliation for the failed 15 July coup. Including Turkish university staff. Nature reports:

More than a thousand Turkish university staff have been ordered to resign their faculty leadership positions -- and others expect to be sacked -- in the aftermath of the country's failed coup on 15 July.

      As president Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to clamp down on political opposition, the Turkish Council of Higher Education (YOK) has called for all 1,577 of the country's university deans -- the staff that head up each institution's various academic faculties -- to leave their posts.

      Many of the deans may ultimately be re-appointed, but researchers say the move is designed to ensure that Erdogan maintains tight political control over the education sector, following earlier purges of the country's military, judiciary and police. And in what amounts to a temporary international travel ban for Turkish scholars, all vacations at universities have also been cancelled, and academics abroad for work and holidays have been told to return.

      Additionally, the purge has been extended to Turkey's schools where 15000 schoolteachers have been suspended and another 20000 have lost their teaching licenses. The article continues:

University associations oustide Turkey were quick to criticize the measures. On 19 July, the European University Association (EUA), in Brussels, issued a statement condemning the news of the university deans' forced resignations. "EUA calls on all European governments, universities and scholars to speak out against these developments and to support democracy in Turkey, including institutional autonomy and academic freedom for scholars and students," said its president, Rolf Tarrach.

      "We are all stunned by the deep and seemingly ruthless attacks on academic freedom by the Turkish government," said Horst Hippler, president of the German Rectors Conference, an association of Germany's state-recognized universities.

Submitted July 36, Rejected July 26

      ScienceDaily reports on results from MIT's CSAIL and the Weizmann Institute:

3-D movies immerse us in new worlds and allow us to see places and things that we otherwise couldn't. But behind every 3-D experience is something that is uniformly despised: those goofy glasses.

In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets you watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear.

Dubbed "Cinema 3D," the prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3-D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," says MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, one of the co-authors on a related paper. "This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale."

While the researchers caution that the system isn't currently market-ready, they are optimistic that future versions could push the technology to a place where theaters would be able to offer glasses-free alternatives for 3-D movies.

Tonight was the final night of the Republican National Convention in the US. Vox attempts to answer the question: "How did the Party of Lincoln become the Party of Trump.

The Republican Party has nominated Donald J. Trump for president of the United States. This is a remarkable turn of events, and it only gets more remarkable when you think back to how the party began its existence: fighting against the expansion of slavery. But over the past century and a half, the party of Abraham Lincoln has changed dramatically. It went from a party that was racially progressive for its times, to one that gets little support from nonwhite voters. It went from a Northern-only party, to one that dominates the South. Here's how it happened.

In the opinion of your humble correspondent, this is probably the most coherent and concise explanation that I've seen. Read the text and/or watch the video.

      Referring to the "Soylent" which is a startup that makes a nutritional powder and drink that are supposed to be able to replace meals, Quartz has posted this taste-evaluation article:

[...] As part of Silicon Valley's desire to disrupt everything about modern life -- whether it needs to be disrupted or not -- Soylent has become a popular company for venture capitalists to back and Valley types to be seen with. The company's newest drink, Soylent 2.0, was released last October, and costs $32 for 12 bottles. It has seen a marketing push of late, with advertisements appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and other internet properties that millennials and those that want to market to them tend to congregate.

        There are almost as many ingredients in Soylent as there are characters in Game of Thrones pic.twitter.com/sxyuAAOBxy
        - Mike Murphy (@mcwm) June 27, 2016

      The tech team at Quartz decided to try a bottle-live on Facebook-for the first time today. It's safe to say that most of us will likely continue to keep eating food, instead of drinking our meals. But in case you're so fed up with having to carry out that arduous task of taking time to purchase and masticate something a few times a day and are interested to know what Soylent tastes like, here are a few of the descriptions of its flavor that the team came up with in video, and after having the flavor linger for a little while:

        Wet cardboard
        Sand
        Water
        Glue
        The aftertaste of Cheerios cereal
        Licking stamps
        Stale cereal
        Old refrigerated oatmeal
        A taste of nothingness and awfulness
        Not food

Manhattanhenge! -- Submitted Jul 12, Rejected Jul 15

      If you're thinking, "Western triangularized futons?" Manhattanhenge is a term popularized by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. From the Huffington Post (very cool photo):

Manhattanhenge creates "a radiant glow of light across Manhattan's brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every cross street of the borough's grid."
      [...]

      Manhattanhenge -- the name is a nod to the prehistoric monument Stonehenge, which was built to align with the rising sun during the summer solstice -- occurs because of the roughly east-west alignment of the borough's street grid. It's not the only "henge" out there -- others include Bostonhenge, Phillyhenge and Torontohenge, according to The New York Times.

      But if you're in Manhattan, you might want to head to one of the major cross streets -- 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets -- and look to the west.

Moon Photobombs Earth -- NASA Camera Catches It
Submitted Jul 11, Rejected Jul 15

      "For only the second time in a year, a NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth," reports Phys.org.

The images were captured by NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four-megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

      EPIC maintains a constant view of the fully illuminated Earth as it rotates, providing scientific observations of ozone, vegetation, cloud height and aerosols in the atmosphere. The EPIC camera is providing a series of Earth images allowing study of daily variations over the entire globe.

      The video is at youtube.

Team Lofts Skateboard to Space in "Awesome" VR Film -- Submitted Jul 11, Rejected Jul 15

      Space Daily reports:

LOS ANGELES, July 7, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- 121C has announced that it launched a carbon fiber skateboard to the edge of space above the Mojave Desert earlier this year. The event can be experienced in Virtual Reality (VR) narrated by NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria at https://youtu.be/5NSbVwTVU20. (VRs are best viewed from a mobile device.)

      [...]

      The board and camera rig were launched using a helium weather balloon and safely descended via parachute. After reaching an estimated altitude of 90,000 ft a GPS tracking system with a satellite uplink helped to locate and recover the payload. The launch and recovery are described in detail in a 121C blog post at: http://www.121cboards.com/blog.

SpaceX Receives First Order for Crewed Mission from NASA -- Submitted Jul 8, Rejected Jul 15

      The Albany Daily Star is reporting that SpaceX got approval today (Friday, July 8) from NASA to take a crew to the ISS. This will be SpaceX's first such mission.

Both Boeing and SpaceX have received billions in seed money from NASA to restore American access to the ISS, after the US space shuttle program was retired in 2011.

The announcement of $4.2 billion for Boeing and $2.6 billion for SpaceX was made in September 2014.
Boeing announced in January that it would be the first, sending a piloted mission aboard its CST-100 Starliner capsule by late 2017.

However, in Friday's announcement, NASA said that "determination of which company will fly its mission to the station first will be made at a later time."

SpaceX is already flying cargo missions to the ISS, and is working on a crew version of its Dragon capsule to carry astronauts. [...]

If things go as advertised a "normal" CCP mission could see around four NASA or NASA-sponsored crew members and about 220 lbs (100 kg) of pressurized cargo to the orbiting laboratory.

[...]

This is the second in a series of four guaranteed orders NASA will make under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts. The Boeing Company of Houston received its first crew mission order in May.

"It's really exciting to see SpaceX and Boeing with hardware in flow for their first crew rotation missions," said Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. "It is important to have at least two healthy and robust capabilities from U.S. companies to deliver crew and critical scientific experiments from American soil to the space station throughout its lifespan."

The flight isn't set to happen until late 2017. But SpaceX can now begin preparing for the journey. The flight is one of two guaranteed missions that SpaceX secured the rights to in a 2014 contract with NASA.Boeing, which was also awarded a contract with NASA last year, was given its first assignment in June. As part of the contract, both Boeing and SpaceX are entitled to at least two and as many as six missions. The deal is part of NASA's effort to transition some of its low-Earth orbit flights to less expensive commercial operators. [...]

The contracts call for orders to take place prior to certification to support the lead time necessary for missions in late 2017, provided the contractors meet readiness conditions.

Juno Makes It to Jupiter Orbit (submitted to Breaking News)

"Welcome to Jupiter!" a mission commentator announced just after the burn ended, eliciting a second round of cheers and then, a few moments later, a standing ovation.

      "It feels great -- this is phenomenal!" Geoff Yoder, acting Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said when the celebration died down.

      Space.com reports that:

NASA's robotic Juno probe began circling the solar system's largest planet tonight (July 4), ending a nearly five-year journey through deep space and becoming the first spacecraft to enter Jupiter orbit since NASA's Galileo mission did so in 1995.

      The milestone came late tonight, as Juno fired its main engine in a crucial 35-minute burn that slowed the probe down enough to be captured by Jupiter's powerful gravity. That burn started at 11:18 p.m. EDT (0318 GMT Tuesday) and ended on schedule at 11:53 p.m. [Photos: NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter]