Space venture plans to ferry people to the Moon

Eric Hand reports in the News Blog, it was only May when SpaceX rocketed up to the space station and showed that commercial cargo was possible. However, in the next few years people could start riding those rockets and commercial crew will come into being. Eric elaborates:

Next up, says Gerry Griffin, is what you might call ‘commercial Moon’. Griffin’s startup company, called Golden Spike, after the spike used to complete the first US transcontinental railroad, was unveiled on Thursday in Washington DC. The company plans to sell regular trips to the surface of the Moon for two people for about $1.4 billion — a price that Griffin thinks is within reach for many countries and corporations. “The time is ripe for commercial human lunar exploration,” says Griffin, former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

You can find out more about Golden Spike’s plans in Eric’s post. 

 

Cancer Therapy 

In this week’s Soapbox Science guest post, Sandeep C. Pingle asks whether presidential elections can teach us about personalised cancer therapy?

The 2012 election season in the US that ended a few weeks ago witnessed a never-before-seen barrage of “targeted” television advertisements, phone calls and door knocks. The use of “big data” by campaigns to effectively micro-target voter groups was particularly striking. Data companies gathered over 500 attributes from individual records including voting histories, demographics, hobbies, income etc. These data points were plugged into sophisticated algorithms on computer models to generate scores that identified undecided voters most likely to “swing”. The “persuasion scores” thus obtained drove campaign strategies to target these swing voters. Research shows that such voter targeting likely yields huge successes in terms of persuading unconvinced voters. Another layer to political campaigning was the use of transactional data to evaluate how opinions would change after interactions with campaign volunteers. Together, big data and an efficient use of technology have radically changed the nature of campaigning. It is remarkable how similar this approach is to that of personalized cancer medicine. Or at least to how an ideal personalized medicine approach should be for cancer management.

Learn more about this approach in Sandeep’s post.

A gene for binge-drinking? 

This week, SciLogs blogger Suzi Gage reflects on media reports that say there could be genes for binge drinking:

Only the BBC (so far) seem to have fallen in to the ‘gene for x’ trap, the first paragraph of their article being particularly poor:

Scientists believe some people have a gene that hard-wires them for binge drinking by boosting levels of a happy brain chemical triggered by alcohol.

“Not quite, but what did the study* actually look at?”

Stacey and colleagues are interested in the effect of dopamine (the ‘happy brain chemical’ referred to above) on the way people respond to drugs, and the reinforcement people get from them; in other words, addiction. In particular, there is a gene which has previously been associated with alcohol intake in a genome wide association study (although that study did not provide definitive evidence of an association, only a suggestion, and only in a subpopulation). The gene in question (RASGRF2 for any gene spotters out there) codes for a protein which is involved in dopamine transmission (read more about dopamine here), which is why the researchers were interested in its effects on alcohol consumption.

Find out more about the paper which has triggered these articles in Suzi’s post. 

Away from home

Over the last month, each Wednesday the Indigenus blog have been hosting an ‘Away from home’ blogging series which features one Indian postdoc working in a foreign lab. Each post recounts his/her experiences: the triumphs and challenges of lab life, the cultural differences, what they miss about India, as well as some top tips for postdocs headed abroad. To summarise the posts so far, Subhra Priyadarshini has put together an interactive  map pinpointing the labs these postdocs are based.

View Away from home: Indian postdocs abroad in a larger map

Subhra will continue to update the map each Wednesday and you can join in the online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.

Reviewing gender

Action Potential’s blogger I-han Chou, talks about the verdict of a leader published in Nature last week:

Last week Nature published a leader reflecting upon our performance as editors and journalists in the gender balance of our referees, commissioned authors, and journalistic profiles. The verdict?  Plenty of room for improvement – in 2011, only 14% of Nature’s 5,514 manuscript referees were women.  Those numbers are for all areas, both physical and life sciences. I don’t have the exact number for just neuroscientists but a quick partial analysis suggests it is in the same ballpark. How good/bad is 14%? According to a 2007 survey of North American neuroscience programs, 36% of neuroscience assistant professors, 28% of associate, and 21% of full professors are women. I don’t know what those percentages would be if you included neuroscientists from the rest of the the world (I’m guessing they would be lower), but I am fairly confident in saying we haven’t been grossly overrepresenting women in our referee picks.

More in I-han’s post on how Nature Neuroscience choose their referees.

Mars rover finds carbon in its first soil sample analysis

Eric Hand reveals in the News Blog, the team of scientists operating NASA’s Curiosity rover has found organic materials on Mars — but they are not sure whether the carbon-containing compounds are indigenous to the planet:

{credit}NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS{/credit}

On 3 December, the team announced it had found several carbon-containing compounds, such as chloromethane (CH3Cl), after heating soil samples scooped from a wind-blown drift (pictured at right) into ovens on board the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. The compounds were formed after the highly reactive chlorine combined with carbon in the oven — but the team isn’t sure of the source material for those two compounds.

“We have to make sure that the carbon and the chlorine are coming from Mars,” says SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Continue to Eric’s post to find out more.

With a thin crust, the Moon’s origin is entwined with Earth’s

NASA has unveiled the most precise map yet of the Moon’s gravity field — the most detailed map of any body in the Solar System, including Earth (pictured left). Eric Hand expands:

Analysis of the gravity data shows that the Moon’s crust is between 34-43 kilometres thick — about 20 kilometres thinner than thought during the Apollo era.

And with a crustal bulk density also lower than previously thought, the Moon can have the same basic composition as Earth. That sits well withrecent theories about the Moon-forming impact 4.5 billion years ago that suggest a common compositional origin for the Moon and Earth.

Continue to Eric’s post to hear more about this discovery.

Chemistry for Christmas

For chemistry and Christmas enthusiasts, Stuart Cantrill links out to the The Royal Institution’s advent calendar in his latest post:

For those of you who haven’t noticed yet, this year’s Christmas Lectures at The Royal Institution are about chemistry! Yay! They are being given by Dr Peter Wothers from the University of Cambridge, who is also one of the authors of my favourite organic chemistry textbook.

Related to this, the RI has a chemistry-themed advent calendar where each day there is a video of someone talking about their favourite element(s). So far, Mark Miodownik (Dec 1), Liz Bonnin (Dec 2), Dara O Briain (Dec 3), Andrea Sella (Dec 4) and Helen Czerski (Dec 5) have revealed their picks. I won’t spoil it by telling you what they chose; go and check out the videos for yourselves!

If you like advent calendars, we have also created a Pinterest Advent Calendar. Behind each window you will find a written clue to help you identify what could be a picture, video, paper, infographic or special holiday treat. You can join in the online conversation using the #npgadvent hashtag – and if you’re already a Pinterest user, follow us and get re-pinning!

SpotOn London 2012 (#solo12): Starting a Conversation

Scitable blogger, Jonathan Lawson reflects on his SpotOn London 2012 experience and talks about his role organising a panel discussion on, Juggling jobs. Balancing a research career with SciComm – is it a policy issue?

One thing that really makes the SpotOn conferences different from the norm is the community centred scheduling. SpotOn London has no posters and no presentations, just a few keynote lectures and the rest is all about discussion sessions, panels and workshops.

SpotOn London 2012 provided me with my first chance to host a session, including selecting a panel and choosing the subject for our discussion. I was very excited to be co-organising this with recent PhD graduate, Heather Doran, from Aberdeen University. We’ve both spent a lot of time, during our studies, on advancing the cause of science communication and encouraging researchers to talk more about their work, particularly through our university science magazines, BlueSci and AU Science.

Happy Birthday

Finally, this week the SciLogs blog Stripped Science became five years old! Let’s celebrate it with a birthday cake. Bon Appetite!