Spitting fire, a Dragon heads for the space station
Daniel Cressey reveals in the News Blog that SpaceX has launched its first mission to resupply the International Space Station. This is a major development in the commercial spaceflight sector:
The California-based company’s Dragon craft was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida at 20.35 Eastern time on Sunday.
The Dragon capsule is scheduled dock with the space station on 10 October before returning to Earth. A similar mission in May also saw a Dragon capsule docking with the Space Station in a dry run without vital cargo. With the demise of the Space Shuttle, NASA and other countries are increasingly reliant on commercial companies for launches. NASA hailed the launch of this, the first genuine resupply, as the start of a “landmark” mission (see: ISS catch of the day: Dragon!).
“This was a critical event in spaceflight tonight,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “We’re once again launching spacecraft from American soil with the supplies our astronauts need in space. NASA and the nation are embarking on an ambitious program of space exploration.
You can watch the launch in this video:
Land of Desire: A Consumer Culture
SciLogs blogger Paige Brown reviews William Leach’s book, Land of Desire, in her latest post:
The main point of “Land of Desire” is to describe the formative years and forces behind the culture of American consumer capitalism, to “illuminate its power and appeal as well as the tremendous ethical change it brought to America” (p. xiii). William Leach focuses on the creation of this culture, its production “by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an ever-ascending scale” (p. xv).
In Part I, Leach describes the commercial strategies designed to entice desire in the customer. He describes the rise of investment banking and giant retail corporations, department stores catering to a rising consuming middle class. He describes forces that led to businessmen’s fostering of the public’s “ability to want and choose” (p. 16).
Find out more about this book in Paige’s report.
Hundreds of safety issues found at European nuclear plants
Hundreds of safety upgrades are needed at European nuclear reactors, according to an analysis of the continent’s power plants. Daniel Cressey elaborates in the News Blog:
The Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, one of the sites where safety problems were identified.{credit}PHOTO BY ANDERS SANDBERG VIA FLICKR UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS.{/credit}
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan the European Commission subjected all 145 reactors at EU nuclear power plants to ‘stress tests’ to determine if they were in any danger. “Practically all” of the nuclear plants need safety improvements, and “hundreds of technical upgrade measures have been identified”, the Commission’s report reveals.
Many power plants are also ill-equipped to deal with a major disaster, with 24 reactors having no back up control rooms which can be used if the primary one has to be abandoned. In reactors in Finland and Sweden the stress testers found staff would have less than an hour to make the power plants safe if they lost power to the cooling systems or the cooling systems themselves.
Continue to the post to find out more information.
Internet billionaire ponies up more cash for physics prizes
According to Sciam blogger John Matson, Tech investor Yuri Milner, who shook the physics world two months ago by dishing out $27 million to the nine inaugural awardees of his Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation’s namesake award (see ‘Physics prize dwarfs all others‘), has just sweetened the pot:
Milner’s organization today announced the addition of a new award, the Physics Frontiers Prize, which will place three individuals in the running for the $3-million Fundamental Physics Prize and bestow $300,000 on those who do not win it. This latest program, plus the $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize for young researchers, makes three big-money awards that the Milner Foundation promises to bestow.
The prizes are meant to recognize major achievements in fundamental physics — primarily theoretical physics, if the first batch of Fundamental Physics Prize laureates is any indication — with a preference for recent advances.
The graph below shows how these awards compare to other big-money accolades in the field:
{credit}SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN{/credit}
Find out more in John’s post.
New app lets you job-hunt on the go
Earlier this week the brand new Naturejobs app became available on both the App Store and Google Play. We hope by now you’ve had a chance to download and try it out. If not, you can find more information, and download it here.
Job hunting? There's an app for that. iStockphoto/Thinkstock
Please leave your feedback about the app on the Naturejobs Blog.
Is drilling in the Red Sea good for science?
Mohammed Yahia explains in the House of Wisdom blog that a Canadian company has started a study to determine whether deep-sea mining in the Red Sea to extract minerals from hydro-thermal basins could be feasible:
But will this provide Saudi Arabia and Sudan, who are interested in this project, an economic boost or will it wreck havoc on the sea’s fragile environmental system?
On the positive side, the project will supply a large amount of metals, such silver, cooper and zinc, worth up to US$8.21 billion according to a paper published last year by the Kiel Institute for World Economy.
The mining operations could also bring high-tech, good-paying jobs for local skilled workers. It could also bring jobs to local scientists, who would be trained up to international standards when they join the project. “The more locals you hire, the more goodwill you generate,” Wayen Malouf, the director of Diamond Fields International Ltd. (DFI) which is conducting the study, told SciDev.Net.
Learn more about this story, including links to further articles, in Mohammed’s post.
Statistics Is The Sexy In Science
Scitable’s Khalil A. Cassimally explains in his latest post how a biostatistician and cancer researcher based in New York wants to redefine the field of “popular statistics” to show us that stats is more fun than we think. His dream? To make people more statistics literate:
Statistics transcends all disciplines of science. It is a science and a tool which other disciplines rely on for their investigations. It is science’s way of finding the truth. So, in essence, statistics carries the purity of the sciences on its shoulders. In more compelling terms, statistics is what makes science sexy.
Andrew Vickers gets that. In his book, What is a p-value anyway?, Vickers’ aim is to show us what statistics means. To do so, he carries us head-first into basic statistical concepts such as inference, estimation and mean, median and standard deviation. And he does so in a supremely unorthodox manner.
Finally, this funny xkcd comic ties in well with Khalil’s post:
{credit}xkcd Statistics Comic{/credit}