Ten-engine electric plane prototype takes off

Credit: NASA Langley/David C. Bowman

By Kathy Barnstorff

A team at NASA’s Langley Research Center is developing a concept of a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. The prototype, called Greased Lightning or GL-10, is currently in the design and testing phase. The initial thought was to develop a 20-foot wingspan (6.1 meters) aircraft powered by hybrid diesel/electric engines, but the team started with smaller versions for testing, built by rapid prototyping.

Imagine a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. That is a concept being developed by NASA researchers called Greased Lightning or GL-10.

The team, at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is looking at the idea initially as a potential unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). “We have a couple of options that this concept could be good for,” said Bill Fredericks, aerospace engineer. “It could be used for small package delivery or vertical take off and landing, long endurance surveillance for agriculture, mapping and other applications. A scaled up version—much larger than what we are testing now—would make also a great one to four person size personal air vehicle.””

The GL-10 is currently in the design and testing phase. The initial thought was to develop a 20-foot wingspan (6.1 meters) aircraft powered by hybrid diesel/electric engines, but the team started with smaller versions for testing, built by rapid prototyping.

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Commander-In-Belief?: Americans Have A History Of Thinking The President Isn’t Christian Enough

By Simon Brown

It is well documented that the Religious Right thinks President Barack Obama either isn’t religious enough or is the “wrong” religion. But it turns out that when it comes to presidents and their personal beliefs, these sentiments are nothing new. As it turns out, Americans have a long history of claiming that the president just isn’t Christian enough for their liking.

In his new book Religion in the Oval Office, author Gary Scott Smith examined the theological background of 11 presidents from John Adams through Obama. Smith, who chairs the history department at Grove City College, concluded that the American public is never satisfied with the president’s level of observance.

Unsurprisingly, Smith found that the chief executive who drew the most suspicion about his faith was Thomas Jefferson – the deist and Founding Father who coined the term “wall of separation” between church and state.

Smith wrote that during the 1800 presidential race, ministers claimed that the future president prayed to the “Goddess of Reason” and sacrificed animals during services held at his home in Virginia. Then-Yale University President Timothy Dwight said if Jefferson were elected, “we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire.” (While Jefferson did make his own version of the Bible in which he removed all of the stories of Jesus’ miracles and references to his divinity, there is no evidence that he ever destroyed any religious books.)

Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father who was also the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, even went so far as to argue that Jefferson should be barred from running for office because of his supposed atheist beliefs.

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Pulsar with widest orbit ever detected

Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

By Charles Blue

A team of highly determined high school students discovered a never-before-seen pulsar by painstakingly analyzing data from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Further observations by astronomers using the GBT revealed that this pulsar has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star and is part of only a handful of double neutron star systems.

This impressive find will help astronomers better understand how binary neutron star systems form and evolve.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the superdense remains of massive stars that have exploded as supernovas. As a pulsar spins, lighthouse-like beams of radio waves, streaming from the poles of its powerful magnetic field, sweep through space. When one of these beams sweeps across the Earth, radio telescopes can capture the pulse of radio waves.

“Pulsars are some of the most extreme objects in the universe,” said Joe Swiggum, a graduate student in physics and astronomy at West Virginia University in Morgantown and lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal explaining this result and its implications. “The students’ discovery shows one of these objects in a really unique set of circumstances.”

About 10 percent of known pulsars are in binary systems; the vast majority of these are found orbiting ancient white dwarf companion stars. Only a rare few orbit other neutron stars or main sequence stars like our Sun. The reason for this paucity of double neutron star systems, astronomers believe, is the process by which pulsars and all neutron stars form.

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Citing Ethical Issues, U.S. Will Not Fund Embryo Editing

Photograph by Sam Kaplan

By Sarah Fecht

Thanks to new genetic engineering techniques, we can edit DNA with more precision than ever before. This technology has the potential to change whether a baby lives or dies, but it also carries with it a lot of unanswered scientific and ethical questions, such as the possibility of one day creating “designer babies“.

In spite of all the scientific and ethical dilemmas that could result from editing the DNA that gets passed down from generation to generation–and despitecalls for a moratorium on such research–Chinese scientists recently went ahead and did it anyway. They attempted to delete a gene for a blood disorder called beta thalassemia from the DNA of 86 nonviable embryos. The experiment was successful in 7 embryos.

In response, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (and leader of the U.S. effort to sequence the human genome), is making it known that the NIH will not fund such research. Editing human embryos “is a line that should not be crossed”, says the statement, noting there are “serious and unquantifiable safety issues, ethical issues presented by altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent, and a current lack of compelling medical applications justifying the use of [genetic engineering] in embryos.”

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Long-term galactic cosmic ray exposure leads to dementia-like cognitive impairments

Image courtesy of University of California – Irvine

By Science Daily

What happens to an astronaut’s brain during a mission to Mars? Nothing good. It’s besieged by destructive particles that can forever impair cognition, according to a UC Irvine radiation oncology study appearing in the May 1 edition of Science Advances.

Charles Limoli and colleagues found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles — much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights — cause significant damage to the central nervous system, resulting in cognitive impairments.

“This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a two- to three-year round trip to Mars,” said Limoli, a professor of radiation oncology in UCI’s School of Medicine. “Performance decrements, memory deficits, and loss of awareness and focus during spaceflight may affect mission-critical activities, and exposure to these particles may have long-term adverse consequences to cognition throughout life.”

For the study, rodents were subjected to charged particle irradiation (fully ionized oxygen and titanium) at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at the Brookhaven National Laboratory before being sent back to Limoli’s Irvine lab.

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Want equality for all? Then spurn organised religion

By Clementine Ford

According to the adage, one should never discuss religion or politics when in polite company. But this is print media, and that means we can take the liberty of discussing both. Both the machinations and implications of politics are inseparable from all of the world’s major religions, with Christianity being equally as culpable in the state-sanctioned oppression of citizens as its more vocally condemned sibling, Islam. A nation that strives for equality and self-determination for all its citizens cannot collude with the revered figures of organised religion – so how can we reconcile its influence in a society that should be striving to be both secular and progressive?

We may have moved past the days when it was frowned upon to discuss religion and politics, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept them as a package deal.

The simple answer, as former United States president Jimmy Carter famously concluded in a stirring polemic, is that it can’t. In a 2009 op-ed, Carter wrote about his decision to leave the Southern Baptist Convention after more than six decades. His exit was prompted after it became impossible for him to ignore the continued oppression and marginalisation of women in the church. A stalwart supporter of equal rights, Carter’s faith remained intact but he could no longer support a structure of intolerance that prioritised the leadership and moral superiority of men over that of women.

The first amendment to the United States constitution calls for a separation of church and state. It’s a nice theory but the essential liberty of it seems to be rarely enforced in a country whose invocation of the constitution is selective at best. A recent sketch by American stand-up comic Amy Schumer highlighted this hypocrisy while parodying an advertisement for birth-control medication. An increasingly frustrated Schumer is advised to ask her doctor about birth control – and then her employer, a man on the street, her stepfather, a small boy playing chess, and finally the Supreme Court. When she eventually files the script, she’s told that she’ll have to go through the same rigmarole each month. Meanwhile, a small boy asks the chemist for a gun. The chemist hands it to him with a grin, saying, “It’s your right!”

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Atheists Say Transit System Punted Their Ads

By Erin Mcauley

An atheist organization, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, says in a lawsuit that a Pennsylvania transit system violated its free speech rights by refusing to run a bus advertisement for its website.

The ad at the center of the controversy states, “Atheists. NEPA Freethought Society. NEPAfreethought.org.”

In its lawsuit filed in the Scranton, Pa. Federal Court, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Freethought Society claims that in February 2012, the Court of Lackawanna Transit System refused to lease advertising space for their message, believing it might “spark public debate and attacked religion.”

The group says the transit system adopted this position despite running “numerous advertisements from religious organizations and other ads that it later deemed to violate its policy.”

The plaintiffs claim the transit system has never turned down an advertisement in the past.

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