While the idea may seem like something out of a Sci-Fi movie, the process of printing food has already been proven possible. The brains behind the innovation, Anjan Contractor, previously printed chocolate in a bid to prove his concept. Contractor and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, will now use NASA’s $125,000 grant to attempt to print a pizza. The grant was applied for on March 28, 2013. The pizza printer is still in the conceptual stage, and will begin to be built in two weeks, Quartz reported. The printer will first print a layer of dough, which will be cooked while being printed. Tomato powder will then be mixed with water and oil to print a tomato sauce. The topping for the pizza will be a “protein layer” which could come from any source – animals, milk, or plants. The concept is to use basic “building blocks” of food in replaceable powder cartridges. Each block will be combined to create a range of foods which can be created by the printer. The cartridges will have a shelf life of 30 years – more than long enough to enable long-distance space travel. Contractor and his team hope the 3D printer will be used not only by NASA, but also by regular Earthlings. His vision would mean the end of food waste, due to the powder’s long shelf life. “I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” he said, as quoted by Quartz. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.” There are some conveniences which would come along with the printer. For example, recipes could be traded with others through software. Each recipe would have a set of instructions which tells the printer which cartridge of powder to mix with which liquids, and at what rate and how it should be sprayed. Another perk includes personalized nutrition. “If you’re male, female, someone is sick—they all have different dietary needs. If you can program your needs into a 3D printer, it can print exactly the nutrients that person requires,” Contractor said. Contractor plans on keeping the software portion of his 3D printer entirely open-source, so that anyone can look at its code. He believes this will allow people to find creative uses for the hardware. … Read More
Big Bang: Biggest meteorite explosion rocks the Moon
The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the Moon’s surface on March 17, 2013.The explosion from the impact, glowing like a 4th magnitude star, was so bright that it could have been seen from Earth with the naked eye. However the flash of light lasted only for a second and was rather difficult to detect.Ron Suggs an analyst at the Marshall space flight center was the first to notice the explosion on a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring programs.“It jumped right out at me. It was so bright” he acknowledged.”On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.”It exploded in a flash nearly ten times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”Unlike Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere to protect it. As there is no oxygen, it poses the question of how they explode.“Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” NASA explains.As the crater from the impact could be as wide as 20 meters, comparing it to the brightness of the explosion might give certain explanations to scientists about “lunar meteor showers”.For the past eight years NASA scientists have been observing the Moon as part of a lunar monitoring program to identify new kinds of space debris that can threaten our planet. The US space agency says that this is a ‘good candidate’ for research.The lunar impact might have been part of a much larger event, Cooke noted. NASA and the University of Western Ontario’s sky cameras detected an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors on Earth. These speeding fireballs rushed along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt. He notes that the Earth and the Moon were pelted by meteoroids at about the same time and supposes that these two events were connected.The NASA lunar monitoring program began in 2005. “Lunar meteor showers” are quite common, since the beginning of the program scientists have detected more than 300 impacts. According to NASA’s observations, half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are from sporadic space debris.Russia plans to launch its next unmanned mission to the Moon in 2015. It will mark the country’s return to the Earth’s natural satellite after a 40-year hiatus. The Russian space agency has said that three lunar exploration missions will be launched from Cosmodrome Vostochny under construction in the country’s Far East region. The first mission is to be dubbed the ‘Luna-Glob-1’. … Read More
Russia summons US envoy over spy recruitment accusations
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Russia’s Foreign Ministry has summoned US Ambassador Michael McFaul after a US embassy employee was detained on accusations of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer to work for the CIA.
McFaul, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, had been called to the ministry, an official ministry spokesman confirmed without giving further details.
Earlier, Russia detained an American citizen accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer to work for the CIA, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said. It said the man was an employee at the US embassy in Moscow but also worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Although the embassy declined immediate comment, a spokesman for the FSB identified the man as Ryan Fogle, a third secretary at the embassy. The spokesman also said that Fogle was carrying “special technical equipment”, a disguise, a large amount of money and instructions for the Russian he was trying to recruit. An FSB statement read: “Recently American intelligence has made multiple attempts to recruit employees of Russian law enforcement organs and special agencies, which have been detected and monitored by Russian FSB counter-intelligence.”
The incident comes just days after US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Moscow, at a time when the United States and Russia are trying to improve relations.
Both countries have spoken of stepping up security cooperation following the Boston Marathon bombings last month and last week announced plans to try to organize an international conference to promote an end to Syria’s civil war.
Even more than two decades after the end of the Cold War, there have been accusations of espionage between the US and Russia in recent years. In 2010, 10 people identified by US intelligence as Russian agents were arrested in the US and deported back to Russia in exchange for four Russians detained for spying for the West.
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Russia’s Soyuz space module returns home with ISS crew
The Expedition 35 crew touched down at 6:30AM Moscow time on Tuesday, Mission Control told Itar-Tass. They consisted of Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn.“It’s beautiful…it’s morning here”, Romanenko radioed to mission control just before landing. The three space travelers were in high spirits. “That was quite a ride home”, remembered Hadfield.Hadfield was the commander of Expedition 35, which has just ended, as number 36 is up. He recently decided to record an amusing David Bowie cover right in space, sending it back in a series of videos.The news comes just two days after Marshburn and another NASA astronaut had to perform a daring emergency spacewalk to fix a dangerous ammonia leak on the outer surface of the station. Ammonia is used as a coolant.During the 144 days they spent in space and on the ISS, the three had orbited Earth 2,300 times and covered around 98 million kilometers (61 million miles) in distance.Three other space personnel were left to watch over the ISS – NASA’s Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Aleksandr Misurkin. They won’t be alone for long, however – as they will soon be joined by Italy’s Luca Parmitano, NASA’s Karen Nyberg and the Russian Fyodor Yurchikhin at the end of the month of May.The Soyuz spacecraft has been a solid piece of technology relied on by NASA to transport the agency’s astronauts back and forth between Earth and the ISS since the shuttle program had gotten wrapped up in 2011. NASA’s hope is that private space ships will soon be used for the task.The International Space Station is a spinning space laboratory about the size of a house. Five different agencies from 15 different countries had taken part in designing and building it back in 1998. Since the year 2000, the space lab had been occupied in shifts by crews of international astronauts and cosmonauts. #soyuz TMA07M crew lands safely on #earth. View from mission control in #moscow #Russia #ISS #NASA#space #Science twitter.com/seanthomas_RT/… — Sean Michael Thomas (@seanthomas_RT) May 14, 2013 … Read More
ISS astronauts make emergency space walk
Read this article: ISS astronauts make emergency space walk
NASA emergency mission successful
http://www.youtube.com/v/KqxuZ6LVcRE?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata See the original article here: NASA emergency mission successful
Cosmic Loss: ISS suffers ammonia leak
http://www.youtube.com/v/767d0JD8w3U?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Originally from: Cosmic Loss: ISS suffers ammonia leak
