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Category: space – Page 860

NASA needs your help: Do you know how to grow plants in space?

Do you know how to maintain a family-sized garden without unlimited soil, natural sunlight and Earth’s gravity? If the answer is yes, then call NASA.

The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami in partnership with NASA is calling all “makers” to participate in its “Growing Beyond Earth Maker Contest.” The challenge is to reinvent the systems used to grow on the International Space Station and beyond.

Fairchild and NASA began their partnership in 2015 to find more ways to sustain plant life in . Last summer, the received a nearly $750,000 grant from NASA to support its Growing Beyond Earth Innovation Studio, a community work space dedicated to the technology of growing food.

New Turbulence Models Could Predict Galaxy Formation

Scientists found a way to make sense of particularly chaotic events in nature.

Thanks to a new set of equations for modeling turbulence, scientists can now better predict things like how galaxies form in distant space, complex weather patterns here on Earth, and nuclear fusion. According to the research, published this Spring in the journal Physical Review Letters, turbulence may start out chaotic but then falls into a more uniform pattern that scientists can readily model and understand.

Physicists ‘teleport’ logic operation between separated ions

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teleported a computer circuit instruction known as a quantum logic operation between two separated ions (electrically charged atoms), showcasing how quantum computer programs could carry out tasks in future large-scale quantum networks.

Quantum teleportation transfers data from one quantum system (such as an ion) to another (such as a second ion), even if the two are completely isolated from each other, like two books in the basements of separate buildings. In this real-life form of teleportation, only quantum information, not matter, is transported, as opposed to the Star Trek version of “beaming” entire human beings from, say, a spaceship to a planet.

Teleportation of quantum data has been demonstrated previously with ions and a variety of other quantum systems. But the new work is the first to teleport a complete quantum logic operation using ions, a leading candidate for the architecture of future quantum computers. The experiments are described in the May 31 issue of Science.

250-Million-Year-Old Bacteria Revived in Lab / Spores were found deep in rock salt formation

Scientists drilling into a New Mexico rock formation deep underground have brought to life four unknown strains of bacteria that have lain entombed in salt crystals for 250 million years.

The bacteria, like many of their kind, form into long-lasting protective spores. The scientists were able to revive the spores until the microbes reproduced.

The report, by a team of biologists and geologists, has already fueled speculation that spores of living organisms might somehow be transported from planet to planet, across the galaxy and over eons. It is a concept known as “panspermia,” which some see as a possible source for life arising on Earth.

Are mushrooms from outer space?

By Scott Mechura EBS Food Columnist

It isn’t a fruit or vegetable, it isn’t a fiber, and it certainly isn’t a protein. Then what is a mushroom?

Other than the mouthwatering anticipation with which chefs and foragers harvest morels or golden chanterelles from the Gallatin Valley each year, or prized truffles from France or Italy, most of us don’t often give the mushroom the same attention as local beef, trout, or fresh produce.

NASA Is Sending a Life-Hunting Drone to Saturn’s Huge Moon Titan

NASA is going to Titan.

The space agency announced today (June 27) that the next mission in its New Frontiers line of medium-cost missions will be Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to ply the skies of the huge, hazy and potentially life-hosting Saturn moon.

If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and land on Titan eight years later, NASA officials said. The probe will then spend at least 2.5 years cruising around the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) moon, making two dozen flights that cover a total of about 110 miles (180 km).

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