I helped build Apollo and the shuttle – Orion is next

NASA called on aerospace engineer Owen Morris to consult on its latest spacecraft – he's also dreaming of a space station on the far side of the moon

What inspired you to get into space travel?

I've been interested in things that fly since I was a kid. I got degrees in aerospace engineering, applied to NASA and stayed there for my entire career.

What did you work on at NASA?

During Apollo, when we started the lunar module project, I was the chief engineer. Later, I managed the entire Apollo spacecraft programme. In the shuttle programme, I was manager of systems integration and systems engineering.

NASA summoned you back as a consultant on their next spacecraft, Orion. Why did they call on you?

NASA has not developed a big new vehicle since the shuttle. Most of the people that worked on the shuttle are now retired, so those starting the Orion programme didn't have the shuttle people to advise them. That's what I've been trying to help a bit on.

Does it matter that NASA lacks recent experience in designing a spaceship?

With the tools they have now, the people conducting the Orion programme are much more technically capable than we were back in the Apollo and shuttle days. For example, we knew what the aerodynamics equations for Apollo were, but we could not solve them in any detail with the computers we had at the time. Now they can.

No human has left low Earth orbit for more than 40 years. Where can Orion take us?

The big capability of Orion and its rocket, the Space Launch System, will be to let us do things in deeper space again. It's good for trips that would last three weeks or so, depending on the size of the crew or the details of the mission. You can go to a captured asteroid. To get to Mars, however, you would need a habitation module in addition to Orion, because of the duration of the trip.

If it were up to you, where would you send future astronaut missions?

It's not in the present space programme, but I would like to establish a space station on the far side of the moon. At that location you're shielded from a lot of radio interference originating on Earth, so it would be good for radio astronomy.

Looking back, what is your most vivid memory of your career at NASA?

The one that always comes to mind is Apollo 13. The service module exploded on the way to the moon, so the lunar module basically had to support the crew all the way to and around the moon. We had to use it to do things it had never done before. I was at NASA for about 85 hours straight. It was a very exciting time.

Would you have gone to space if they had asked you to?

Yes, but I didn't have the chance. For me, though, the fun is in being part of the crew that is designing and developing the vehicles.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Back to making people fly"

Profile

Owen Morris was a manager in both the Apollo and space shuttle programmes. He consulted for NASA on the development of its Orion crew capsule (pictured). On 4 December, an uncrewed Orion will blast off, orbit the Earth twice and splash down

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Strange love for cold-war-era slide rules

(Image: Oak Ridge Associated Universities)

"WHAT type of people are fond of slide rules?" asks Paul Frame, newly retired from Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Tennessee. "Old folks. I didn't have an electronic calculator until I was a graduate student."

Until the mid-1970s, Frame did most of his calculations with a slide rule. "Engineering students on campus were easy to spot. They had a big leather case for their slide rule, hanging from their belt like a sword scabbard."

Younger generations simply have no clue what slide rules were used for. "The fact that many people don't know what they are adds to their perceived value to us old folks," says Frame.

At Oak Ridge, Frame has put together a collection of circular slide rules designed for radiologists. Some were for calculating X-ray exposure times, shielding requirements and radioisotope decay; others for working out the explosive yield of nuclear weapons.

The ones that most fascinate people, says Frame, are those with cold war associations. "These are the slide rules that can help military personnel and civilians navigate the radioactive world that will exist after a nuclear detonation has occurred."

Nickamed cold war slide rules, they became famous when Peter Sellers used one in Dr Strangelove . "I have seen the movie maybe 10 times," says Frame. "He is calculating how long he and the other military bigwigs and politicians will have to reside underground after the Soviet Union's doomsday device goes off."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Strange slide rule love"

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Lassie text home: Pooches get technological

Dogs that help humans in danger can do so much more when they have technology designed especially for paws and noses

CLARA MANCINI'S colleagues used to laugh when she talked about her work. Mancini finds ways to improve our experience of interactive technologies. Should there be buttons? How many, how large, what colour? As gadget designers well know, little things can make a big difference.

But Mancini had shifted her focus to a group of users with very different needs. Dogs. "It was very hard at the beginning," says Mancini. "People saw this as something not quite to be taken seriously, as something a little bit funny and cute."

Yet dogs are an integral part of our everyday lives, and that creates a growing need for them to interact with technology. "Dogs are already used in search and rescue, in medicine, as service animals, to help autistic kids and ...

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Hypnotising patterns created in electric soap films

Video: Electric soap film creates liquid motor

The hypnotising patterns in these swirling soap films aren't spontaneous: they're being controlled by the invisible hand of electricity.

By applying an electric field to the suspended liquid, it starts to rotate. Changing the direction of the electric field can alter the direction of flow, and the field's strength affects the speed of rotation.

"The rotating film is like a motor," says Reza Shirsavar from the University of Zanjan in Iran and his colleagues, who created the set-up.

Their soap film was made from water, glycerine and detergent, a common recipe used in bubble-blowing mixtures. The rainbow of colours arises from the varying thickness of the soap film on the water.

But beyond stirring up your bubble bath, the technique could be applied to other types of films containing polar molecules. Liquid crystal films, for example, or compounds used to manufacture industrial chemicals, could be controlled in the same way.

Shirsavar's team says the system could be used as a micro pump, perhaps even controlling the ebb and flow of fluids inside living systems.

The video was presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics in San Francisco, California.

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Random no more: Evolution isn't down to chance alone

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• Arrival of the Fittest: Solving evolution's greatest puzzle by Andreas Wagner


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• Price: £18.99

Arginine dream: how do amino acids turn into superstar proteins? (Image: David Parker/SPL)

Where do evolution's adaptations come from? Arrival of the fittest by Andreas Wagner has some surprising answers

EVOLUTION, we have always been told, results from natural selection sifting through countless random variations over millions of years.

That's not good enough, says Andreas Wagner, a systems biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Natural selection can explain which adaptations survive over time, he argues, but it falls far short of explaining where those adaptations originate.

For over a decade, Wagner has been looking for an answer that would satisfy him, and Arrival of the Fittest presents his research to a general audience for the first time. In it, he makes a persuasive case that the origin of adaptations – the arrival of the fittest, rather than the survival of the fittest – can't be down to pure chance alone.

Imagine a vast library, one so big that it contains every possible sequence of letters. Most of the books are gibberish, filled with words like "erwtvaiwq" or "avbqse", but you can also find Hamlet and On the Origin of Species. This is the book's core metaphor, used, for example, to describe how most strings of amino acids make non-functional proteins – Wagner's gibberish – but some make working enzymes and a few make brilliant ones.

The problem is that the library is so vast (there are more than 10130 different proteins made from just 100 amino acids) that the odds of evolution stumbling across the specific "book" it needs – an enzyme that can disarm a synthetic toxin, for example – are practically zero. Something else must guide evolution through the library.

Part of the secret, Wagner tells us, is that many different proteins can perform the same function, just as many different books can tell the same story in different words. That is, instead of looking for a single meaningful book in the entire library, evolution is looking for any one of many functionally equivalent ones.

That's not all: the structure of the library makes it easy for evolution to move from one meaningful book to another. When Wagner and his colleagues tried browsing adjacent "books" – proteins that differ by a single amino acid – they found that most worked just as well as the original. The same was true when they changed another amino acid, and another. In fact, you could move, step by step, from one end of the library to the other without changing the meaning.

This allows populations to accumulate a lot of genetic variation while still remaining viable. In Wagner's metaphor, readers spread into many different rooms of the library. And that's where the big pay-off comes. By wandering far afield, you come to rooms with very different sorts of books nearby. In real terms, you end up in places where changing just a few more amino acids gives you a protein with a radically different function – an evolutionary breakthrough, close at hand.

And the more hidden variation the population accumulates, the more likely that this will happen. As Wagner puts it, "while you walk along one of these trails, the innovation you are searching for will appear at some point in a small neighborhood near you". That's a big claim, and a far cry from pure, random chance.

In other chapters, Wagner shows that the same principle holds for networks of metabolic and regulatory genes. Indeed, these linked pathways through diverse libraries may turn up in any sufficiently complex system, he says. In what may be the least convincing part of the book, he even speculates that we may be able to apply these principles to algorithms, letting artificial intelligence innovate faster than human inventors ever could.

Whatever the likelihood of that, Wagner's book is an eye-opener. As a bonus, his writing is clear and elegant, with vivid analogies and concrete examples to illustrate his key points. You'll never think about evolution in the same way again.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Random no more"

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist

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Synthetic enzymes hint at life without DNA or RNA

Enzymes that don't exist in nature have been made from genetic material that doesn't exist in nature either, called XNA, or xeno nucleic acid.

It's the first time this has been done and the results reinforce the possibility that life could evolve without DNA or RNA, the two self-replicating molecules considered indispensible for life on Earth.

"Our work with XNA shows that there's no fundamental imperative for RNA and DNA to be prerequisites for life," says Philipp Holliger of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, the same laboratory where the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson.

It's not all about the base

Holliger's team has made XNAs before. Their unnatural XNA contains the same bases – adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine and uracil – on which DNA and RNA rely for coding hereditary information. What's different is the sugar to which each base is attached.

In DNA and RNA, the sugars are deoxyribose and ribose, respectively. Holliger made new types of genetic material by replacing these with different sugars or other molecules.

Now, they have taken a step closer to mimicking early life on the planet by showing that XNAs can also serve as enzymes – indispensible catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions vital for life.

One of the first steps towards life on Earth is thought to be the evolution of RNA into self-copying enzymes.

Big steps

So by showing that XNAs can act as enzymes, on top of being able to store hereditary information, Holliger has recreated a second major step towards life.

The XNA enzymes can't yet copy themselves but they can cut and paste RNA, just like natural enzymes do, and even paste together fragments of XNA.

It's the first demonstration that, like prehistoric RNA, XNA can catalyse reactions on itself, even if it can't yet copy itself as RNA can.

Holliger argues that RNA and DNA may have come to dominate Earth by chance, simply because they were the best evolutionary materials to hand. "You could speculate that on other planets, XNAs would dominate instead," he says.

Primal molecules

"This work is another nice step towards demonstrating the functional capabilities of XNAs," says Nobel prizewinner Jack Szostak of Harvard University, who studies the origins of life on Earth .

"The possibility that life elsewhere, on exoplanets, could have started with something other than RNA or DNA is quite interesting, but the primordial biopolymer for any form of life must satisfy other constraints as well, such as being something that can be generated by prebiotic chemistry and replicated efficiently," Szostak says. "Whether XNA can satisfy these constraints, as well as providing useful functions, remains an open question."

Holliger says that XNAs may also have roles to play in medicine. Because they do not occur naturally, they can't be broken down in the human body. And since they can be designed to break and destroy RNA, they could work as drugs for treating RNA viruses or disabling RNA messages that trigger cancers.

"We've made XNA enzymes that cut RNA at specific sites, so you could make therapies for cleaving viral or oncogenic messenger RNA," says Holliger. "And because they can't be degraded, they could give long-lasting protection."

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature13982

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Today on New Scientist

Haptic holograms let you touch the void in VR

A system that enables you to feel and handle floating virtual objects with your bare hands is poised to bring virtual reality into the physical world

The smart mouse with the half-human brain

When human brain cells called astrocytes are let loose in mouse brains, they rapidly overwhelm the mouse cells and make the rodents smarter

Wildlife trafficking is rife online in many countries

More than 33,000 animal products, 54 per cent of them live animals, were advertised for sale on websites from 16 countries, mainly in China.

Security savvy services beat online cyber spies

Popular chat service WhatsApp has built end-to-end encryption into the latest Android version of its app. It's part of a growing trend to toughen up web security

Free bitcoin for students: how will they spend it?

Students are receiving $100 of free bitcoin to try and spur acceptance of the cryptocurrency. Will it succeed?

Has the brain-zap backlash begun?

Despite claims it improves creativity, mental maths and memory, a review of brain stimulation wasn't able to find any consistent or reliable physical effects

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Haptic holograms let you touch the void in VR

Feeling is believing. A system that uses sound waves to project "haptic holograms" into mid-air – letting you touch 3D virtual objects with your bare hands – is poised to bring virtual reality into the physical world.

Adding a sense of touch as well as sight and sound will make it easier to completely immerse yourself in VR. And the ability to feel the shape of virtual objects could let doctors use their hands to examine a lump detected by a CT scan, for example. What's more, museum visitors could handle virtual replicas of priceless exhibits while the real thing remained safely behind glass.

Ben Long and his colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, improved on a previous version of their UltraHaptics technology, which projected 2D outlines of map contours, for example, onto a screen. Now, high-frequency sound waves emitted by an array of tiny speakers create the sensation of touching an invisible, floating object. When the sound hits the hand, the force of the waves exerts pressure on the skin.

To make the jump from outlines to full shapes, the team added a Leap Motion sensor to track the precise position of a user's hands. Knowing where the hands are in relation to the virtual object means the system can direct ultrasound at the right time and frequency to produce the sensation of touching different parts of the object – the top, say, or the side. This creates the impression that you are exploring the surface of an object as you move your hands around in empty space.

"Without haptics it's like you're in a dream and you cannot feel the environment," says Sébastien Kuntz of I'm in VR, VR developers in Paris, France. "You can only look at it, you don't have any feedback."

So far, the researchers have tested several shapes, including spheres and pyramids. They appear to be gently vibrating in space, says Long. The level of detail in the virtual objects is limited, but using more, smaller, speakers should improve the resolution of what can be projected, says Long. The shapes do not need to be perfect to conjure an immersive experience, though. "Even if there are discrepancies, the brain will bend what it sees and feels to fit the overall picture," says Kuntz.

The team says it has already been approached by companies interested in developing the technology for commercial applications. The work will be presented at interactive tech conference SIGGRAPH Asia in Shenzhen, China, on 3 December.

Stuart Cupit, technical director at Inition, a design studio in London, is also impressed by the technology. "Touch is a missing element in virtual interfaces today," he says.

This article will appear in print under the headline "Touching the void"

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The smart mouse with the half-human brain

What would Stewart Little make of it? Mice have been created whose brains are half human. As a result, the animals are smarter than their siblings.

The idea is not to mimic fiction, but to advance our understanding of human brain diseases by studying them in whole mouse brains rather than in dishes.

The altered mice still have mouse neurons – the "thinking" cells that make up around half of all their brain cells. But practically all the glial cells in their brains, the ones that support the neurons, are human.

"It's still a mouse brain, not a human brain," says Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. "But all the non-neuronal cells are human."

Rapid takeover

Goldman's team extracted immature glial cells from donated human fetuses. They injected them into mouse pups where they developed into astrocytes, a star-shaped type of glial cell.

Within a year, the mouse glial cells had been completely usurped by the human interlopers. The 300,000 human cells each mouse received multiplied until they numbered 12 million, displacing the native cells.

"We could see the human cells taking over the whole space," says Goldman. "It seemed like the mouse counterparts were fleeing to the margins."

Astrocytes are vital for conscious thought, because they help to strengthen the connections between neurons, called synapses. Their tendrils (see image) are involved in coordinating the transmission of electrical signals across synapses.

Human astrocytes are 10 to 20 times the size of mouse astrocytes and carry 100 times as many tendrils. This means they can coordinate all the neural signals in an area far more adeptly than mouse astrocytes can. "It's like ramping up the power of your computer," says Goldman.

Intelligence leap

A battery of standard tests for mouse memory and cognition showed that the mice with human astrocytes are much smarter than their mousy peers.

In one test that measures ability to remember a sound associated with a mild electric shock, for example, the humanised mice froze for four times as long as other mice when they heard the sound, suggesting their memory was about four times better. "These were whopping effects," says Goldman. "We can say they were statistically and significantly smarter than control mice."

Goldman first reported last year that mice with human glial cells are smarter. But the human cells his team injected then were mature so they simply integrated into the mouse brain tissue and stayed put.

This time, he injected the precursors of these cells, glial progenitor cells, which were able to divide and multiply. That, he says, explains how they were able to take over the mouse brains so completely, stopping only when they reached the physical limits of the space.

Species cross

"It would be interesting to find out whether the human astrocytes function the same way in the mice as they do in humans," says Fred Gage, a stem cell researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. "It would show whether the host modifies the fate of cells, or whether the cells retain the same features in mice as they do in humans," he says.

"That the cells work at all in a different species is amazing, and poses the question of which properties are being driven by the cell itself and which by the new environment," says Wolfgang Enard of Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Germany, who has shown that mice are better at learning if they have the human Foxp2 gene, which has been linked with human language development.

In a parallel experiment, Goldman injected immature human glial cells into mouse pups that were poor at making myelin, the protein that insulates nerves. Once inside the mouse brain, many of the human glial cells matured into oligodendrocytes, brain cells that specialise in making the insulating material, suggesting that the cells somehow detected and compensated for the defect.

This could be useful for treating diseases in which the myelin sheath is damaged, such as multiple sclerosis, says Goldman, and he has already applied for permission to treat MS patients with the glial progenitor cells, and hopes to start a trial in 12 to 15 months.

Still a mouse

To explore further how the human astrocytes affect intelligence, memory and learning, Goldman is already grafting the cells into rats, which are more intelligent than mice. "We've done the first grafts, and are mapping distributions of the cells," he says.

Although this may sound like the work of science fiction – think Deep Blue Sea , where researchers searching for an Alzheimer's cure accidently create super-smart sharks, or Algernon, the lab mouse who has surgery to enhance his intelligence, or even the pigoons, Margaret Atwood's pigs with human stem cells – and human thoughts – Goldman is quick to dismiss any idea that the added cells somehow make the mice more human.

"This does not provide the animals with additional capabilities that could in any way be ascribed or perceived as specifically human," he says. "Rather, the human cells are simply improving the efficiency of the mouse's own neural networks. It's still a mouse."

However, the team decided not to try putting human cells into monkeys. "We briefly considered it but decided not to because of all the potential ethical issues," Goldman says.

Enard agrees that it could be difficult to decide which animals to put human brain cells into. "If you make animals more human-like, where do you stop?" he says.

Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1510-14.2014

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Wildlife trafficking is rife online in many countries

GOING, going, gone! Adverts on Russian websites offering endangered animals, including 54 tigers and 13 orang-utans, are among almost 9500 online ads found in 16 countries over a six-week period earlier this year. The ads promoted more than 33,000 animal products, and 54 per cent of them were for live animals.

"If we could find that in just six weeks, you have to have serious concerns about what's going on constantly," says Tania McCrea-Steele of the International Fund for Animal Welfare group, and lead investigator of the study released on 25 November.

More than half the total adverts – 56 per cent – were from China, which also dominates ivory sales, with 1662 ads for ivory or suspected ivory.

Chinese sites included 164 rhino horn ads, even as the South African government published figures this week showing that rhino poaching has reached record levels, with 1020 rhinos poached so far this year, 16 more already than the previous record toll of 1004 in 2013.

McCrea-Steele says that some trade in endangered and live species and their products is allowed through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, but cautions that it is impossible to tell which adverts are legal. She applauded major web companies including eBay and the Chinese giants Alibaba and Taobao for doing what they could to ban illegal wildlife adverts. But she says that traders are now switching to social media, which is harder to police.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Trafficking rife online"

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