NewsMarket

Monday, February 20, 2012

Canadian to 'command world spaceship'

Astronaut Chris Hadfield already has a number of firsts to his name.

Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian to walk in space during his 2001 shuttle mission

undertake a spacewalk; and he was the first and only Canadian to board the Russian Mir space station.

He was also the first Canadian to operate his country's major contribution to the space shuttle - its robotic arm, or "Canadarm".

Now, he is about to become the first Canadian to command the International Space Stations (ISS).

"I'm being asked to command the world's spaceship; it's a big responsibility," Hadfield said.

"The leading nations of the world have built a laboratory with no gravity, at huge cost and toil. I'm only one of many commanders in a sequence; I recognise my relative importance. But it doesn't decrease the level of responsibility for the time that I'm the commander.

"So, my number one job of course is to maintain the health of the crew. We need to keep the people healthy and alive and productive onboard. Number two is the health of the spaceship, to keep the space station productive and functioning."

The former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel has been talking about his upcoming mission here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

To date, only one national outside of the US and Russia has been given the status of commander on the ISS, and that was a European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut, the Belgian Frank De Winne, who took the helm of the orbiting outpost in 2009.

Hadfield's big moment will begin when he launches to the station on a Soyuz rocket at the end of this year.

For three months, the 52-year-old will serve as a flight engineer in the Expedition 34 crew. Then, in March 2013, he will assume command of Expedition 35 for three months, before returning to Earth in his Soyuz capsule.

"We run about 100 experiments [on the ISS] consistently, rotating them all the time but there are about 100 experiments up there.

"So, the job of the commander is to build a group of people, both the astronaut crew and the ground crew that supports us, that can successfully execute the six months I'm up there - the three months that I'm the commander - to get those primary objectives done. Crew health and safety, vehicle health and safety, and then all the science and engineering and experimentation that comes with it."

It will be Chris Hadfield's third trip into orbit. His first was a little more than 16 years ago when he flew on space shuttle Atlantis to the Mir space station.

The Sarnia, Ontario-born astronaut then made his only other flight in 2001, when, as part of the shuttle Endeavour crew, he delivered Canadarm2 to the space station. Canadarm2 is a bigger, more sophisticated version of the robotic arm fitted in the shuttles.

It was during this mission that Hadfield undertook the first ever Canadian spacewalks.

Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger

The first strips of muscle have been grown in a project to develop a new way to produce meat

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.

The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.

At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.

"We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources," he said.

Professor Post's group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.

The cost of producing the hamburger will be £200,000 but Professor Post says that once the principle has been demonstrated, production techniques will be improved and costs will come down.

At a news conference, Prof Post said he was even planning to ask celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal to cook it.

“Start Quote

In the beginning it will taste bland. I think we will need to work on the flavour”

Prof Mark PostUniversity of Maastricht

"The reason we are doing this is not to show a viable product but to show that in reality we can do this," he told BBC News.

"From then on, we need to spend a whole lot of work and money to make the process efficient and then cost effective."

So why use such high tech methods to produce meat when livestock production methods have done the job effectively for thousands of years?

It is because most food scientists believe that current methods of food production are unsustainable.

Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.

Prof Sean Smukler from the University of British Columbia said keeping pace with demand for meat from Asia and Africa will be particularly hard as demand from these regions will shoot up as living standards rise. He thinks that lab grown meat could be a good solution.

Demand for meat will increase at a time when it will be harder than ever for farmers to boost production

"It will help reduce land pressures," he told BBC News. "Anything that stops more wild land being converted to agricultural land is a good thing. We're already reaching a critical point in availability of arable land," he said.

Lab-grown meat could eventually become more efficient than producing meat the old fashioned way, according to Prof Post. Currently, 100g of vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce 15g of animal protein, an efficiency of 15%. He believes that synthetic meat could be produced with an equivalent energy efficiency of 50%.

So what is the synthetic burger likely to taste like?

"In the beginning it will taste bland," says Prof Post. "I think we will need to work on the flavour separately by trying to figure out which components of the meat actually produce the taste and analyse what the composition of the strip is and whether we can change that."

Prof Post also said that if the technology took off, it would reduce the number of animals that were factory farmed and slaughtered.

The BBC's Pallab Ghosh reports from Duggie's Dogs hot dog restaurant in Downtown Vancouver

But David Steele, who is president of Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat.

"While I do think that there are definite environmental and animal welfare advantages of this high-tech approach over factory farming, especially, it is pretty clear to me that plant-based alternatives... have substantial environmental and probably animal welfare advantages over synthetic meat," he said.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

Ants remember their enemy's scent

Tropical weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina) (c) Antweb

Weaver ant "major workers" aggressively defend their colony from intruders

Ant colonies - one of nature's most ancient and efficient societies - are able to form a "collective memory" of their enemies, say scientists.

When one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy's odour: passing it on to the rest of the colony.

This enables any of its nest-mates to identify an ant from the offending colony.

The findings are reported in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

For many ant species, chemicals are key to functioning as a society. Insects identify their nest-mates by the specific "chemical signature" that coats the body of every member of that nest.

The insects are also able to sniff out any intruder that might be attempting to invade.

This study, carried out by a team from the University of Melbourne in Australia, set out to discover if ants were able to retain memories of the odours they encounter.

The researchers studied the tropical weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina), which builds is home in trees; one nest can contain up to 500,000 workers.

The team set up a "familiarisation test" to allow ants from one nest to encounter intruders from another.

Over a series of trials, they placed an ant from a "focal nest" into a tiny observation arena with an ant from another nest.

After 15 of these familiarising face-offs, the team set up a fake ant invasion.

They placed 20 worker ants from the now "familiar" nest on or near the focal nest.

"These intruders were typically attacked by the resident workers," the researchers reported in their paper.

Corporate wisdom

The ants recognise nest-mates by smell

The ants defending their colony reacted much more aggressively towards intruders from a nest that a few of their workers had been familiarised with.

The team explained that "this increased aggression was... specifically targeted toward the 'familiar' colony, and persisted for at least 6 days" after the familiarisation trials.

Lead researcher Prof Mark Elgar explained to BBC Nature that all of the ants in the colony were able to draw on the experience of one worker.

He described this as collective or "corporate wisdom".

In human terms, he explained, "[imagine] you have had an unsavoury experience with a particular group of people with a distinguishing feature - perhaps they all wear the same coloured scarf of their football team.

"And you warned your colleagues to look out for people wearing that coloured scarf.

"One of the colleagues that heard you might subsequently tell another colleague who wasn't in the room when you made your comment.

"That colleague has acquired the information indirectly from the collective memory of you and your work colleagues.

"Change colleagues to ants, and scarf colour to odour and you've got our story."

Digital tools 'to save languages'

There's an app for everything - even an endangered language like Tuvan

Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe.

Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end.

Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the "modern world", especially digital technology, are pushing back against the tide.

North American tribes use social media to re-engage their young, for example.

Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students.

"Small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence," said K David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow.

"It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation. We hear a lot about how globalisation exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate. But a positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now through digital technology that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience."

Harrison, who travels the world to seek out the last speakers of vanishing languages, has been describing his work here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

With National Geographic, he has just helped produce eight talking dictionaries.

These dictionaries contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. All the audio recordings have been made by native speakers, some of whom like Alfred "Bud" Lane are among the last fluent individuals in their native tongues.

Mr Lane speaks a language known as Siletz Dee-ni, which is restricted to a small area on the central Oregon coast.

"Linguists came in and labelled our language moribund, meaning it was heading for the ash heap of history; and our tribal people and our council decided that wasn't going to happen. So we devised a plan to go forward to start teaching our dialect here in the Siletz Valley," he told the meeting.

Mr Lane has sat down and recorded 14,000 words for the online dictionary. "Nothing takes the place of speakers speaking to other speakers, but this bridges a gap that was just sorely needed in our community and our tribe."

Margaret Noori is an expert in Native American studies at the University of Michigan and a speaker of Anishinaabemowin, which is the sovereign language of over 200 indigenous "nations" in Canada and the US. These communities are heavy users of Facebook.

"What we do with technology is try to connect people," Prof Noori said. "All of it is to keep the language."

Dr Harrison says not all languages can survive, and many inevitably will be lost as remaining speakers die off. But he says the new digital tools do offer a way back from the brink for a lot of languages that seemed doomed just a few years ago.

He told BBC News: "Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.

"If we care about sustainability and survival on the planet, we all benefit from having this knowledge base persevered."