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For two years, the Chinese science satellite SJ-06F flew solo orbits around the Earth (or, as solo as a machine could be in the expanding haze of space junk in orbit). But now it has a partner: Last month China executed the delicate maneuver of aligning another satellite launched this year, SJ-12, with its older counterpart.

Only the United States had executed such a satellite rendezvous before this, and it shows off China’s advancement in satellite sophistication. Three years ago the country blew one of its satellites to smithereens in a practice test—a test that created thousands of additional chunks of debris in orbit. The satellite meet-up is a more elegant trick, and one whose implications could be sinister or benign. Let’s explore both possibilities.

Don’t Worry

China’s game of catch-up, which has its space program closing in on America’s abilities in orbit, strikes fear into the hearts of some politicos. But malfeasance need not be the aim of the satellite maneuver.

“This set of skills serves a whole lot of purposes,” says Dean Cheng, a Chinese policy expert with the Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington DC. The most immediate application, Cheng says, may be testing sensors and control systems to help pave the way for docking procedures to be used with China’s first space station module, Tiangong-1, which is set to launch in 2011. “This sort of thing may very well be consistent with wanting to test drive the hardware and software before you test it on your space laboratory,” Cheng says. [New Scientist]

And speaking of space junk (as we were earlier), this kind of procedure could be used in the future to clear out the defunct equipment and debris that clogs the space around our planet and threatens useful machinery in orbit.

What of the worry that China could dock with our satellites and interfere with them? Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, who I talked to for a story in the September issue of DISCOVER, tracked the rendezvous and says that’s unlikely. Weeden, whose organization is devoted to the peaceful use of space, says that there are easier ways to mess with enemy satellites, like shooting them with lasers from the ground.

OK, Worry

Whether or not China is pursuing space warfare in this instance, the country is certainly trying to measure up to whatever the United States can do.

“The Chinese would be absolutely incompetent to not be trying to reduce U.S advantage in space,” James Oberg, a former NASA space engineer specializing in orbital rendezvous, tells Danger Room. “No potential adversary in their right mind would give us permanent advantage in space operations.” [Wired.com]

China might not need rendezvous capability to tinker with another country’s satellites, but it would need that capability to spy on them—taking an up-close look at the competitor’s product. There may be no way to gauge true intentions.

According to Oberg, the satellite meet-up occurred in an orbit almost exclusively devoted to earth observation — spy and weather satellites, for example — where “a potential adversary would be most interested in rendezvousing. On the other hand, it’s also where a satellite might need refueling,” he adds. “It’s like you could be changing a screwdriver for a hammer, or you could be turning a peaceful ‘bot into a killer one.” [Wired.com]

Image: ESA

Source: Close Encounters of the Worrisome Kind? Chinese Satellites Meet in Space

Macrumors is reporting that an executive at Mexican carrier Telcel is claiming that Apple will release a revised version of the iPhone 4 by the end of September to address the highly publicized iPhone 4 antenna issue.

When Steve Jobs had announced at the iPhone 4 press conference that Apple will be giving a free case to all customers who had purchased an iPhone 4 only until September 30, 2010, it had raised some eyebrows.

Macrumors reports:

According to Marco Quatorze, Telcel's Director of Value Added Services, the iPhone 4 sold in Mexico will initially be the same hardware as that sold in the U.S. and elsewhere, with Apple offering a free case to address potential issues with antenna performance. But he also noted that as of September 30th, when the free case program expires, revised hardware without the reception issues will become available.

Macrumors goes on to add:

The veracity of Quatorze's claim is unknown, as it is unclear whether a carrier executive at his level would even be privy to such information, and it is possible that he may simply be mistaken in his understanding of Apple's September 30th expiration date for the free case program.

If Apple ends up releasing a revised version of iPhone 4 to fix the antenna issue then it will be very controversial as Steve Jobs had explained that the issue was not limited to iPhone 4 and was also observed on other popular smartphones.

Steve Jobs believed that they have got to the heart of the problem and that is the smarphones have weak spots, which is a challenge to the entire industry.

After all this, if Apple releases a revised version of iPhone 4, its going to turn into another PR nightmare for Apple as early adopters are going to be really pissed off.

The only reason that can force Apple to release a revision version (assuming it has a fix for the antenna issue) would be a drastic drop in demand for iPhone 4. But according to Apple, demand for iPhone 4 is ‘absolutely stunning’ and they’re selling every iPhone 4 unit they can make, which clearly shows that customers don’t think the antenna issue is a deal breaker.

I would be really surprised if Apple releases a revised version of iPhone 4 to fix the antenna issue. In my opinion, Apple bought some time by launching the iPhone 4 case program until September 30 to see if it can bundle the free case while shipping iPhone 4 rather than running a separate program until it releases the next generation iPhone in mid 2011 as I’m sure it adding unnecessary overheads.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

[CanalMX via MacRumors]

Source: Apple Might Release New iPhone 4 To Fix Antenna Problem By End Of September?

The United States currently holds around half of the world’s helium supply and we’re selling it, for cheap.

We’ve known this for a while. We started stockpiling the stuff near Amarillo, Texas in 1925, in part for dirigible use, and stepped up reserves in the 1960s as a Cold War asset. In 1996, Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act mandating that the United States sell the gas at artificially low prices to get rid of the stockpile by 2015. This February, the National Research Council published a report estimating that, given increasing consumption, the world may run out of helium in 40 years. That’s bad news given helium’s current applications in science, technology, and party decorations–and possible future applications in fusion energy.

Now physicist Robert Richardson, who won a 1996 Nobel Prize for work using helium-3 to make superfluids, has come forward to stress the folly of underselling our supply of the natural resource. He suggested in several interviews that the gas’s price should mirror its actual demand and scarcity. He estimates that typical party balloons should cost $100 a pop.

“They couldn’t sell it fast enough and the world price for helium gas is ridiculously cheap,” Professor Richardson told a summer meeting of Nobel laureates…. “Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium it is lost to the Earth forever, lost to the Earth forever,” he emphasised. [The Independent]

If we don’t heed Richardson’s warning, here are some sources the United States might have to tap when we run out:

The Air

The current U.S. helium supply formed from billions of years worth of radioactive decay and accrued near uranium and thorium deposits. Though it’s possible to separate helium out of the air, Richardson warns that it will cost a lot more. He told New Scientist:

“There is no chemical means to make helium. The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks. Right now it’s not commercially viable to recover helium from the air, so we have to rely on extracting it from rocks. But if we do run out altogether, we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today.” [New Scientist]

Other Countries

If we sell off all of our helium that means we’ll likely have to import it later–and c0mpetition could be fierce. China and India’s developing science and tech industries will also likely want a piece of the He pie.

Emerging powers such as China and India are ramping up helium-hungry activities like chipset fabrication, space programs, and cryogenic research…. Now, the NRC report warns, if the US does not soon cease selling off its reserves, within 10 to 15 years the country will be forced to import most of its helium from the only other near-term sources, gas fields in the Middle East and Russia. [Seed]

Other Planets

Another place where helium occurs naturally is, of course, in the gas balls we call stars. Researchers think that the solar wind from our sun may have deposited some helium-3 on the moon’s surface. If we use that up too, we could look a little further, say Uranus or Neptune, which have helium-rich atmospheres. We’re guessing that the party balloon prices will suffer accordingly.

“The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3,” says [futurist Marshall] Savage, and he’s right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful. Associate professor Tim Swindle and his colleagues at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona have already begun prospecting. Swindle has mapped likely helium-3 deposits on the moon by charting the parts of the lunar landscape most exposed to solar wind against the locations of mineral deposits that best trap the element. [Wired]

Image: flickr / Shiny Things

Source: Nobel Prize Winner Warns World: We’re Running Out of Helium

The legal mess around embryonic stem cell research just got messier. Yesterday a U.S. district judge ruled that President Obama’s expansion of federal financing for the research, enacted last year when he lifted the Bush-era restrictions on creating new stem cell lines, was a violation of federal law.

Judge Lamberth ruled that the administration’s policy violated the clear language of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a law passed annually by Congress that bans federal financing for any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death” [The New York Times].

Here’s the gist of what happened: The Obama Administration said that its policy fit with Dickey-Wicker because no federal dollars financed the destruction of embryos. Under the new rules the few stem cell lines approved by the Bush administration were OK, and so were new ones from embryos that had already been discarded because they weren’t needed for fertility treatments anymore—if the donors had given their consent to the embryos being used for research purposes. In this compromise position, taxpayer money wouldn’t be used to create new stem cell lines from embryos, but federally funded researchers could work with new stem cell lines created by privately financed scientists.

Judge Royce Lamberth, however, interpreted the law to mean that federal money couldn’t fund any research that involved discarded embryos, no matter if a penny of taxpayer money went to creating the stem cell lines or how long it had been since those embryos were discarded.

Research is a long, continuous process that can’t be partitioned into discrete pieces, Lamberth wrote. If Congress meant to prohibit funding only for specific scientific acts, it could have said so. “Congress, however, has not written the statute that way, and this Court is bound to apply the law as it is written,” the ruling said [Los Angeles Times].

The Department of Justice says it is reviewing the ruling, which could make a mess of research funding. By Lamberth’s reading of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, even some of the work done under the Bush Administration might have been illegal because sometime, somewhere, at some point embryos had been destroyed to make the stem cell lines, even though the Bush rules didn’t allow any new embryo use.

According the Wall Street Journal, the government currently spends more than $100 million per year on embryonic stem cell research. The fate of present projects remains unclear—and for the time being, researchers have to pay even more attention to what test-tubes they touch with federally funded instruments while the government works out what to do.

“I have had to tell everyone in my lab that when they feed their cells tomorrow morning, they better use media that has not been funded by the federal government,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children’s Hospital Boston, referring to food given to cells. “This ruling means an immediate disruption of dozens of labs doing this work since the Obama administration made its order” [The New York Times].

Image: iStockphoto

Source: Judge: Obama’s Expansion of Stem Cell Research Violates Federal Law

jamie writes “Federal prosecutors have decided not to file charges against a Philadelphia school district or its employees over the use of software to remotely monitor students. From the article: ‘U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger says investigators have found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.’”

Source: Feds Won’t File Charges In School Laptop-Spy Case

The antibiotics-resistant superbug that emerged in South Asia appears to have claimed its first life. According to doctors who treated a man in Belgium, he went to a hospital in Pakistan after a car accident, and there he picked up the bacterial infection. While the man died back in June, his doctors announced today that he carried the superbug.

This new health scare intensified this week after researchers published a study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases characterizing “a new antibiotic resistance mechanism” in the U.K., India, and Pakistan. How bad is this “mechanism?”

It’s bad:

The problem isn’t a particular kind of bacteria. It’s a gene that encodes an enyzme called New Delhi metallo-lactamase-1 (NDM-1). Bacteria that carry it aren’t bothered by traditional antibiotics, or even the drugs known as carbapenems deployed against antibiotic-resistant microbes.

The NDM-1 gene is a special worry because it is found in plasmids — DNA structures that can easily be copied and then transferred promiscuously among different types of bacteria. These include Escherichia coli, the commonest cause of urinary tract infections, and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which causes lung and wound infections and is generated mainly in hospitals [AFP].

It’s no worse than what we had before:

Yes, NDM-1 is scary. But it’s not unprecedented.

There are numerous strains of antibiotic-resistant germs, and although they have killed many patients in hospitals and nursing homes, none have yet lived up to the “superbug” and “flesh-eating bacteria” hyperbole that greets the discovery of each new one. “They’re all bad,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Is NDM-1 more worrisome than MRSA? It’s too early to judge” [The New York Times].

The Los Angeles Times contends that the problem is not a serious problem for the West—at least not yet. The people in the most danger are patients in hospitals, The New York Times says—especially ones with weaker immune systems.

Could it happen anywhere?

India and Pakistan have developed some excellent hospitals and surgeons that provide medical care and surgical procedures, especially elective procedures, more cheaply than they are available in the West. But the overuse of antibiotics among the larger population leads to the development of resistance, and those organisms can make their way into even the best hospitals [Los Angeles Times].

Indians, however—cognizant of the bad press that comes with having a medical scare named after one’s capital city—have fought back against the idea that their practices brought on the emergence of a superbug.

“Several superbugs are surviving in nature and they have been reported from countries like Greece, Israel, the U.S., Britain, Brazil,” and elsewhere, V. M. Katoch, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research in New Delhi told India Real Time. “It’s unfortunate that this new bug, which is an environmental thing, has been attached to a particular country” [Wall Street Journal].

Image: USDA

Source: New Antibiotic-Resistant Superbug Found: Should Everybody Panic?

The BP oil spill isn’t over. But, as CNN says, we could be at the beginning of the end.

The first part of BP’s “static kill,” in which it used mud to try to plug the leak, appears to have worked well and stemmed the flow of oil. Last night National Incident Commander Thad Allen gave the OK for the second part: pumping concrete. That could begin today.

BP’s “static kill” operation finished ahead of schedule. It took eight hours to fill the 13,000-foot well pipe with heavy drill mud, holding back the oil with its weight. … Now, the column of mud ensures that oil will never be released from the well again, officials say. A permanent cement plug will be put in place later this month [ABC News].

This business of pumping mud probably sounds familiar. That’s because it’s basically the same thing  BP tried to do many weeks ago with its “top kill” maneuver. This time, though, the mud seems to be working, probably because the temporary cap BP put on the leak in July made it easier to smother the oil flow.

Hopefully their optimism isn’t misplaced, but it’s nice to see some hope on the horizon. While BP continues work on this plug, the relief wells near their target. They should intersect the well sometime later this month.

Now more attention turns to the other side of the disaster—cleaning it up. This week the U.S. government issued a report that sounded like good news, that it has accounted for most of the reported 5 million barrels of oil from the leak. Not everyone, though, was convinced by this rosy declaration.

The government was met with skepticism about its report that three-quarters of the oil from the well had evaporated, or had been removed in controlled burns, collected or dispersed. Critics accused the panel of government, industry and academic scientists who authored the report of being at best vague about how it reached its conclusions and at worst deliberately downplaying the environmental impact of the biggest oil spill in U.S. history [Houston Chronicle].

As we’ve seen over and over during the hundred-plus days of the BP oil spill, getting accurate figures is tricky. The first few guesses of the amount of oil leaking per day were wildly underestimated, and oceanographer Ian MacDonald tells Discovery News that the government’s announcement is based on more guesswork, not direct measurement.

Image: U.S. Coast Guard

Source: Mud from “Static Kill” Has Stopped BP’s Leak; Concrete Coming Today

One of the surprising things about the iPhone 4 reception saga was that most of the our favorite tech journalists did not report the antenna issue when they reviewed iPhone 4.

Walt Mossberg of Wall Street Journal was probably the only one who reported that iPhone 4’s performance in making voice calls on AT&T's network in the U.S. was decidedly mixed.

Source: iPhone 4 Real World Testing Report

Every time governments fail to take serious steps on climate change, it seems the parlor game of predicting what our warmer world will look like heats up. And the newest of those predictions, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pokes at what is presently one of the country’s most sensitive spots: immigration.

Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton published a study that estimates that between 1.4 and 6.7 million people could become climate refugees emigrating from rural Mexico to the United States between now and 2080. That’s 2 to 10 percent of the present Mexican population, and it doesn’t include people who would make the move for other reasons.

Is it a major concern? Yes. How much stock should you put in those statistics? Not much.

Oppenheimer and colleagues used projections of decreased agricultural output driven by rising temperatures to get these figures. In the worst-case scenario would occur if temperatures were to rise by one to three degrees Celsius (1.8 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2080, if farming methods had not been adapted to cope with global warming and if higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide had not spurred plant growth. This would mean crop yields in Mexico would fall by 39 to 48 percent, the study said [AFP].

Other scientists agreed that a warming Earth could spur more migration, but questioned whether it is truly possible to disentangle climate change from other forces and pin statistics just on that.

The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico’s economy. And it’s always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall’s dried up or the soil’s eroded [The New Republic].

In addition, the Arizona Daily Star reports that the fertility rate in Mexico has trended downward for decades. Its continued drop could cut into any migration increase tied to climate change. Douglas Massey, another Princeton professor, told the Los Angeles Times that even if agricultural production worsens, Mexicans aren’t going to come in a mass exodus in the U.S. unless there are lots of jobs here to be had.

Oppenheimer himself free acknowledges the fudgy nature of predicting climate change’s effects, and that while the numbers make for a sexy headline, you shouldn’t take them too seriously. He says:

“Our intention was to show that this problem is a substantial one. Our goal was not to project specific outcomes 80 years from now but to show the magnitude of problems that policymakers ought to pay more attention to. I don’t want to say that this will be the single biggest factor driving immigration, but it could become among the largest factors” [Arizona Daily Star].

Image: flickr / wonderlane

Source: Will Climate Change Really Spur Mass Migrations of Mexicans to the U.S.?

Earlier this month, we described the successful flight of Solar Impulse, a manned solar plane that flew for over 26 hours before a safe landing in Switzerland. Now comes news of another feat of solar-powered derring-do. Currently circling above Arizona, a British-built unmanned solar plane dubbed the Zephyr has now flown for a record-breaking seven days straight. Zephyr’s developer, the defense company QinetiQ, hopes the plane can stay aloft and double its own record for a total of fourteen days.

With a 74-foot wingspan, this latest version of the  Zephyr is fifty percent bigger than its predecessors. Its designers hope that the plane will one day find use both for military reconnaissance and also for scientific research. Without a payload, it weights about 110 pounds. Says project manager Jon Saltmarsh:

“Zephyr is basically the first ‘eternal aircraft.’… The launch was absolutely beautiful; it was just so smooth,” said Mr Saltmarsh. “We had five people lift it above their heads, start running and it just lifted away into the sky.” [BBC]

The plane is currently circling over its take-off location, a U.S. military installation called the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. It uses paper-thin silicon solar arrays that cover its wings for power in the day, which also charge lithium-sulphur batteries for power when the sun goes down.

QinetiQ chose this time and place for its test because the plane can soak up the sun only 32 degrees north of the Equator in the midst of summer’s longer days.

The sun is tracking as nearly dead overhead as it ever does over US territory just now, meaning that the Zephyr is getting far more energy from its cells than it would farther north or at other times of year. One should note that in operational use the Zephyr will have to power a payload as well as itself–and for much of the year in many locations it will have to do this with less output from its cells than it is getting now. [The Register]

The Zephyr has already flown for four times as long as the unmanned aircraft that previously held the official endurance record, the United States’ Global Hawk. This one-week flight also doubles the unofficial record held by a previous version of the Zephyr.

Image: QinetiQ

Source: 1 Week and Counting: Zephyr’s Record-Breaking, Solar-Powered Flight