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July 23, 2021 Archives
Friday, July 23, 2021
CONTEXT: Comrades! Don't Touch the Anthill!
"Don't touch the anthill!" Soviet environmental poster, 1969 pic.twitter.com/vGeWn86VJQ
— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) July 22, 2021
Posted at
15:23
CONTINUITY: NASA 1965 “Advanced Post-Saturn Earth Launch Vehicle Study”
Even before the 1969 Moon landing, studies were being performed on the possibility of post-Saturn vehicles that would use solid-core, gas-core or pulsed nuclear engines to push gigantic 21.3m wide stages with 450-900 ton payloads to the Moon and beyond. https://t.co/4DL4vSEe7P pic.twitter.com/lMGreNmWRS
— ToughSF (@ToughSf) July 20, 2021
This thirty-four page “Executive Summary Report”, NASA TM X-53200 [PDF, scanned full text], dated February 3, 1965, is wild. From the abstract:
The results indicate that gas core reactor and nuclear pulse engines are both attractive for the advanced Post-Saturn vehicle, and both should be investigated further. If emphasis is on Earth orbit and lunar delivery missions, the gas core reactor shows a slight advantage. The nuclear pulse concept is clearly preferable if emphasis is on lunar and planetary deliveries.
“Nuclear pulse”, of course, refers to Project Orion-type propulsion where a ship is propelled by setting off thermonuclear bombs behind a pusher plate to accelerate it.
Posted at
14:54
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: ALMA Observatory Spots Moon-Forming Disc around Exoplanet
1/ Astronomers made the first clear detection of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet, using @ALMAObs , in which ESO is a partner.
— ESO (@ESO) July 22, 2021
🔗https://t.co/LjoIaSoBlR
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al. pic.twitter.com/4ybtQJ6myt
Here is the research paper, “A Circumplanetary Disk Around PDS70” [PDF].
Posted at
12:29
CONTEXT: United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno on Atlas, Vulcan, and the Emerging Space Economy
He has an interesting view of terraforming Mars: “Not going to happen. … There are many orders of magnitude less [CO₂] than we had originally had hoped would be there. … There just isn't enough—you're not going to be able to terraform Mars.”
But why would you want to escape from Earth's gravity well just to go down into another (dry and cold) hole? O'Neill colonies built from lunar and asteroid resources provide a far larger and more habitable environment for human and post-human settlement in the solar system.
Posted at
11:59
THE HAPPENING WORLD: DeepMind/AlphaFold Publishes 3D Structure of Most Human Proteins
Today with @emblebi, we're launching the #AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, which offers the most complete and accurate picture of the human proteome, doubling humanity’s accumulated knowledge of high-accuracy human protein structures - for free: https://t.co/vtBGmTkKhy 1/ pic.twitter.com/XgBQTn2fuC
— DeepMind (@DeepMind) July 22, 2021
And the database presently includes twenty other organisms.
OK, I didn't think I'd wake up this morning to find that all Plasmodium falciparum protein structures have been predicted.. And there is a data base to play around with them, too! 🤯https://t.co/om2HcInto1#AlphaFold #embl #ebi pic.twitter.com/6Hhozds5R4
— Franziska Hentzschel (@FHentzschel) July 23, 2021
Plans are for the database to eventually cover more than 100,000 millions proteins catalogued in UniRef90.
For example, here is the paired box protein Pax-6 (“EYELESS”) from Drosophila melanogaster.
Posted at
11:22