NASA Competition: Students To Help Design Deep Space Habitat

College students have until May 2 to help NASA design a deep space habitat, thanks to a new competition.

NASA is hosting the 2013 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge that tests undergraduate and graduate students to design systems for potential use on a deep space habitat prototype.

Interested students can view more information and eligibility requirements here: http://spacegrant.org/xhab.

Winners are expected to receive between $10,000 and $49,000 to produce functional products to be delivered by June 2013.

"Students will play a vital role in our critical early system planning and development," Alvin Drew, NASA astronaut and project manager at Johnson Space Center, said in a statement.

"Their designs could become the basis for the concepts and technologies that will make up the habitat we eventually send to space."

The challenge was first held in 2011 when NASA solicited designs for an inflatable space loft, a place where astronauts can sleep, eat and live while in space.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison beat out two other teams and tested its loft as part of NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies simulated asteroid mission in August and September.

The 2012 challenge called for designs for plant growth technologies. NASA funded four schools to build their designs, which will be tested in August.

NASA announced the 2013 challenge Tuesday and called for designs on various technologies such as solar arrays, medicine systems and food production.

X-Hab is designed to attract students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by providing them with real-world challenges, and helps NASA engineers through the development of novel technologies, NASA said in a statement.

"The NASA team is putting a great deal of responsibility on the students, and in turn gives the students a bigger stake in the future development of space technologies that likely will become heritage to actual systems and technologies that will be flown in space in the years and decades to come," NASA says in the challenge description.

Rare Image: The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey

Researchers working in Northern Myanmar have captured the first photographs of the recently discovered Myanmar snub-nosed monkey.

"These images are the first record of the animal in its natural habitat," said Ngwe Lwin, the Burmese national who first recognised the monkey as a possible new species.

"It is great to finally have photographs because they show us something about how and where it actually lives."

"The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey was described scientifically in 2010 from a dead specimen collected from a local hunter," said Frank Momberg of FFI, who organised the initial expeditions that led to the monkey's discovery. "As yet, no scientist has seen a live individual," he added.

Picture: FFI/BANCA/PRCF/REX FEATURES

French Vintner crisis: Bordeaux banks on biodiversity for sustainability

It was a crisp autumn day in the vineyards of Saint Emilion, the vines asleep for the winter, as winegrowers, scientists and children planted hedges to create habitats for mites needed to prey on vine pests.

This marked the debut of an ambitious biodiversity project launched by pioneering French vintners in a bid for sustainability.

The biological diversity of Saint Emilion's 8,000-hectare vineyard landscape, intertwined with wine since Roman times and protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage site since 1999, has been precariously reduced by urbanisation, chemical vine treatments, and one-crop farming.

The long-term goal of the community project, unveiled to coincide with St. Catherine's Day when "all trees take root", is an attractive and functional landscape.

It will come with dozens of kilometres of interlinking green corridors that allow animals to move between 1,100 wine estates, and reduce soil erosion, vine treatments and fertilizer and pesticide run-off.

The corridors, for the moment, however, are few, far between, and fragile. Where a variety of crops grew 50 years ago, grapevines reign supreme, often cultivated from the edge of the ditch alongside the road to within steps of the cellar door.

"In Saint Emilion, vineyard land sells for between one and three million euros per hectare, so when we let grass or poppies grow, it seems incomprehensible," said Xavier David-Beaulieu, owner of Chateau Coutet, a 14-hectare estate with one hectare of woods and prairie.

Historical legacy
Viticulture has made the area wealthy but monoculture provides an ideal habitat for pests like spider mites and leafhoppers to colonise and infest a field, destroying the grape quality and yield. For decades, chemicals provided the answer, but led to a vicious cycle of dependency.

Pesticides
"When you treat with insecticides only three percent of the bugs are a menace to the vineyards, the other 97 percent are useful," said Patrice Hateau, director of Chateau Fombrauge.

In the case of spider mites, the insecticides also kill their natural enemy, the predatory mite Typhlodromus. "Just one Typhlodromus per vine leaf means you don't have to treat for red or yellow spider mites."

Hernicides
Herbicides, used to make the vine rows pristine, exacerbate the problem. "Ninety percent of the bugs live at soil level."

Increasing Complexity
"The more an environment is complex, the less vulnerable it is," said Maarten van Helden, a researcher in Integrated Pest Management and Biodiversity at the National School for Agricultural Engineers (ENITA) and consultant on the Saint Emilion project, which is now part of a larger biodiversity study in France, Spain and Portugal awaiting approval from the European Union.