40,000 People needed to Colonise any Alien Planet

Adrian Mann's illustration depicts a future starship under construction in Earth orbit using a ring-type construction facility, which could provide hotel rooms for guests who wish to view the construction.

Hungary-based space illustrator Adrian Mann is a graphical engineer for Project Icarus.
Credit: Adrian Mann

If humanity ever wants to colonise a planet beyond the solar system, it's going to need a really big spaceship.

The founding population of an interstellar colony should consist of 20,000 to 40,000 people, said Cameron Smith, an anthropologist at Portland State University in Oregon.

Such a large group would possess a great deal of genetic and demographic diversity, giving the settlement the best chance of survival during the long space voyage and beyond, he explained.

"Do you want to just squeak by, with barely what you can get? Or do you want to go in good health?" Smith said on July 16 during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group (mp3 file).

"I would suggest, go with something that gives you a good margin for the case of disaster."

Revisiting the numbers
In the past, researchers have proposed that a few hundred people would be sufficient to establish a settlement on or near an alien planet but Smith thought it was time to take another look.

"I wanted to revisit the issue," he said. "It had been quite a long time, and of course we now know more about population genetics from genomics."

For his study, which was published in April in the journal Acta Astronautica, Smith assumed an interstellar voyage lasting roughly 150 years.

This time frame is consistent with that envisioned by researchers at Icarus Instellar, a nonprofit organization dedicated to pursuing travel to another star.

Smith's calculations, which combine information from population genetics theory and computer modeling, point toward a founding population of 14,000 to 44,000 people.

A "safe and well-considered figure" is 40,000, about 23,000 of whom would be men and women of reproductive age, Smith writes in the study.

This figure may seem "astoundingly large," Smith acknowledged, but he stressed that it makes sense.

Smith writes in the Acta Astronautica paper; "This number would maintain good health over five generations despite;

• increased inbreeding resulting from a relatively small human population, 
• depressed genetic diversity due to the founder effect, 
• demographic change through time and 
• expectation of at least one severe population catastrophe over the five-generation voyage,"

Data from the real world support the overall thrust of his findings, Smith added.

"Almost no natural populations of vertebrates dip below around five to 7,000 individuals," he said during the FISO talk.

" There are genetic reasons for this. And when they do go below this, sometimes they survive, but many times they go into what's called a demographic or extinction vortex."

Sending frozen sperm and eggs on the voyage with a limited number of human "tenders" is also an option, Smith said, though he didn't consider it seriously in the new paper.

"It can be done, but it's so different from the human experience of living in communities and so forth that I've kind of avoided that," he said.

"I'm kind of assuming, or sticking with, 'What is the experience of humanity so far, and what can we learn from it?"

NASA Mars: Mars habitable to Humans by 2035

Conceptual image of people working on Mars. 

Credit: NASA.

At the European Lunar Symposium 2014 held at the Natural History Museum earlier this month, NASA officials revealed that the Moon could be used as a practice ground for sending humans to Mars within 20 years.

Ellen Stofan

NASA's chief scientist Dr Ellen Stofan and deputy chief technologist Jim Adams told the assembled scientists that putting humans on Mars is NASA's 'primary mission'.

While there have been many robotic missions to Mars in search of water and signs of life, including Curiosity's current assignment, Dr Stofan believes it's now essential to send human scientists.

'To unambiguously settle the questions of whether there was life on Mars it will take scientists down on the surface,' Dr Stofan said.

However, she admitted there is still a long way to go to ready the technologies for such a mission.

With the exception of those who went to the Moon, the majority of people sent into space so far have been in 'low Earth orbit', relying on systems on Earth to keep them alive.

A journey to Mars would take months.

Bagging an asteroid
Before taking the plunge and attempting to send people to Mars, and the associated dangers of deep space, NASA plans to use the Moon as an intermediate proving ground, because it is close enough to return astronauts home within a couple of days.

Conceptual image of an astronaut retrieving a sample from a captured asteroid. 

Credit: NASA.

But rather than landing on the lunar surface, the plan is to pull an asteroid close enough to the Moon to allow astronauts to take samples from it.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission aims to find a small asteroid travelling between the Moon and Earth and to 'snag it, bag it and drag it' into orbit around the Moon where it can be reached by astronauts.

Hazardous journey
Robots would perform the capture portion, testing ion propulsion systems - the heavy-duty thrusters that would be needed to get humans and their equipment all the way to Mars.

The budget for seeking out near-Earth objects such as asteroids has already been doubled to find a suitable candidate for the mission.

The human phase would then test new suits designed to protect astronauts from health hazards such as bursts of solar wind. It would also train astronauts in protocols for working in deep space, far from home.

'We're working to reduce the risks so that people can arrive on Mars happy and healthy and ready to work.' Dr Stofan said.

Fly by
To the disappointment of many of the scientists in the audience, who want to see more lunar exploration, Dr Stofan and Adams said that NASA does not intend to use the Moon's surface as part of its journey to Mars.

They did acknowledge, however, the general importance of research on the surface, both for science and exploration, and said they will work with partners in other space agencies.

Research on the Moon could help work out how to gather resources from the surface of an alien world, such as how to extract water.

Beyond Mars
Adams finished the talk with tantalising inspiration. 'Where NASA is headed is to the Martian surface in the 2030s,' he said.

'It is my dream that once we've put boots on Mars and we've established that pioneering presence on the surface, we would have already been thinking about where to go next. I hope that you guys will be along for the ride.'

Nuclear Fusion Rockets could transport humans to Mars

A concept image of a spacecraft powered by a fusion-driven rocket. 

In this image, the crew would be in the forward-most chamber. 

Solar panels on the sides would collect energy to initiate the process that creates fusion. 

Credit: University of Washington

Human travel to Mars has long been the unachievable dangling carrot for space programs.

Now, astronauts could be a step closer to our nearest planetary neighbour through a unique manipulation of nuclear fusion, the same energy that powers the sun and stars.

University of Washington researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks.

John Slough

"Using existing rocket fuels, it's nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth," said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

"We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace."

The project is funded through NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program.

Last month at a symposium, Slough and his team from MSNW, of which he is president, presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results.

Theirs was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.

The plasma (blue) is injected into the rocket nozzle. 

Lithium metal rings (red) then collapse at great force around the plasma, compressing it to fusion conditions. 

The sudden release of fusion energy vaporises and ionises the lithium in the magnetic nozzle, causing it to eject and power the rocket forward. 

Credit: University of Washington

NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology.

The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive – the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.

Slough and his team have published papers calculating the potential for 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a rocket powered by fusion, which would make the trip more practical and less costly.

Researchers develop mouse genetic blueprint

An overview of variants called from 17 mouse genomes relative to the reference. 

Four wild strains (CAST/EiJ, WSB/EiJ, PWK/PhJ and SPRET/EiJ) are shown in a circle with tracks indicating the relative density of single nucleotide polymophisms (SNPs), structural variants (SVs) and uncallable regions.

Transposable element insertions (TEs), a subset of the SV calls, are shown as a separate track. Corresponding tracks are shown for each of the 13 classical laboratory strains to the right of the circle.

Links crossing the circle indicate regions on the reference where the wild strain is closest to the reference. (Credit: From Keane et al. Mouse genomic variation and its effect on phenotypes and gene regulation.

Nature, 2011; 477 (7364): 289 DOI: 10.1038/nature10413)

Researchers have developed a valuable mouse genetic blueprint that will accelerate future research and understanding of human genetics.

The international team, led by researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Oxford, explains in two papers published in Nature on Sept. 14, 2011 how they decoded and compared the genome sequence of 17 mouse strains.

In creating this unique resource, the biggest catalogue for any vertebrate model organism, the team found an astonishing 56.7 million unique sites of variation (known as SNPs) between the strains, in addition to other more complex differences.

Among these they identified sequence differences associated with over 700 biological differences, including markers for diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, so linking genes with medically important individual differences.

The catalogue, which was funded principally by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, can be used by researchers to understand the genetic basis of individual variation, and to ask fundamental questions about how genes function and make us more or less likely to have particular diseases.

Inbred strains of mice are invaluable sources of genetic information. Every animal within each inbred strain is essentially genetically identical, but each strain is different from the others both in their genes and across a huge range of medically and biologically important characteristics.

"We are living in an era where we have thousands of human genomes at our finger tips," says Dr Adams, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who led the project.

"The mouse, and the genome sequences we have generated, will play a critical role in understanding of how genetic variation contributes to disease and will lead us towards new therapies."

As a direct result of the project, researchers will place less reliance on breeding mice to find mutations; using this resource they will be able to find mutations much more quickly by the click of a digital mouse to search for the data on their computer.

These strains of mice are used in every corner of biology to further our understanding of human disease, and there is much more to discover. With the variants to hand, the challenge moves to understanding the biological consequences.

South African fossils: Between ape and human

Two fossil skeletons of early humans appear to mark a halfway stage between primitive "ape-men" and our direct ancestors.

A year of detailed study has revealed that the skeletons are a hodgepodge of anatomical features: some bones look almost human while others are chimpanzee-like.

The two fossils, an adult female and a juvenile male, were discovered in the Malapa cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2008.

Both about 1.2 metres tall, they are unusually complete and well-preserved and date from 1,977,000 years ago.

Excavated by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and colleagues, they were given the name Australopithecus sediba.

Australopithecines were early hominids that lived between 4 and 2 million years ago: the best-known fossil example is a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia and nicknamed Lucy. Unlike chimpanzees and other apes, they walked on two legs, but their brains were still small. Not until Homo erectus evolved, around 1.8 million years ago, did larger brains appear.

Together with a large team of researchers, Berger has spent the last year intensively studying the two A. sediba skeletons. He says they are unusually advanced for an Australopithecus, and may show how the australopiths evolved into humans.
Brainy

One area of particular interest is the brain size. So far, the male skull has been excavated. It's also been named: South African schoolchildren chose the name Karabo, which means "answer" in the Setswana and Sotho languages of southern Africa.

Kristian Carlson of the University of the Witwatersrand and colleagues used synchrotron scans to build a detailed 3D image of the inside of the skull, allowing them to calculate the shape of Karabo's brain.

This was small even for an australopith, with a volume of just 420 cubic centimetres. A. afarensis, by contrast, averaged 459 cc, despite being an earlier species. That suggests there was no overall increase in brain size over the course of australopith evolution.

But Carlson says A. sediba's brain had been subtly reorganised. The orbitofrontal region, which sits just behind the eyes, is a different shape to those of other australopiths and apes, and may have been rewired into a more human-like design.

Carlson draws particular attention to an area called the inferior frontal gyrus, which has bulged out in A. sediba. In modern humans this area is important for language processing, hinting that A. sediba had advanced communication skills.

Carlson remains cautious, however, pointing out that spoken language relies on adaptations like vocal cords. Although neck bones were part of the find, they have not yet been studied in detail, so we don't know if A. sediba was built for speech.

We need to treat the brain studies with great caution, says Robert Barton of Durham University in the UK. "Interpretation of surface features of brains is fraught at the best of times," he says, "but on individual specimens that are merely impressions of the original brain and millions of years old to boot?"

AnatOnMe projects patients' insides onto their outsides

A team at Microsoft's research wing has developed a working prototype of a system that may help to encourage physical injury sufferers to do their exercises by giving them a clearer understanding of what's going on.

A therapist would use the device to project a series of graphics of underlying bone, muscle tissue, tendons or nerves directly onto the body of a patient to help explain the nature of the injury and prescribe effective treatment.

The device can also take photos during a consultation, which can be subsequently reviewed or printed out as a memory aid for the patient.

It is estimated that up to half of patients undergoing physical therapy for chronic conditions fail to comply with the recommended therapies, and effective communication between patient and practitioner is seen as a major influence for compliance with prescribed exercise regimens.

The team of Amy K. Karlson and Daniel Wigdor from Microsoft Research, and PhD student intern Tao Ni from Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science, has created a system that could help to enhance such a therapist-patient information exchange.

The AnatOnMe projection-based handheld prototype is made up of two parts. The first consists of an Optoma PK102 pico projector, a Microsoft LifeCam digital webcam and a FireFly MV USB near-infrared camera.

The second is a modified Logitech R400 laser pointer which has had its red laser diode replaced by an IR laser diode, and some control buttons added. Both parts are connected to a laptop for processing.

The researchers put together a series of annotated graphic collections representing six injury types using stock graphics, three upper body and three lower body injuries that often require physical therapy.

Using this library, the therapist can project images onto a patient's body, a mannequin or a wall, to help the patient better understand an injury through 3D visualization of the problem and then to detail a recommended course of treatment.

Rather than creating a complicated automated system to line up the image with the area of injury, the prototype relies on the therapist to match the two by line of sight.

As the therapist gives exercise instruction, the camera could be used to photograph the patient performing the recommended exercises, and these photos could be compiled into an instruction sheet and printed off for the patient to take away.

It is hoped that giving patients a virtual view inside an affected area will encourage them to keep up their exercises.

Smart Moon home knows just how you like your breakfast

Humans are creatures of habit, as a sensor-stuffed apartment at Washington State University in Pullman knows.

The smart home can learn the ways of its inhabitants simply by observing how they walk around and use different appliances.

The technology could be used in houses to support people with cognitive difficulties or dementia with their daily living needs, or to make things easier for healthy people.

The apartment can, for example, recognise when a person is performing actions associated with making breakfast. If the person absent-mindedly leaves a stove burner on, the system can spot the anomaly and prompt them with audio and video signals to return to the hob.

Memes: Replace Genes as Engine driving Human Evolution

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature.

MemeTheory
According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines.

Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of information.

Differentiating
The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes retain ultimate control.

Memetics challenges that assumption. Although the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began evolving in their own right.

Proliferation
So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so.

Memetic Drive
This "memetic drive" forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human culture.

Clickety Click here for the full Article from New Scientist

Alas poor Hobbit......we did not know you well!

Anthropology is comparing this small hobbit skull to that of it's square jawed Homo Sapien cousin and coming to differing views.

The tale of Homo floresiensis, aka 'the hobbit' is beginning to read less like a Tolkien epic and more like an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Two studies have added a new and interesting twist to the plot. One claims that the skeleton's ape-like feet push back its ancestry near the dawn of Homo. Another argues that the hobbit is a later offshoot of Homo erectus, dwarfed by aeons of island isolation, just like the British!

"Either answer is pretty damn exciting," says William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, who led the analysis of the foot. "It's telling us something pretty amazing about human evolution."

The Hobbit skeleton

Researchers unearthed the hobbit's 18,000-year-old skeleton in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Then in 2004 partial remains from at least a half dozen individuals were uncovered.

Much of the subsequent research has focused on the skull, which encased a 417 cubic-centimetre brain; about the size of a chimpanzee's and a third the size of a human adult brain.

Allegedly, island species, separated from their mainland kin, tend to shrink over evolutionary time, so the main thrust of the "hobbit as a separate species" arguments have focussed on its small brain. However another theory holds that the skull is simply that of a diseased Homo sapiens.