This morning the world woke up to find out what the rest of us stayed up and watched happen: SpaceX launched their second spacecraft into orbit on a first of its kind mission to the International Space Station. The next few days involve more technical challenges. In a procedure akin to shooting a missile going 22,000 MPH into a trajectory with the ISS; SpaceX will try to pull off a rare feat capable of only a couple nations.

Meanwhile, what’s next for SpaceX?

Things are only getting started. Elon Musk has proposed an incredibly ambitious program for his company which is barely ten years old.

FALCON HEAVY

While SpaceX continues cargo flights to the ISS and launching satellites, next up is the testing and launch of the Falcon Heavy. SpaceX isn’t content with just building a replacement system for getting into space, they want to push the envelope even further.

Falcon Heavy is a rocket with 27 Merlin rocket engines (versus the Falcon 9’s nine). Slated to start testing later this year, Falcon 9 will be the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V’s that took us to the moon.

That’s this year.

The most powerful rocket in the world.

It’s the kind of rocket you’d use to send people to Mars.

Let me repeat, THEY PLAN ON TESTING IT THIS YEAR.

Even if it takes another year or two to get this up, anybody wants to to see what a mission to Mars will look like can take a trip like Justin Young and I did last night and watch SpaceX light the candle. This time on 27 Merlins instead of nine.

Check out an animation of this bad boy.

Falcon Heavy press conference

DRAGON CREW CAPSULE

SpaceX is building a Mars capable spaceship today. The bird flying over our heads right now is a proof of concept of a lot of the technologies that will go into making that happen. The most important system is safety.

To make the Dragon spacecraft the safest crewed space vehicle in the world, they need to build an escape system – something the Space Shuttle never had.

The Dragon will have built-in thrusters that will allow the spaceship to separate from the second and third stage in an emergency and land via parachute or rocket power. This rocket-powered launch would even allow the Dragon to land from orbit back on the launch pad without a parachute.

That’s crazy Buck Rogers technology, but that’s the plan. In researching the feasibility of this, Elon Musk and the SpaceX team came up with the most crazy idea yet:

A FULLY REUSABLE SPACECRAFT

Instead of trying to pull your rockets out of the sea and rebuild them, why not have them land back on the launch pad. While companies like Blue Origin are trying to build a single-stage to orbit system, SpaceX is developing a far more fuel efficient system that would allow each stage to land by itself.

A fully reusable rocket would take off and separate into two stages and a spacecraft. Each one would then use rocket thrusters to land back on the launch pad where they’d be inspected and refueled.

This is the space age version of passenger jets. SpaceX is working on this right now. Not ‘someday’, not in ‘the future’. Engineers are trying to solve these problems as we speak. The systems that go into making the Dragon crew-capable lead into the systems that will allow you to let your primary stage land back on the platform.

The cost savings are incredible. The Shuttle cost from $10-20,000 per pound. Falcon 9 costs about $2,300. A reusable craft takes this below $100. From $10,000 per pound to $100 in a decade. It could even go lower. Cheaper than a space elevator. Now that’s crazy talk.

You can see SpaceX’s vision for this in the animation. You can go outside and look up at the first step towards this right now.

The future is happening.

Elon Musk explaining reusable rockets

Justin Robert Young and Andrew Mayne at the SpaceX launch of the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.

It was EPIC and AWESOME.

Two mysterious ‘doors’ deep inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid were slowly being explored by tiny robots…until political unrest and paperwork brought everything to a screeching halt.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) has paused what’s known as the Djedi Project and asked them to resubmit their permits in order to continue burrowing into the depths of the Great Pyramid.

Robots began crawling into the Great Pyramid in 1993 in order to explore what was thought to be shafts that allowed the pharaoh’s soul to escape to the afterlife. While two of the four shafts simply led outside, the other two led deeper into the pyramid dead-ending at what’s called “Gantenbrink’s door.”

What lies beyond that will be a mystery until all the proper paperwork clears and the project resumes.

Pretty sure we’re all secretly having nerd-dreams that there’s a Stargate down there somewhere.

[Discovery News]

While everyone’s been busy applauding Space X, nerd-herding our likes to Pinterest and getting anxious over Facebook’s IPO, Russia’s decided to just keep right on working on their latest little science fair project… immortality!

With little buzz or fanfare, a group of Russian visionaries has been quietly tinkering away to ensure that the singularity gets here in a timely fashion.

After the above video started getting some play on YouTube, people’s interest began directing them to something that seems like a viral marketing campaign for the latest summer blockbuster about people being embedded into androids. It’s not.

The Russia 2045 Project is planning on eventually taking YOU (call it what you will…your ‘soul’, your ‘bio-data’ or your ‘Midichlorians’…whatever) and embedding it like a YouTube video into one of their androids.

While this all sounds like a science fiction dream-come-true? Watch the video. Russia 2045’s latest model of android looks like someone is puppeteering him just to get him to nod his head.

Ventriloquist dummies are creepy enough. Having your soul trapped inside one for eternity? Creepier.

Best of luck, humanity.

[The Verge]

Dinosaur archaeologist. Those words conjure up a lot of school and a highly-educated lab-coat-wearing stereotype for most of us, right? Or at the least monologue-spouting dinosaur-loving cast of Jurassic Park, right?

Then there’s 78 year-old Ray Stanford, Maryland’s ‘Dinoman’ who skipped all that.

While all the dinosaur science people and some of the best dinosaur fossil hunters in the country proclaimed that Maryland wasn’t worth their time and has yielded only minimal finds like a few teeth and a couple of footprints, Ray, a self-taught naturalist, has a house FULL of evidence that somehow everyone missed!

Ray’s home, appropriately called the Stanford Museum, houses one of the most significant collections of fossils on the east coast. Even professionals peruse Standford’s collection in awe.

While most of the collection is fairly typical, if you can forget you’re actually in someone’s house, containing footprints and teeth, there are some incredible finds like a footprint that doesn’t even have a matching fossil record at this point as well as the complete skeleton of a baby dinosaur called a Nodosaur (which has been moved to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum).

Somebody call John Hammond and let him know about Ray so we can get things started on our new theme park.

[The Washington Post]

Take a loot at the cross in the middle of this video. Keep you eyes focused on it.

The faces that grace the covers of magazines and open films to multi-million dollar bonanzas suddenly turn into grossly deformed freaks. You will swear they slip in a few photoshops, but watch the video again without staring at the cross and you’ll realize just how thin the line between beauty and bizarre really is.

This won second place at the Best Illusion of the Year competition.

Read more here about why the illusion works.

[MB Thompson Research]

Single cell microbes in the most remote portions of the ocean floor dating back to days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth are indeed alive. But not by much.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaarely alive. Which is a scientific term. Each “a” signifying how much closer to complete nonexistence it is.

Yet still, as Dr. Malcolm teaches us… life finds a way.

Røy and colleagues from Denmark and Germany surveyed red clays buried deep in the Pacific Ocean, along the equator and into the North Pacific Gyre current system. From the research R/V Knorr, they drilled core samples 92 feet into the ocean floor, dating to the time of the dinosaurs, and tested the cores with oxygen sensors. They found that organisms live in the deepest parts of these sediments and that they’re using oxygen for respiration — only incredibly slowly. The deeper the sediments, the less food and oxygen is present, and the less oxygen is used up, too. These organisms have not had access to a fresh food supply since their burial, 70 to 86 million years ago.

The finding could gives new insight into life on other planets. Now that we have an idea of just how durable life in on this particular rock we can have some hope that it could survive in a harsh environment elsewhere across the stars.

[Pop Sci]

German researchers have utilized the strategy behind PageRank, the revolutionary Google algorithm which finds relevant search results to determine critical cancerous biomarkers.

The results could facilitate earlier understanding of how aggressive the cancer is and lead to more accurate treatments.

Finding these biomarkers is often difficult and time consuming. Another problem is that markers found in different studies for the same types of cancer almost never overlap.

This problem has been circumvented using the Google strategy, which takes into account the content of a web page and also how these pages are connected via hyperlinks. With this strategy as the model, the authors made use of the fact that proteins in a cell are connected through a network of physical and regulatory interactions; the ‘protein Facebook’ so to speak.

This would equate really aggressive cancers with SEO experts.

Makes sense.

[Science Daily]

Thriller writer Andrew Mayne presents free audiobooks and short stories of mystery and adventure.

This episode features Payload, read by special guest Justin Robert Young.

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I wanted to be Iron Man so bad when I was a kid, my hair smelled like Folger’s Crystals from wearing a coffee can on my head.

Not a joke.

I cut off the end of a tennis ball can, put a dish glove on it and made my own slapdash armor. You have to understand, this wasn’t a costume, in my demented little mind, I WAS MAKING MY OWN ARMOR.

I was obsessed with robots. I’d build little walking things from broken toys and Tupperware containers. When I saw my first Iron Man comic, my head exploded. Dude, you could BE A ROBOT.

In the above photo, my brother and I are dressed up as hybrid Iron Man/C3PO/R2-D2 characters. My dad made the costumes from popcorn tins, life vests, Legos and plenty of silver tape. If you wonder where my creativity comes from; look no further than my dad. He’s always been that awesome.

Before I decided to become a magician, back then I was a little inventor. My goal in life was to go to MIT. Why? Because that’s where Tony Stark went to school.

Life turned out differently. I got into magic, discovered other science heroes like Doctor Who, but I’d be lying if I don’t get a little nostalgic every time I see a coffee can and wonder what could have been…

For more from Andrew Mayne, visit his website: AndrewMayneBooks.com

Tentacle Bento, a MUCH spicier niche game than Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, made its way onto the crowd-funding project site, Kickstarter. Within one week, Tentacle Bento rocketed past its $13,000 goal by over $17,000!

The game’s objective is to “get your slimy tentacles on as many of the students as you can before time runs out” by assuming the role of a tentacled monster. This has not set well with some critics of both the game and Kickstarter for allowing this project to even be available for funding.

On the other side of the fence are the games creators who included this on Bento Tentacle’s Kickstarter page:

In the long history of horrible combinations of tentacles and school girls, we have taken a cheeky satire look at the genre to create a silly, if not innuendo rich, product. We are firmly against the depiction of violence against women in any regards.

Currently the Kickstarter page simply states, “Funding Canceled”.

Soda Pop Miniatures, the creators of the game, have moved the project to a another site to be privately funded and have already accrued the $13,000 they needed to complete the project.

Mike “Gabriel” Krahulik of Penny Arcade also chimed in on Twitter saying that “It’s okay for things you don’t like to exist.”

While everyone is up in arms about this whole mess, it sounds like Tentacle Bento is going to be about as horrendous and shockingly graphic as that deleted scene from Goonies.

Which is to say, not at all.

[The Daily Dot]

Dragging yourself to your morning coffee just got a whole lot easier. So did our baby steps toward becoming cyborgs.

Two quadriplegic volunteers, a 66 year-old man and a 58 year-old woman, have been part of a study being conducted at Brown University that transmits neural activity into physical movement via a robotic arm.

Cathy Hutchinson, the female volunteer, has been working with the implanted sensor for almost five years now to achieve this seemingly simple task.

Watch the video not just for the load of information it provides but for the kinda heart-warming moment when she actually drinks the coffee without assistance for the first time in fifteen years and both her and the up-until-then stone-faced science guy in the background triumphantly smile at their success…which is EXACTLY how our future robot overlords want us to feel.

Let’s just hope that the male volunteer’s name isn’t Otto Gunther Octavius…because that’s when all this feel-good/man-machine love story will just get ugly.

[YouTube]

Turns out you can plop yourself amongst over 200 times the average level of background radiation for as long as you’d like, it’s probably not going to hurt you all that much. Despite popular thought that any radiation exposure increases the likelihood of cancer, new studies are showing that simply isn’t the case for prolonged low doses.

On the most recent Weird Things podcast the boys discussed what levels of radiation exposure were safe to work around with Brian landing on the right side of the research. As for Justin’s insistence that he would eat a bag of popcorn cooked by way of an radioactive reaction, he’s still an idiot.

[Medical Xpress]

A corporate jet pilot nearly collided with what he said looked like a remote controlled vehicle over Denver Monday evening. But no one will take credit for the mysterious airborne menace.

Law enforcement says their were no drones in the air. The local RC club says that members are forbidden from flying craft that high as they would otherwise cause this kind of commotion.

The pilot is heard telling air traffic control: “A remote controlled aircraft, or what? Something just went by the other way … About 20 to 30 seconds ago. It was like a large remote-controlled aircraft.

The corporate jet, a Cessna Citation 525 CJ1, was flying at 8,000 feet above sea level over Cherry Creek when the mystery object came close enough to make any pilot nervous.

What else could it be? UFO? Pterodactyl?

In our mind, there is only one culprit. Drogon is loose from the pits of Meereen!

[9News]

The revolution is here. The machines have risen. And they can juggle.

Chiba University presented the following this week at 2012 IEE International Conference on Robotics and Automatiion.

The robot is equipped with a three-fingered hand, each with 2 or 3 degrees of motion, and an arm with 7 degrees of motion. These pieces are coupled with a high-speed vision system (500 frames per second) that allows a controller to plan for catches and throws, the IEEE Automation Blog explains.

Next they’ll spin plates…

[MSNBC]

Gaydar, it’s not just a one liner from sassy friends in romantic comedies anymore. It’s science fact.

A University of Washington study flashed faces for less than a blink of an eye and asked respondents to determine if the person was gay or straight. Not only did results come more accurate than chance, they also tracked accurate when displayed upside down.

Here are the parameters of the study:

In the study, 129 college students viewed 96 photos each of young adult men and women who identified themselves as gay or straight. Concerned that facial hair, glasses, makeup and piercings might provide easy clues, the researchers only used photos of people who did not have such embellishments. They cropped the grayscale photos so that only faces, not hairstyles, were visible.

By the numbers, women had more “gaydar readable” faces. Participants were 65 percent in choosing sexual orientation when the faces were right side up. 61 when upside down. Sorting the men proved harder, participants had 57 percent accuracy right side up and 53 upside down.

[Science Daily]