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Reality TV paves way for Neil Armstrong of Mars
THIS WEEK Insight
Reality TV paves way for Neil Armstrong of Mars ability to take off, land and then take off again, like the vehicles of science fiction, brings reusable ones a step closer. That could be one part of making interplanetary travel affordable, not to mention less polluting. Today, all rockets are single-use and discarded once their payload reaches orbit. Musk isn’t the only one dreaming of interplanetary travel. Two weeks ago, multimillionaire Dennis Tito announced Inspiration Mars, a plan to send a married couple on a round-trip fly-by past Mars by 2018 using SpaceX technology. However, the crew would stay in their craft for all 501 days.
Meet the cloned mouse with 580 identical ‘twins’
says Teruhiko Wakayama at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, who carried out the work. He says that the technique could help in producing high-quality animals for farms and conservation purposes. “If a ‘super cow’ that could produce, say, a lot of milk or Kobe beef could be cloned at low cost, then not only consumers but also farmers would be happy.” Following Dolly the sheep, enthusiasm for cloning waned as researchers struggled to produce cloned animals beyond two or three generations. Now Wakayama’s team has emphatically broken
The first people on Mars may live in capsules strung like pearls
Mars One/Bryan Versteeg
COMMERCIAL space-flight mogul Elon Musk has quipped that he would like to die on Mars – just not on impact. The quote highlights his desire to build reliable, affordable spacecraft that could one day carry the first people to land on the Red Planet. Musk may have the technological prowess to make it happen. Last week his company SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, lofted its Grasshopper rocket a record 80 metres into the air, where it hovered for a few seconds before gently landing on hydraulic legs. It’s not high compared with the distance to space but giving rockets the
To be the first to set foot on Mars may mean becoming a reality TV star. The Mars One project is in the running to send astronauts to the Red Planet in 2023, with the $6 billion mission paid for by selling global TV rights to their adventures, says Bas Lansdorp, the Dutch entrepreneur behind the plan. It sounds wackier even than Inspiration Mars, but Lansdorp is serious. This week, he announced that Paragon Space Development of Tucson, Arizona, would design Mars One’s space suits and life-support systems. Paragon is also on the Inspiration team, and the firm has completed life-support projects for NASA and some of its major suppliers.
A MOUSE has smashed the record for sequential cloning – the ability to make clones of clones of clones. Twenty-five generations of clones have come from the mouse, and all 580 of them were healthy, lived normal lifespans and could have healthy pups through normal mating. “My lab is now trying to make cloned mice from dead frozen bodies, fur, stuffed bodies and excrement,” 12 | NewScientist | 16 March 2013
through this barrier thanks to a chemical that more faithfully resets the cell nucleus to be cloned back to an embryonic state (Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/krw). First, the team emptied a mouse egg cell of its nucleus. Then they inserted a nucleus from the adult mouse to be cloned before putting this cell into a bath of an enzyme blocker called trichostatin. The resulting embryos – all females –
“My lab is now trying to make cloned mice from frozen bodies, fur, stuffed bodies and excrement”
Mars One doesn’t have a contract with SpaceX, but, like Tito, its plans rely on the firm’s vehicles. The team wants to use a raft of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules. These have so far only made it to the International Space Station, uncrewed, but a version is being designed for a planetary landing. They would be expanded from the current 3.6-metre width to a more livable 5 metres. “SpaceX says this modification is probably possible,” says Lansdorp. According to the proposed timeline, Mars One will send a lone cargo-filled Dragon capsule to Mars in 2016, to test its ability to land safely using rockets in its sidewalls. Rovers launched in 2018 and 2021 will corral five more uncrewed capsules, placing all six in a row that the first four astronauts can connect into a habitat when they arrive. All being well, four more crew members will join the colony in 2025. This trip is one way, as getting back to Earth is too difficult, and it means displaying your life on primetime TV. Crew selection begins this year. “We want people who have a fulfilling life on Earth but who want to explore a new planet,” says Lansdorp. Just one person will get to make the first bootprint on Mars – the TV audience will decide who. “The people must decide, because in 1000 years people will still know who the Neil Armstrong of Mars was,” says Lansdorp. If Musk wants the title, he had better start campaigning. Paul Marks n
had fewer abnormalities in their histones, the packing materials for chromosomes. Previous studies had identified faulty histones in cloned embryos as a reason for the poor success rate, as well as clone abnormalities. One explanation for the previous limit on the number of “reclones” is a build-up of such abnormalities over generations. “This is very impressive work. If this translates to other mammalian species – including humans – it could be a major game changer,” says Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Andy Coghlan and Robert Gilhooly n
Reality TV paves way for Neil Armstrong of Mars ability to take off, land and then take off again, like the vehicles of science fiction, brings reusable ones a step closer. That could be one part of making interplanetary travel affordable, not to mention less polluting. Today, all rockets are single-use and discarded once their payload reaches orbit. Musk isn’t the only one dreaming of interplanetary travel. Two weeks ago, multimillionaire Dennis Tito announced Inspiration Mars, a plan to send a married couple on a round-trip fly-by past Mars by 2018 using SpaceX technology. However, the crew would stay in their craft for all 501 days.
Meet the cloned mouse with 580 identical ‘twins’
says Teruhiko Wakayama at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, who carried out the work. He says that the technique could help in producing high-quality animals for farms and conservation purposes. “If a ‘super cow’ that could produce, say, a lot of milk or Kobe beef could be cloned at low cost, then not only consumers but also farmers would be happy.” Following Dolly the sheep, enthusiasm for cloning waned as researchers struggled to produce cloned animals beyond two or three generations. Now Wakayama’s team has emphatically broken
The first people on Mars may live in capsules strung like pearls
Mars One/Bryan Versteeg
COMMERCIAL space-flight mogul Elon Musk has quipped that he would like to die on Mars – just not on impact. The quote highlights his desire to build reliable, affordable spacecraft that could one day carry the first people to land on the Red Planet. Musk may have the technological prowess to make it happen. Last week his company SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, lofted its Grasshopper rocket a record 80 metres into the air, where it hovered for a few seconds before gently landing on hydraulic legs. It’s not high compared with the distance to space but giving rockets the
To be the first to set foot on Mars may mean becoming a reality TV star. The Mars One project is in the running to send astronauts to the Red Planet in 2023, with the $6 billion mission paid for by selling global TV rights to their adventures, says Bas Lansdorp, the Dutch entrepreneur behind the plan. It sounds wackier even than Inspiration Mars, but Lansdorp is serious. This week, he announced that Paragon Space Development of Tucson, Arizona, would design Mars One’s space suits and life-support systems. Paragon is also on the Inspiration team, and the firm has completed life-support projects for NASA and some of its major suppliers.
A MOUSE has smashed the record for sequential cloning – the ability to make clones of clones of clones. Twenty-five generations of clones have come from the mouse, and all 580 of them were healthy, lived normal lifespans and could have healthy pups through normal mating. “My lab is now trying to make cloned mice from dead frozen bodies, fur, stuffed bodies and excrement,” 12 | NewScientist | 16 March 2013
through this barrier thanks to a chemical that more faithfully resets the cell nucleus to be cloned back to an embryonic state (Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/krw). First, the team emptied a mouse egg cell of its nucleus. Then they inserted a nucleus from the adult mouse to be cloned before putting this cell into a bath of an enzyme blocker called trichostatin. The resulting embryos – all females –
“My lab is now trying to make cloned mice from frozen bodies, fur, stuffed bodies and excrement”
Mars One doesn’t have a contract with SpaceX, but, like Tito, its plans rely on the firm’s vehicles. The team wants to use a raft of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules. These have so far only made it to the International Space Station, uncrewed, but a version is being designed for a planetary landing. They would be expanded from the current 3.6-metre width to a more livable 5 metres. “SpaceX says this modification is probably possible,” says Lansdorp. According to the proposed timeline, Mars One will send a lone cargo-filled Dragon capsule to Mars in 2016, to test its ability to land safely using rockets in its sidewalls. Rovers launched in 2018 and 2021 will corral five more uncrewed capsules, placing all six in a row that the first four astronauts can connect into a habitat when they arrive. All being well, four more crew members will join the colony in 2025. This trip is one way, as getting back to Earth is too difficult, and it means displaying your life on primetime TV. Crew selection begins this year. “We want people who have a fulfilling life on Earth but who want to explore a new planet,” says Lansdorp. Just one person will get to make the first bootprint on Mars – the TV audience will decide who. “The people must decide, because in 1000 years people will still know who the Neil Armstrong of Mars was,” says Lansdorp. If Musk wants the title, he had better start campaigning. Paul Marks n
had fewer abnormalities in their histones, the packing materials for chromosomes. Previous studies had identified faulty histones in cloned embryos as a reason for the poor success rate, as well as clone abnormalities. One explanation for the previous limit on the number of “reclones” is a build-up of such abnormalities over generations. “This is very impressive work. If this translates to other mammalian species – including humans – it could be a major game changer,” says Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Andy Coghlan and Robert Gilhooly n