SpaceX blames recent rocket explosion on helium tank breach

Several weeks ago, SpaceX suffered another blow to its efforts to make private spaceflight a viable business when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad during a pre-flight test. The explosion resulted in the loss of the rocket and the payload, a satellite that was to be used for Facebook’s internet.org project. The firm began an investigation immediately, and has now provided an update on the cause. The explosion was reportedly a result of a breached helium containment system.

This might sound familiar, because it was also a problem with the helium storage tanks that caused the 2015 in-flight explosion that destroyed a resupply payload bound for the International Space Station. SpaceX is careful to point out that the recent anomaly had nothing to do with the 2015 explosion. In that incident, a strut that held the helium containers in place failed long before it had reached the rated tolerance levels. That caused the helium tank to rupture and lead to the breakup of the rocket.

In the September 2nd incident (which Elon musk says was not an explosion, but just a very fast fire), the helium storage system was breached in the second stage oxygen tank. Helium is used in rocket engines to maintain proper pressurization inside the tank as fuel is depleted. Because it’s stored as a supercooled liquid, a breach can lead to serious damage to the rocket.

While SpaceX knows what caused the explosion, it doesn’t yet know why. SpaceX is working with the FAA, NASA, the US Air Force, and outside industry experts to determine how the helium tank was damaged, but there’s precious little data from the vent itself. The Falcon 9 reports more than 3,000 different channels of engineering data to mission control, but from the first signs of an anomaly to complete loss of data was just 93 milliseconds. The investigation team has scoured the landscape near Launch Complex 40 to find all the debris from the rocket. It has all been cataloged, photographed, and stored in a hangar for further analysis.

Video of the anomaly (seen above) is quite dramatic, but as per regulations, no one was nearby during the fueling operation. There was substantial damage to the launchpad systems, but all the SpaceX support facilities nearby managed to get away with only minor damage. The company is still planning to launch again in November and is still building rocket components at its California facility for cargo missions and the upcoming NASA Commercial Crew Program flights. If the September 2nd incident is found to have been caused by the Falcon 9 design, SpaceX will be able to make changes to the rocket before getting back to the launchpad.

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Human skeleton found on shipwreck that held mysterious Antikythera Mechanism

• By Jessica Hall on September 22, 2016 at 1:14 pm
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In January of 1900, deep divers off the coast of a Greek island took shelter from a storm, and found a two-thousand-year-old shipwreck strewn with bones, loot, and a mysterious artifact, half-buried in the sand. Now a team of underwater archaeologists have uncovered a partial skeleton from the same wreck, in such shockingly good condition that they’re going to attempt a DNA extraction on the remains.

Deep diving is dangerous; divers breathe a different mix of gases while they’re underwater, and nitrogen in their air tanks can cause narcosis, which Jacques Cousteau called the “rapture of the deep.” On the first exploration of the wreck, which is 150 feet down, when the first diver surfaced with reports of bodies and artifacts and even submerged horses, the captain didn’t believe a word of the story: he thought it was nitrogen narcosis making the diver spin such tales. But the diver was fine. By 1901, those deep divers had brought to the surface a hoard of buried treasure, including a mysterious clockwork artifact, corroded and crushed, with a gearwheel sticking out of it and markings that nobody understood. They called it the Antikythera device, after the island near which it was found. They fished out everything they could get off the ocean floor, every amphora and coin they could find, and called it done.

Cousteau heard of the Antikythera device shortly after the first publication about it, by bespectacled British historian Derek de Solla Price. Incredibly, the device had just been mothballed in museum storage for half a century because nobody believed the people of the shipwreck’s era could have built it. When scientists finally took an interest and started imaging it, everyone was stunned at the complexity of the mechanism. Once Cousteau heard of the device, he himself came to investigate the wreck in the 1970s, and excavated a buried tableau beyond anyone’s expectations: dated to the first century BC, Cousteau found statues, jewelry, money, weapons — and several sets of barely recognizable human remains.

Decades later, we’re doing better with diving tech. The crew doing the underwater excavation is breathing something called “trimix,” which is a cocktail of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen better suited to spending time at depth. We’ve got pressure suits, too, and hyperbaric chambers if something should go wrong. We’re still sifting through the site and finding buried artifacts, but every detail we find raises more questions. The skeleton we just found is no exception. It isn’t the only human remains from the Antikythera wreck. It’s just the best preserved, by a long shot — well enough so that Hannes Schroeder and his team are going to try to get DNA out of it.

The jawbone. Image: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO, via Nature News

The remains consist of a partial skull with teeth, two thighbones, two arm bones, and some ribs. “It doesn’t look like bone that’s 2,000 years old,” says Schroeder, an expert in ancient-DNA analysis who’s personally working on the DNA extraction. Because the skull is in such great condition, Schroeder can finesse DNA out of the dense bits of bone behind the ear called petrous bone; it preserves DNA better than other parts of the skeleton, even the teeth. “It’s amazing you guys found that,” Schroeder says of the partial skull. “If there’s any DNA, then from what we know, it’ll be there.”

DNA from the remains could add a valuable data point to our genetic history and the movement of haplogroups through time. Who was the person these remains came from? Would he (we think it’s a he) have looked “more Greek-Italian or Near Eastern”?  How will the DNA we find inside them change our understanding of population movements through history? And why, after two thousand years underwater, are there still so many bones?

To the latter question, there exists an answer, even if it’s a little grim. The wreck site is positioned at the foot of Antikythera’s steep cliffs. The ship could have been caught in a storm and dashed against the rocks — just the kind of storm from which those divers originally tried to take shelter. Co-director of the excavation team Brandon Foley explains, “We think it was such a violent wrecking event, people got trapped below decks.” When the ship went down, the wreck was rapidly buried under the sand, and so too were the bodies.

Based on the richness of debris from the ship, and how they’re distributed, researchers think it was a large merchant ship with multiple decks, possibly toting spoils of war looted from Athens or Asia Minor. It could have been inbound as swag for a victory parade for Julius Caesar. In this era, Greek and Roman merchant ships often carried well-to-do passengers, or at least those who could pay, and sometimes slaves. British underwater archaeologist Mark Dunkley points out that a crew of a dozen or so chained-up slaves in the cargo hold would be SOL in a sinking ship. “The crew would be able to get off relatively fast. Those shackled would have no opportunity to escape.” The bones just uncovered were surrounded by pieces of corroded iron, still unidentified; the iron oxide has stained the bones amber red.

Image: Nature

As for the device, scholars and tinkerers have been poring over the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism for years, analyzing its function and gearing. CAT scanning and repeated radiographs of the fragments have told us about its purpose: the Antikythera device was an orrery, a planetarium that would predict the diurnal movements of the sun and the five known planets. It had explicit, detailed instructions on the inside covers: you can just picture a hoary Grecian geometer yelling “RTFM!” The device could also predict eclipses, and — I’m not making this up — it had bloatware a built-in feature that could also give the dates of the Greek Olympic games, which happened every four years.

A device that complex, historians agree, probably wasn’t the work of a lone innovator. It was a masterwork, easily the most technologically advanced device we’ve recovered from antiquity. It could have been the work of Hipparchus, with his mentor and probably his apprentices. Scientists are using the markings on the device to suss out the latitude at which it was meant to be used.

Schematic of the whole Antikythera mechanism, with pins and gears labeled. Via Wikipedia

Naturally, there are some enterprising folks who have taken the data from existing studies of the device, often called the world’s first analog computer, and done reconstructions trying to find the answers. The artifact itself is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, several people have done elegant working models, and there’s even a project to release CAD files for the device. But its gearing ratios present a problem: the device appears to have a “fast zone” and a “slow zone” where the gear teeth are differently spaced to account for the varying speed of the planets. The varying gear ratio could be the nuanced application of Greek geometrical theory to Babylonian astronomy, and in fact the Greeks were really into geometry at the time of the wreck, and the inscriptions inside the intricately geared device are thoroughly Babylonian. Or it could be sloppy craftsmanship that made some teeth larger than others. Forensic imaging is our best bet now.

Nobody knows who made the Antikythera device, nor how it came to be on the ship that sank. But if we can narrow down a few lineages, some information on who was where and when — if we can figure out who made it and why the gears are spaced the way they are — the DNA results from that partial skeleton stand to throw light on the whole affair. It’s amazing what you can find in the data.

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Surgeon plans first human head transplant in 2017

Modern medical technology has granted doctors the ability to transplant many of the body’s organs, extending the life of people suffering from chronic diseases. But what about replacing all the organs at once along with the body they are in? That’s science fiction right now, but Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero (pictured, top) says he plans to do the first human head transplant next year. This isn’t the first time he’s made this claim, but now he’s got a volunteer lined up and has explained in more detail how he thinks the procedure will go.

If this sounds suspicious, there’s good reason. There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical.

It’s easy to see the appeal of a head transplant in theory. If it were possible and reasonably safe, you could cure almost any disease, except for neurological ones. You’d be replacing a person’s entire complement of organs, their immune system, their joints, and everything else that causes problems as we age. Canavero’s first volunteer, Valery Spiridonov, has appeared with Canavero several times to talk about his desire to undergo the operation. Spiridonov is 31 and suffers from a muscle-wasting disease called Werdnig-Hoffman’s. It leaves him wheelchair bound and dependent on others for basic needs. Canavero wants to put his head on a body that doesn’t have Werdnig-Hoffman’s, but finding such a body will be the first hurdle.

According to Canavero, the donor body will come from someone who is brain dead and whose organs would be considered acceptable for transplantation. Things get wild when Canavero explains the process of disposing of the old body. The patient would be cooled in order to slow damage to brain cells, then surgeons would sever the soft tissue in the neck. Tubes would be affixed to all the arteries and veins to maintain blood flow. Then, Canavero plans to use a diamond knife to sever the spinal cord.



Being able to surgically remove the head in an orderly fashion should allow surgeons to then reattach all the nerves and blood vessels to the new body, once that pesky donor head is removed. A special bio-compatible glue will hold the spinal cord together so it can fuse with the donor body. The patient will then be put in a drug-induced coma for four weeks while the connection between the head and body heals. It’s the reattachment process that’s the most unlikely part of all this. There’s never been a successful procedure that reattached a fully severed primate spinal cord.

Canavero says all the technology he needs is available, and estimates the procedure will take about 36 hours and require the services of 150 medical professionals. He expects a 90% chance of success, as in a 90% chance the patient is up and walking around a few months after the surgery. This is… suspiciously high for a completely new procedure.

This all still sounds like science fiction, and medical professionals are mostly skeptical of Canavero’s plan. He seems set to try, though. And who knows? Maybe it’ll work. A few years ago face transplants seemed like science fiction. Even if this does work, the process will be obscenely expensive. Plus, it will give an entire body full of transplantable organs to a single person. It’s unclear if this would be considered ethical when there are so many people waiting for transplants.

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Samsung unveils next-generation 960 Pro, 960 Evo M.2 SSDs with blistering speeds, up to 2TB capacity

Samsung has been pushing the boundary of SSDs for several years — it was the first company to release a commercial 3D NAND drive, and it’s been aggressively pushing the new NVMe and PCI Express-based M.2 drive standard. Now, the company has taken another step forward with the 960 Pro. This is the successor to the 950 Pro that launched last year as Samsung’s first M.2 drive for the consumer PCI Express market. The Korean company is also launching the 960 EVO — and like its previous EVO drives, this one is based on TLC NAND.

What’s new, this time around, is the type of 3D NAND (Samsung calls it V-NAND) that the company is using. The 950 Pro relied on Samsung’s 32-layer NAND, while the 960 Pro is based on a denser, 48-layer NAND variant. More vertical NAND stacks translates directly to packing more NAND into the same area — Samsung’s 950 Evo was limited to 256GB and 512GB drives, while the 960 will be available in capacities up to 2TB. Previously, Samsung’s 32-layer V-NAND topped out at 128Gbit, while the new 960 Pro has 256Gbit chips.



While Samsung is keeping the same PCI Express 3.0 x4 lane defined in the M.2 specification, it has built a new controller, Samsung Polaris, rather than using the UBX controller in the 950 Pro, Anandtech reports. The already-excellent performance of the 950 Pro is expected to be even higher now, with the 960 Pro 2TB offering 3.5GB/s of sequential read and 2.1GB/s of sequential write, compared with 2.5GB/s and 1.5GB/s for the 950 Pro. The theoretical sequential read speed on the 960 Pro hasn’t quite bumped into the practical limit of the PCI Express 3.0 bus, but it’s getting close.

Meanwhile, the 960 EVO may use TLC NAND, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be slow. The new drive sports a 13-42GB SLC cache to speed reads and writes (13TB at 250GB, 42GB at 1TB). Sequential read speeds of 3.2GB and write speeds of 1.9GB are nearly as fast as the full 960 Pro, and while we saw multiple problems with the old 840 EVO drives, those issues appear to have been eradicated with the shift to 3D NAND instead of older 2D planar NAND.

Image by Anandtech

The new controller reportedly uses a five-core solution (up from three cores), with one dedicated to host management and four used for NAND flash communication. Samsung has also reportedly improved their own thermal management, resulting in a drive that can hold its peak performance for up to 95 seconds, compared with 63 seconds for the original 950 Pro, as shown above.

Expect to see more drives like this coming online in the next few years, as the SSD industry collectively moves to 3D NAND flash. As far as we know, Samsung is still building its NAND on an older 40nm process — as the industry moves towards smaller nodes for 3D NAND we should see further cost improvements, though the difficulty of building deep trenches at smaller process geometries may lead to slow improvement on this front.

The 960 Pro and 960 EVO will be available in October starting at $329.99 and $129.99.

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China’s first space station will fall back to Earth in 2017

China launched its first space station in 2011, and managed to successfully use it intermittently for several years longer than originally planned. Now, the Tiangong-1 module is heading for a crash landing on Earth. However, China doesn’t know exactly when it’s coming down. That has fed speculation that all communication with the module has been lost, meaning it could come down almost anywhere.

The best estimate of reentry China has given is sometime in the second half of 2017. That would indicate a slowly decaying orbit. China announced in March that it had lost telemetry and guidance control of the satellite, but it had not played host to astronauts since 2013, so there was no immediate danger. However, some astronomers worried aloud that Tiangong-1 was completely inoperable and could be dropping out of the sky at any moment.

China’s statement (delivered by the government-backed Xinhua news agency) says that the module is intact and orbiting at an altitude of 230 miles (370 kilometers). This at least implies that it knows exactly where the station is, and will be able to predict its landing closer to the event. When it hits the atmosphere, much of Tiangong-1 will break up into tiny fragments. There may still be some segments as large as 100 kilograms, which could cause real damage if it fell on a populated area. However, the odds of it actually getting close to anyone or anything important are slim. Statistically, it’s likely the debris will just impact the ocean. China says it will monitor reentry for and dangerous objects.

Chinese crew aboard the Tiangong-1.

If China has completely lost contact with the station, at least Tiangong-1 is on the small side. At just just 18,753 pounds, it provided crews 15 cubic meters of space. The International Space Station has over 900 cubic meters of pressurized space, not including the new experimental Bigelow inflatable module. Unlike the ISS, Tiangong-1 didn’t have the facilities for constant habitation. It was originally used to test docking systems in 2011; then crews were able to return to the module for 11 days in 2012 and 14 days in 2013.

China successfully launched the Tiangong-2 station into orbit last week. It’s considerably larger than Tiangong-1, and will host two astronauts next month. They’ll stay on board for a month to do research. The Tiangong-3 station will follow this one in a few years, and will serve as a platform to test the final technologies China needs to perfect before launching a permanent orbital station in the early 2020s.

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Apple A10 teardown sheds light on quad-core SoC, confirms Intel won modem contract

Every time a new Apple device ships, it’s interesting to see how manufacturing technology has advanced. This year is no exception. The Apple device teardown revealed a number of interesting details and confirmed a rumor we’d heard before — Intel did indeed win at least some of the iPhone 7’s modem business (Intel builds the modem inside the AT&T and T-Mobile devices, denoted as the A1778 and A1784). The Verizon and Sprint products (A1660 and A1661) use a Qualcomm modem.

Chipworks, which performed the teardown and analysis, doesn’t dive into the implications of a dual-sourced modem between Intel and Qualcomm, but this may have practical repercussions depending on how you intend to use the device. Because Intel’s modems don’t support CDMA, you won’t be able to take AT&T or T-Mobile devices to non-GSM networks. The Qualcomm modems, in contrast, support both GSM and CDMA, meaning they should be compatible on any carrier network across the country.

Still, this is a huge feather in Intel’s cap. The company hasn’t had great luck pushing its XMM modems into high-profile device wins — at least, none it has prominently discussed. Apple’s sheer volume should drive materially higher profits for Chipzilla’s networking division.



Unlike the iPhone 6s, which featured dual-sourcing between Samsung and TSMC, the iPhone 7 may be a TSMC-only design. Die size on the new chip is 125mm sq, a 20% size increase over the A9’s 104.5mm sq (at TSMC, the Samsung variant was smaller). According to Chipworks, the A10 is considerably more dense than the A9 thanks to better packing on Apple’s part — a straight scale-out of the A9 would’ve left Apple with a chip nearly 150mm sq, as compared to a relatively svelte 125mm sq.

The chip is built on TSMC’s 16FFC process. The “C” stands for compact, and the new node is intended for use in mainstream and low-power markets. Compared with 16nm FF+ (second-generation FinFET), FFC reduces SRAM area, leakage, and supports ultra-low power voltage modes (down to 0.6v). The diagram above shows Chipworks estimate on where specific features are located, after Anandtech helped them narrow down potential feature locations on the “little” CPU cores.

The battery is a 1960mAh unit, compared with the 1810mAh pack used in the iPhone 6s. The batteries that failed on Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, in contrast, are nearly twice this size. Overall, the iPhone 7 is a significant manufacturing step forward for Apple, a solid debut for TSMC’s 16FFC process node, and a major win for Intel, which can claim a significant design win for its own modem technology.

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