International Space

Last month, I wrote stories about the space programs in Indian and the United Arab Emirates. I learned a lot! For one, the Indian program, called ISRO has been around for decades, quietly building reliable rockets and sending satellites into orbit for telecommunication, telemedicine, and imagining for land management, and disaster relief, etc. For two, the UAE’s space agency is very much focused on the public relations side of things, almost the opposite of India’s. But one of its great hopes is to get students excited about space, which will lead them to STEM careers, and potentially steer the country to economic options that aren’t oil.

There’s more to both of these programs than that, of course. You can read the stories, published on Slate for Future Tense here:

Why India is Investing in Space

Why the United Arab Emirates is Building a Space Program from Scratch

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Lasers to Alpha Centauri

Last week for Slate I wrote about the ambitious proposal to send small spacecrafts dubbed “starchips” to the Alpha Centauri system. This was a fun article that was actually months in the making, though the news of $100 million funding seemed to come out of nowhere.

I first learned of Phil Lubin’s ideas to use lasers for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Starship symposium last fall. The conference was full of zany proposals, but Lubin’s seemed, somehow, to not be as crazy as some others. PhotonRocketbyGGZelkinHis explanations were clear and he acted as surprised as anyone that the physics of relativistic travel for small, laser-propelled spacecraft was sound. (He shopped his calculations around to physicist far and wide–the crankier critic the better–and no one could prove any show stoppers.)

Skeptics will say that laser-based space travel will never get enough money to actually fly. I suspect this might be the case. Still, there’s no doubt it’s an inspired and inspiring idea.

Check out the Slate article here.

Check out Lubin’s extensive roadmap for interstellar flight here.

Check out this fun article from 1960 about a different but related kind of photon propulsion here.

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Swim Food

After a long delay, here is a post about the very-fun-to-research piece I wrote for Lucky Peach about the food marathon swimmers eat when they swim for a hours on end.

Check it out here.

SWIM_FEED

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Interstellar Band-Aids

I have a new piece up at The Atlantic about a better wound dressing for deep cuts, lacerations and burns. These dressings–which can be 3-D printed into customizable shapes and have been shown to significantly reduce the time it takes a wound to heal–are being developed by an Aurora, CO company called Sharklet Technologies.

Last fall, Chelsea Magin of Sharklet presented the product-in-development at the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Clearly, better dressings aren’t just good for an imaginary starship. They could also be used on in hospital burn units, on battlefields, or anywhere else resources are limited and healing quickly is critical.

Details on how the dressing works and what sharks have to do with it are in the full article here.

 

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REALITY MINING Wins PROSE Award

RealityMiningCoverCut

I’m pleased to announced that the book I’ve co-authored with Nathan Eagle, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, has won a 2015 PROSE Award. This award goes to a best-in-category academic book; we won in the Computing and Information Science category. The grand prize winner this year was Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Not bad company.

To see a list of all PROSE winners, go here.

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