So few people do favors for NASA these days. So when Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, announced last week that an expedition he financed had hoisted two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission off the ocean floor, the agency was understandably grateful.
Bezos Expeditions
An expedition retrieved two F-1 rocket engines from an Apollo mission that were sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor.
NASA/Reuters
The Mars Rover is back in good health after suffering some computer problems.
Esa/Planck Collaboration European Pressphoto Agency
Astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, above, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang.
"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff's desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," the NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., said in a statement.
The engines may have been among the five that helped launch Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 shipmates to the Moon in 1969, while Mr. Bezos, then 5, watched on television. Today Mr. Bezos, one of a lineup of millionaires keen on space and underwater adventure, noted in a blog post that the F-1 rocket engine is "still a modern wonder — one and a half million pounds of thrust, 32 million horsepower, and burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second."
He was aboard the Seabed Wonder as it spent three weeks at sea off Cape Canaveral, recovering engines that had come to rest nearly three miles from the surface. "We've seen an underwater wonderland," he wrote, "an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."
Because the engines rightly belong to NASA, Mr. Bezos plans to deliver them. One is likely to go to the Smithsonian and the other to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, near the headquarters of Mr. Bezos's human spaceflight company, Blue Origin.
Developments
Space Exploration
That's No Heliopause, Silly
Speaking of space, a number of cool things happened since we checked in last week. One was that the Mars rover, Curiosity, which had been having some pesky computer problems, was restored to good health and given an excellent prognosis. Another was that astrophysicists released a map of the infant universe, just 370,000 years after the Big Bang, resplendent with specks that would one day grow into entire galaxies. And then there was the tantalizing report about Voyager 1, which has been hurtling away from the Sun since 1977 and aims to become the first manufactured object to leave the solar system. A headline on a news release from the American Geophysical Union suggested that Voyager 1 had entered the heliopause, or beginning of interstellar space, which would be totally exciting. Not so, said NASA quickly, explaining that while the plucky little spacecraft was busy speeding from the Sun at 38,000 miles an hour — and was now an impressive 11.5 billion miles from it — it was too soon to declare heliopause.
Health
A Leukemia Advance
Acute leukemia in adults, while rare, is usually lethal. Now come doctors with an experimental treatment that genetically alters a patient's own immune cells to fight this type of blood cancer. While it hasn't worked for all patients, some have gone into remission, even after chemotherapy had failed. The findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, included the startling case of one severely ill patient who, after undergoing the treatment, saw all traces of leukemia vanish in eight days. Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the first author of a new study of the therapy, said, "We had hoped, but couldn't have predicted that the response would be so profound and rapid."
Zoology
All in the (Squid) Family
The giant squid is fascinating in its size and ungainliness. It lives deep in the ocean, grows as long as 60 feet — including eight arms and two longer tentacles. Now it turns out that, even though they live all over the globe, giant squid are all very closely related genetically, scientists said in a paper last week, surprising the squid cognoscenti. The study looked at the mitochondrial genome of 43 giant squid samples, some that had washed ashore, some pulled up by deepwater fishing nets, and some culled from whale stomachs. In these samples, "the level of nucleotide diversity is exceptionally low," the scientists wrote.
Genetics
Reviving Extinct Species
"Who Wants to Live Alongside Sabre-Toothed Tigers?" asked a headline in the British magazine New Scientist, amid a clutch of reports, including one in this paper and one in National Geographic, about the prospects for bringing back vanished animals of yesteryear. One catalyst was a presentation in Washington at a one-day conference) by Australian scientists who are trying to revive the Southern gastric brooding frog, which died out about a quarter-century ago and which — brace yourself — gives birth through its mouth. So far, they have produced embryos only, and those have not survived. Such was also the immediate fate of the one extinct subspecies of animal that has been brought back, through cloning: a Pyrenean ibex — a sort of wild mountain goat — that went extinct in 1999 and was revived, once, for mere minutes, in 2003.
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