High-end property

Private enterprises, beckoned by commercial opportunities in outer space, are raising concerns over celestial property rights. No one owns the moon, so what rights would a company on the lunar surface have? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently took the first step toward encouraging U.S. companies to stake claims to territory on the moon for commercial development.

“We recognize the private sector’s need to protect its assets and personnel on the moon or on other celestial bodies,” the FAA wrote in response to a policy request from Bigelow Aerospace, an American space technology startup company that hopes to set up inflatable habitats on the moon by 2025. The agency voiced intentions to expand its authority to include ensuring that Americans can conduct commercial activities on the moon “on a non-interference basis.”

The FAA’s decision “doesn’t mean that there’s ownership of the moon,” company founder Robert Bigelow told the Reuters news service. “It just means that somebody else isn’t licensed to land on top of you or land on top of where exploration and prospecting activities are going on, which may be quite a distance from the lunar station.”

But the issue is a bit more complicated. The United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national claims to celestial bodies and stipulates that space exploration and development should benefit all countries. A UN proposal regarding lunar property and mineral rights was tabled in 1970.

“It’s very much a Wild West kind of mentality and approach right now,” said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, a startup lunar transportation and services firm.

Moon Express, a lunar transportation company, intends to bring moon rocks back to Earth, and co-founder Bob Richards said company officials believe the Outer Space Treaty does not prohibit their “right to bring stuff off the moon and call it ours.”

Synthetic storage

Imagine a digital storage method that can safely store the equivalent of 1 million CDs for 10,000 years in a mere gram of synthetic DNA.

A group of European researchers has developed a technique that stores digital information in DNA and re-creates the original files without error. The researchers could store only 739 kilobytes of data, and right now the method is too expensive to be feasible; but, the researchers told The New York Times, they have shown the technique can work on a large scale.

The next step is to improve coding/decoding techniques and decrease the error correction code to allow the storage of more information in the same amount of DNA. The scientists also hope to cut costs by automating and miniaturizing the procedure. “All the technologies exist—they’re all commercially available,” the researchers said. —J.B.

Dendrites in a haystack

Researchers have developed a unique 3-D vaccine that may help fight cancer. It is made up of microscopic rods dispersed in liquid that, after injection into the body, spontaneously assemble into a scaffold resembling a haystack. The spaces between the rods are large enough to house temporarily immune cells called dendrites. Within the scaffolding, researchers expose the dendrites to chemicals and proteins that are loaded within the pores of the rods. These chemicals are meant to reprogram and activate the dendrites to signal the rest of the immune system to attack the cancer cells. The researchers plan to explore further how the injectable scaffold may be able to treat infectious diseases. —J.B.