The UAE is celebrating International Women’s Day a little early this year with news of the first female Emirati astronaut set to graduate from NASA.
Nora Al Matrooshi, NASA class of 2023, will graduate in March 2024 alongside her Emirati counterpart Mohammed Al Mulla, the National reports. The ceremony will take place in Houston, Texas.
Al Matrooshi, an engineer formerly of the National Petroleum Construction Co., was one of two candidates chosen from over 4,000 applicants for the 2021 NASA training program.
When she was initially selected, Al Matrooshi in a media conference said she was inspired to reach for the stars by one of her teachers who would set up a tent in the classroom and ask the students to try to imagine it was a spacecraft en route to the moon.
In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova of Russia became the first woman in space, but the next wasn’t until two decades later.
In 2020, Phys.org reported that only 11.5 percent of the 566 people who have gone to space were women, and the United Nations Space4Women program reports that 20-22 percent of the space workforce is women – virtually unchanged from what it was 30 years ago.
But the flight crews are increasing in female numbers and Al Matrooshi aims to be an inspiration for other young women: “If I can do it, then you can do it too. If no one has done it yet, then you just go ahead and be the first,” she said in a 2021 interview with The National.
This brings the Emirati astronaut count to four as the UAE space program grows and continues to rack up firsts.
CAPTION: International Space Station IMAGE: NASA
The first Emirati astronaut, Hazza al Mansouri, spent eight days aboard the International Space Station in 2022, followed by Sultan Al Neyadi with a six-month stay in 2023 and first Arab space walk.
Al Matrooshi’s graduation coincides with the most recent advancement in the UAE’s space program – a ticket to the moon.
The UAE recently agreed to provide NASA with an airlock for the Gateway lunar station, which will serve as an exchange center for crew and science payloads. The deal comes with UAE access to the station and a lunar mission. The deal comes with UAE access to the station and a lunar mission.
No decisions have been made about which UAE astronauts will be selected for the first UAE lunar mission.
According to NASA, the Lunar Gateway will record its first mission no sooner than 2028.
The UAE’s deal to contribute the airlock for the planned lunar-orbiting Gateway station marks a significant milestone for the nation, a Khalifa University expert on the space sector says.
“The Gateway project is a fundamental part of the Artemis program and sets up the stage for further exploring the moon by developing and maintaining a manned space station in lunar orbit. The UAE’s recent partnership with NASA on this project highlights the country’s dedication to becoming a major player in the space sector in the coming years,” Mohamed Ramy El-Maarry, director of the Space and Planetary Science Center at Khalifa University, tells KUST Review.
Gateway, the space station expected to orbit the moon, will serve as a science lab and temporary lodging as astronauts explore the moon and test its materials. The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre will provide the airlock that will allow people and supplies to enter and exit the station. The deal also includes the potential for UAE astronauts to participate in future moon missions.
President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Jan. 7 announced the project on X, formerly Twitter: “I was pleased to attend with my brother Mohammed bin Rashid the launch of the UAE’s contributions to the historic lunar Gateway, which will serve as humanity’s first space station around the moon.
“Through our long-term investment in space exploration and scientific innovation, the UAE is determined to work alongside its international partners to enable collective progress for all.”
The project is part of NASA’s Artemis program aimed at returning astronauts to the moon by 2024 and the next frontier — an eventual human mission to Mars.
IMAGE: Pixabay
The UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center is the latest member to join the international partnership of the lunar Gateway project consisting of the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Gateway is expected to serve as a layover for future missions deeper into the cosmos with a docking port, part of the airlock to be provided by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, for those deep-space missions.
The agreement reinforces scientific ties between the UAE and the United States.
“By combining our resources, scientific capacity and technical skill, the U.S. and UAE will further our collective vision for space and ensure it presents extraordinary opportunities for everyone here on Earth,” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who also chairs the U.S. National Space Council, said in a press release.
The UAE’s space program has moved at a rapid pace since its launch in 2017. Accomplishments include sending its first two UAE astronauts to the ISS and its first spacewalk.
In conjunction with NASA, Hazza al Mansoori completed an eight-day stay on the ISS in 2019. Sultan al Neyadi in 2023 completed six months on the ISS, numerous scientific experiments and the first space walk by an Arab.
It has been over five decades since a human walked on the moon but the UAE space program has its sights set on being there for a lunar-exploration revival.
Along with the crew airlock and ongoing engineering services to the ISS, the agreement with NASA includes UAE access to the space station and the opportunity for its own astronauts to embark on lunar missions.
NASA has scheduled a Jan. 31 town hall meeting about the Gateway project with presentations and panels.
In July 2022, Bloomberg analysts reported that the U.S. has now reached the “tipping point” for mass adoption of electric vehicles. According to the report, the nation has reached the magic number that signals a period when “technological preferences rapidly flip.” That magic number is just 5 percent — and 5 percent of new car sales in 2022 were electric vehicles.
IMAGE: Shutterstock
The Middle East brings its own challenges to EV adoption
Although consumer interest is high in the region — local company M Glory Holding Group in the UAE opened its electric vehicle manufacturing plant in 2022 with plans to produce 55,000 electric cars annually to meet a rising demand for green mobility — there are still numerous obstacles hindering the widespread adoption of EVs. The limited availability of EV charging stations is one concern, but more pressing is the new demand placed on power grids by at-home charging stations. Traditional power-distribution grids are not designed to handle a significant number of EVs charging in the evenings when their owners return home from work. Utilities providers will need to predict and account for this surge in demand. Read more›››
EV manufacturers also face the challenge of keeping up with demand, not just for EVs themselves but for their constituent parts. Replacement parts are expensive relative to components needed for internal combustion vehicles, especially when supply chains are not fully developed and hampered by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic on logistics around the world. Localized procurement is the answer for the future, but companies and suppliers need time and investment to set up and serve the local market. In a relatively nascent industry, this is not a short-term solution.
Included in those replacement parts are batteries and tires. Saudi Arabia announced a U.S.$6 billion investment in a steel plate mill complex and electric vehicle battery plant in 2022 to take advantage of its geographical location at the crossroads of the producers of the necessary minerals: lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and graphite. But this investment also foresees the need for more batteries in the Middle Eastern EV market than anywhere else. Put simply: The sun and car batteries don’t mix well. Hot weather means higher temperatures under the hood, which accelerates corrosion inside the battery. In an electric vehicle, full of batteries, this is naturally an exponentially larger concern.
Beyond damaging them, heat also drains batteries, meaning less range available for drivers. A 2019 study by the American Automobile Association found the driving range of an EV could reduce by up to 17 percent if the temperature is constantly above 35C — which it is for almost half the year in the Gulf.
Charging the EV only adds to the heat experienced by the battery. Charging in the evening makes it easier on the cooling systems but that puts a strain on the power grids.
It’s all connected!‹‹‹ Read less
Sales for electric vehicles, commonly called EVs, are on track to double every couple of years, says Loren McDonald of EVAdoption. The industry analysis group predicts 40 million EVs on U.S. roads by 2030. In 2020, some 276 million vehicles were registered.
The industry certainly seems to believe in the proliferation of electric vehicles: Vojay Chandler, investment strategist at Morgan Stanley, says EV’s share of global auto sales is likely to grow from about 7 percent today to nearly 90 percent by 2050.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Climate change and its consequences are forcing people to consider their environmental impact. Governments across the globe are developing policies to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increasing energy efficiency wherever possible. Fuel prices are at the mercy of political instability, particularly in Europe, and governments are hesitant to introduce e-fuels.
As Nasir Salari, marketing expert at Bath Spa University, points out, despite the sluggish growth rate of electric cars, the latest report by the International Energy Agency in 2020 illustrates promising figures in major markets. The global electric car stock hit the 10 million mark, a 43 percent increase over 2019. And while China has the largest fleet with 4.5 million, Europe had the largest annual increase to reach 3.2 million. In the United Kingdom, 67,100 passenger electric cars were registered in 2020. This is promising, Salari says, but the adoption curve is still at the early stage.
IMAGE: Abjad
Salari conducted research in the U.K. looking at the factors contributing to the “sluggish growth rate.” He interviewed 336 individuals in the U.K. to assess their willingness to buy an EV. Like most analysts, he predicts a boom in the coming years, particularly with the U.K. government reaffirming its commitment to ban new petrol and diesel cars in 2030. With pressures like these, new cars will be electric, but people currently seem reluctant to dive into the electric future.
Credit: Abjad
“There are various reasons for this,” Salari tells KUST Review. “This has always been the case for new revolutionary products: the first color TV, smartphone, cameras, for example.
There have always been early adopters and then majority adopters and the people open to embracing technology in general will also be more willing to adopt an electric car. The TRI is a good indicator of this.”
Developed in 2000, the TRI (Technology Readiness Index) is a widely used scale in understanding technology adoption behavior and a powerful tool to predict the adoption of incremental and revolutionary technologies.
“Our data shows no difference between men and women in their willingness to purchase an EV or pay a higher price for the product,” Salari says. “However, the overall TRI is higher amongst men than women, and this difference is statistically significant. This shows that overall, men are more willing to embrace new technology and possess new and unique items in general. There was also no significance between age groups for their willingness to purchase, but I was surprised to see a significant difference in how much environmentalism played a part: The 50-plus age group expressed higher levels of green values than the 20-29 group.”
IMAGE: Unsplash
Bringing down charging times
One of the issues with electric vehicles is the charging time. But a team at Khalifa University is working on cutting that time down. Read more›››
On-board EV charging is generally done through two stages, says Vinod Khadkikar, who leads the project funded by Abu Dhabi’s ASPIRE. In the first stage, AC voltage is converted into DC voltage. But this DC voltage is generally higher than the EV battery voltage, so an additional DC-DC converter is needed to charge the battery. Most current commercial on-board chargers use a full-power processing converter at the DC-DC stage, which requires higher voltage and current rating of switches and diodes. This restricts the charging speed. The size, cost and efficiency of any EV charger also largely depends on the device rating and number of power processing stages.
The KU team proposes partial power processing-based topographies at the DC-DC stage that use a fraction of the power.
“Therefore, the DC-DC converter size is reduced and the charger efficiency is high (97-99 percent with hard switching). The semiconductor device rating is reduced significantly, which helps to achieve higher power density (smaller footprint/compact size). This lets the user use the same footprint size to design the charger for higher power,” Khadkikar says.‹‹‹ Read less
Interestingly, Salari found that most consumers were more concerned by the economic impact of their purchase, rather than the environmentalism aspect: They cared more about their investment than how green they were being.
“Electric vehicles are advertised as environmentally friendly and they are! And people know this, but this isn’t necessarily encouraging people to purchase them,” Salari says. “Environmentalism does not have an impact on purchasing an electric car; its functionality is more important.”
Like Salari, experts believe that demand for electric vehicles will increase as they become more affordable. Morgan Stanley predicts that continued performance improvements and reductions in the cost of batteries (which account for about 35 percent of an EV’s total cost) could lower the average EV price to $18,000 by 2025.
Salari says it also depends on consumer incentives: “People aren’t running out to buy electric vehicles because they’re good for the environment. They’re hesitating because they’re expensive but they’re in favor because their running costs are much cheaper. Regular drivers are more open to adopting EVs because of fuel costs, so it all depends on how you market your product. Enviro isn’t doing it: Shift your marketing to the economic benefits.
Prices will be lower in the future — that’s how innovation works. The first time a product launches, it’s not a cheap product, but as it becomes a mainstream offering, it will become more affordable. The market is still in its infancy. To grow it, we need more early adopters and government incentives are one way to drive adoption.
– Nasir Salari, Marketing Expert at Bath Spa University
Tax credits and improved infrastructure are the way forward then. The U.K. is certainly investing in its electric vehicle readiness: Lampposts across London are being fitted with sensors and EV charging points to reduce emissions and cut congestion, and parking is even free in the capital for EV drivers. New-build houses come with electric vehicle charging stations as standard and many are fitted with solar panels to power this.
As charging infrastructure gets more support, subsidies and incentives become more robust, and governments enforce more petrol-banning policies, electric car sales will continue to rise.
“It’s happening,” Salari tells KUST Review. “It may not be where we expected it to be by now, but it’s happening.”
Before the industrial revolution the world removed carbon from the air all by itself. With global carbon emissions breaking records in 2022 and potential risks of storing carbon underground, however, companies are getting creative and repurposing captured carbon in unexpected ways.
The Paris Agreement in 2015 had countries all over the world commit to take part in the race to net-zero emissions. Those countries are working toward the agreement’s renewable-energy goals, but more can be done to control greenhouse gases. One solution is carbon capture.
Natural or human-made
Carbon capture is the process of retrieving carbon emissions from the air and storing them. The process can be natural or manmade.
Natural carbon capture and storage is achieved by elements of the planet’s ecosystems. Trees, for example, are an effective carbon-capture and storage mechanism: Their leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis. But if trees are cut and burned for firewood — or even if the tree dies naturally — stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
The largest source of natural carbon capture is the world’s oceans. The United Nations estimates that the oceans soak up about 25 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions and 90 percent of the surplus heat those emissions cause.
This natural carbon-capture process is called the carbon cycle. The problem is the world’s ecosystems can’t keep up with the greenhouse gases that are being produced by humans.
Enter man-made carbon capture.
Carbon-capture processes are designed to remove carbon from industrial waste or from the air outside. Carbon-capture plants typically have walls of giant fans, sucking in air. They remove the carbon from the air, convert it to liquid, store it underground or use it to inject into oil fields to simplify oil extraction. But there are challenges with carbon capture.
These large plants require a lot of energy in the form of materials to build the facilities and the energy to run them. Additionally, once the carbon dioxide is stored, there are risks. The carbon dioxide could leak out of the stored areas, polluting water sources and eventually reaching the surface — once again polluting the air.
Reasons for concern
There is also concern that pressure from injecting the carbon underground could cause seismic activity and controversy over whether carbon capture and storage might embolden fossil-fuel use. The 2022 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says, “Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery” and “enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.”
While easing oil removal is the most common use of captured carbon, some companies are getting creative and managing carbon in other unusual ways.
Many large companies purchase carbon offsets to reduce their footprints. But individuals can purchase them as well. One company selling to individuals is Climeworks, a Swiss-based carbon-removal company that captures 900 tons of carbon annually. Buyers can even offer this as a “green gift” in the name of someone else. Climeworks also produces the bubbles for carbonated beverages for such clients as Coca-Cola.
Also getting off the ground is E-Jet fuel from carbon-capture company Twelve. The company says this fuel lowers greenhouse-gas emission of traditional fuels by 80 percent. Twelve entered into a memorandum of understanding with Alaska Air Group and Microsoft to work toward testing the fuel on a commercial flight.
Taking Off
In an announcement of the partnership, Nicholas Flanders, co-founder and CEO of Twelve said, “By producing our drop-in E-Jet fuel from captured CO2, we can rapidly and efficiently close the carbon cycle and allow businesses to sustainably use emissions to power their own business travel.” No date for the testing of the commercial flight has been announced. Air Transport Action Group reports that aviation makes up 12 percent of emissions from all transport sources.
After returning home from a green, commercial flight, weary travelers might do some green laundry with laundry capsules made from captured carbon.
In 2010, Unilever, which produces over 400 household brands such as Omo, Ben and Jerry’s and Dove, began a decades-long commitment to halve its environmental impact by 2030. One of the ingredients used to make foam in Omo (Persil) laundry capsules is fossil fuels. But on World Earth Day in 2021, Unilever launched a limited-edition capsule that used captured carbon instead of fossil fuels in a new process that makes the capsule 82 percent less carbon intensive. Unilever aims to achieve net zero emissions from its product line by 2039.
Even with the volume of removal, storage and creative ways carbon is being repurposed, carbon neutrality remains out of reach. The 2021 Global Status of Carbon Capture and Storage Report estimates that in order to reach mid-century goals, the number of carbon-capture facilities would have to increase by 100 times. There are currently 27.
Nearly every function in the human body is carried out by proteins. Cells are constantly manufacturing them using single-strand messenger RNA, which is made from a DNA template. Each strand of mRNA holds the information on how to make one type of protein. The cell reads the mRNA, follows the instructions and makes a protein.
mRNA is a recipe book for the body’s cells. The idea? Make precise edits to the recipe, inject people with it, sit back and watch the body make all the proteins you need.
IMAGE: Anas Al Bounni-KUST Review
Viruses come in different shapes and sizes. Some are DNA viruses, which contain DNA that integrates with the host DNA in certain cells, using that cell’s replication mechanism to multiply. These viruses can activate cancer genes in the host — the human papillomavirus (HPV) is known to cause cervical cancer, for example.
RNA viruses carry RNA and do not integrate that RNA into a host’s DNA. Instead, the RNA is directed to the host ribosomes in cells, with the ribosomes replicating the virus. These viruses do not interact with host DNA.
Once inside the body, the cell reads the vaccine mRNA and begins to make harmless spike proteins of its own. From there, the body recognizes them as a foreign threat and launches an immune response, teaching itself to respond to spike proteins. Should the actual coronavirus come knocking, your cells now know what to do.
The main drawback to mRNA vaccines? The mRNA breaks down very easily. It needs to be delivered inside a protective fatty barrier and kept cold.
mRNA vaccines are a groundbreaking way to elicit an immune response and their real impact is just beginning. Their applications don’t stop at COVID-19; we might be able to figure out the recipe for a cancer or HIV vaccine.
mRNA VACCINE HISTORY
1961-mRNA discovered.
1963-Interferon induction by mRNA discovered.
1965-First liposomes produced.
1969-First proteins produced from isolated mRNA in lab.
1971-Liposomes first used for drug delivery.
1974-Liposomes first used for vaccine delivery.
1978-First liposome-wrapped mRNA delivery to cells.
1984-mRNA synthesized in lab.
1989-First time synthetic mRNA in liposomes is delivered to human cells.
1992-mRNA tested as a treatment in rats.
1993-First mRNA vaccines tested for influenza in mice.
1995-mRNA tested as cancer vaccine in mice.
2005-Discovery that modified RNA evades immune detection.
2013-First clinical trial of mRNA vaccine for infectious disease (rabies).
2020-First mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine approved for emergency use.
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CAPTION: International Space Station IMAGE: NASA
