New Scientist - USA (2021-12-18)

Jian-Wei Pan in
a lab at China’s
University of Science
and Technology

USTC is making great strides in quantum
communication too. It recently revealed
that the world’s largest metropolitan
quantum network – which involves banks,
universities and government buildings
across the city of Hefei in China – has been
running for nearly three years. In 2016,
USTC put the first quantum satellite
into orbit, demonstrating unhackable
communications with ground stations
on Earth.
Pan’s influence in Chinese science is large
and growing. He is the vice-chair of the
Jiusan Society, a minor political party that
serves as a kind of think tank on scientific
and educational issues.
It remains to be seen which country or
company will be first to develop a practical
quantum computer, but Pan and USTC
seem likely to remain at the centre of this
field for the near future. ❚

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person to visit space on a spacecraft

made by his own company. Amazon

founder Jeff Bezos came a close

second on 20 July, when he rode

his firm Blue Origin’s New Shepard

rocket on a suborbital flight past

the Kármán line. While he reached

a higher altitude than Branson at

107 km, the flight was shorter at

11 minutes, including 3 minutes

of weightlessness. New Shepard

flew again on 12 October with

new passengers, including Star Trek

actor William Shatner.

Meanwhile, in September,

SpaceX pulled off the feat of

sending a spacecraft into actual orbit

without any government-trained

astronauts aboard. Paid for and

commanded by billionaire Jared

Isaacman, this Crew Dragon flight,

titled Inspiration4, was much longer

than the other private flights, with

the four passengers circling Earth

for three days.

These trips show that norms in

space flight are changing. They aren’t

the first examples of space tourism:

non-government astronauts flew

in the early 1980s and several

wealthy thrill seekers have visited the

International Space Station since then.

However, the 2021 passengers are

the first on private craft instead of

“ These billionaire

space tourists are

the first to fly aboard

private spacecraft”

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There was a leap forward in

understanding brain development

in August, when lumps of neural

tissue in a dish were coaxed into

sprouting rudimentary eyes.

The structures, developed

from stem cells, are called optic

cups and responded to light.

They formed similar tissues to

those in real eyes – including a

lens and retina – and developed

nerves that sent signals to the

rest of the neural blob (Cell

Stem Cell, doi.org/grx8).

The work may one day lead to

new treatments for blindness. But

the team involved, at the Heinrich

Heine University Düsseldorf in

Germany, first needs to manage to

keep the “eyes” alive long-term.

Crude eyes

form on brain

blob in a dish

Tissue engineering

Leah Crane

Clare Wilson

18/25 December 2021 | New Scientist | 25

rockets built by government agencies.

If the pledges made by space flight

firms are to be believed, there are

many more of these flights to come.

While the per-person costs of most

of these journeys weren’t revealed,

there is a reason that each of them

has been bankrolled by a billionaire.

As of August, Virgin Galactic was

charging $450,000 per ticket for

trips on SpaceShipTwo, and the going

rate for a flight to orbit is around

$50 million. But many in the industry

expect competition to start bringing

these costs down.

Still, the average person won’t be

able to afford to look down on our

world from space in the next decade,

but maybe mere millionaires will. ❚