HSBC terminates $6bn bid for KEB

HSBC has blamed turmoil in the financial markets after withdrawing its $6bn (£3.3bn) offer to buy a majority stake in Korea Exchange Bank (KEB).

The stake is owned by Texas-based private equity firm Lone Star.

A year after agreeing the deal, HSBC said its plans to buy the stake were no longer in the best interests of its shareholders.

There has been speculation HSBC will instead use the money to buy one of the western banks hit by the credit crunch.

It has already been linked with both Washington Mutual and Royal Bank of Scotland.

The deal to buy KEB has been complicated by legal disputes surrounding Lone Star's investment activities in South Korea.

Without the necessary approval from South Korean regulators, HSBC said it was free to withdraw its offer.

"In the light of developments around the world, not least changes in asset values in world markets, we do not believe it would be in the best interests of shareholders to continue to pursue this acquisition on the terms negotiated last year," said HSBC Asia chief executive Sandy Flockhart.

NASA plans $485 million robotic mission to Mars in 2013

With gobs of information from its recent Mars missions already in the hopper, NASA is now making plans for the 2013 launch of its next robotic trip to the Red Planet. The $485 million mission will focus on studying the planet's atmosphere, climate history and potential habitability.

In recent months, NASA's Mars Lander has been gathering new information on the content of Martian soil and on an ice layer near the Martian north pole. The study of Mars also includes two robotic Rovers that have been traversing the planet for four and a half years, studying rocks and the history of the planet's weather.

And an orbiter is now circling Mars as well. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which acts as a communications relay for other Mars spacecraft, carries a telescopic camera and is helping scientists find landing sites for future missions.

The next planned orbiter is dubbed the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. NASA announced today that the plan for this mission was chosen out of 20 proposals that were submitted to the space agency.

"This [next] mission will provide the first direct measurements ever taken to address key scientific questions about Mars' evolution," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, in a statement. "The loss of Mars' atmosphere has been an ongoing mystery. MAVEN will help us solve it."

According to NASA, Mars once had a much denser atmosphere that supported the presence of water on the surface of the planet. It's suspected that streams and even lakes dotted the landscape billions of years ago. The atmosphere largely dissipated as, apparently, did the water.

MAVEN will be designed to make scientific measurements of present-day atmospheric loss that will offer clues about the planet's history.

Bruce Jakosky, a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be the principal investigator for this upcoming mission. According to NASA, his university will receive $6 million to fund mission planning and technology development during the coming year. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will manage the project, while a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp. in Littleton, Colo., will build the spacecraft based on designs from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2001 Mars Odyssey missions.

The team will begin mission design and implementation in the fall of 2009.

NASA noted that the MAVEN orbiter should arrive at Mars in the fall of 2014, going into an elliptical orbit ranging from 90 to 3,870 miles above the planet. The spacecraft's eight scientific instruments will take measurements during a full Earth year, which is roughly equivalent to half of a Martian year. MAVEN also is scheduled to dip down to 80 miles above the planet to sample Mars' upper atmosphere.

US space woes felt by Europe

Europe may have to find its own solutions for transporting astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station due to short-sighted US policies that now threaten Nasa's ability to maintain a presence on the orbital outpost.

Nasa chief Michael Griffin recently gave top managers a blunt assessment of the situation in an e-mail reprinted by the Orlando Sentinel, in which he said: "My own view is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be."

Fuelling Dr Griffin's frustration is a US policy to retire the space shuttle fleet in 2010, for safety and cost reasons, but five years before replacement ships are ready to take over the work of ferrying crews to the ISS.

The station also is solely dependent on Russia's Soyuz capsules to serve as lifeboats to bring astronauts back to Earth in case of an emergency.

The European Space Agency (Esa) had joined Nasa in designing a station crew-return vehicle based on the X-38 experimental craft, but it was never completed.

Nasa had asked for an additional $1bn a year to speed up development of the shuttle's replacement but was turned down.

The new capsules, which are being designed to travel to the Moon as well as the space station, are expected to debut in 2015.

The problem is not just Nasa's, though. The US promised transportation services to its European, Japanese and Canadian partners, which provided laboratories and other equipment for the space station.

Europe has a cargo hauler, the ATV, which made its debut flight this year. Caporicci said a proposal is being prepared for the ESA Ministerial Council for a cargo transportation capability that may be evolved to carry astronauts.

Helicopter airbags

Several of NASA Mars rovers have successfully landed on Mars, protected from impact with the ground by sophisticated airbags.

Now the helicopter manufacturer Bell Helicopter based in Fort Worth, Texas, believes the same technique could be used to protect helicopters in emergency landings (see image, below right).

The bags would be fitted to the underside of a helicopter and deployed only when the vehicle is about to hit the ground at too high a velocity.

The company says the bags are also designed to reinflate after impact to act as flotation devices should the helicopter ditch in water.

Read the full helicopter airbags patent application

Space satnav

The most accurate way of navigating on Earth is to use the Global Positioning System (GPS) – a receiver reads the signals broadcast by at least three orbiting satellites and calculates its position to within a few metres on Earth.



Arthur Dula, a space lawyer and former NASA consultant, wants to make a similar version for the whole solar system. A SSPS, if you will.

He suggests placing satellite-like base stations on various moons and asteroids around the solar system (see image, right). As long as the orbits of these bodies are well known, any a passing spacecraft can send a signal to several base stations and receive positioning signals in return. This would allow the craft to fix its location within the Solar System.

Read the full solar system positioning system patent application.

Invention: Heart-repair pump

Growing numbers of people are waiting for heart transplants. And engineers are developing miniature pumps known as ventricular assist devices to help.

Small enough to fit inside the patient's body, these pumps act like a second heart, boosting blood circulation and taking some of the load off the ailing organ.

But David Bull, a surgeon at the University of Utah's school of medicine says the pumps could help repair hearts too.

Cardiac stem cells capable of regenerating heart tissue are naturally found in the blood stream in small numbers. Bull and colleagues have designed a pump able to capture and culture those cells, and inject them into the heart to stimulate repairs.

The hope is that this would regenerate the heart sufficiently for the pump to eventually be removed.

Read the full heart-repair pump patent application

See previous inventions:

Space satnav, Exercise bed, Flat-panel ion thrusters, Morphine-cannabis super-painkiller, Exoskeleton for grannies, Smart specs for the blind, Smart inhaler, Artificial whiskers, Eco-friendly tattoo removals, and Jet-engine silencer.