Yes, new jetliner that could fly many more times as fast as the Concorde, burn only hydrogen and get you from Brussels to Sydney in four hours is on the drawing boards for the future. The plane is Reaction Engine’s A2 concept, a Mach 5 (3,400 mph) aircraft for 300 passengers. It is being funded by the European Union’s Long Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and technologies project. If they build it the plane will produce virtually no carbon emissions. In examining the record and performance of the Concorde the engineers today say that it could not fly far enough to do trans-Pacific routes and its engines were efficient at only Mach 0.9. The gas mileage was also horrible and the passenger capacity was small as well.

The new engine, named the A2, operates on two modes—a combination of turbojet and ramjet propulsion systems. Once the plane takes off and reaches Mach 2.5 the second mode takes over and it can reach cruising speed over the Pacific of Mach 5. Joseph Schetz, a hypersonic propulsion expert at Virginia Tech when interviewed said, “there’s nothing fundamentally unsound about the A2’s plans. Whether it’s doable or not is a whole other conversation”.

The engineers will face crucial design obstacles including building heat exchangers that are reliable enough for hypersonic flights. Another huge challenge will be manufacturing hydrogen fuel on a large scale without emitting carbon in the process. Another potential problem is that the engineers had to design the craft without windows for the 300 passengers. The type they would have to use that are standard on the space shuttle would be too heavy for it and would cause construction and fuel excesses, as well. But in our foreseeable future we could very well see the A2 as the new long flight airliner of choice.

U.S. researchers at five universities have identified 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. The U. of Rochester, Scripps Research Institute, U. of Southern California, U of California San Francisco U. of California Los Angeles have all been searching for ways to diagnose disease potential in human saliva. A recent discovery they said could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests that could be done without the need for a single drop of blood being drawn. As many as 20 percent of the proteins that are found in saliva are also found in blood, according to Fred Hagen, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who worked on the study. This is potentially a large field that has many clinical implications in the area of disease diagnostics.

The researchers have hopes that saliva-based tests could be used to diagnose cancer, heart disease, diabetes and a number of other conditions. Early analysis has already turned up a number of proteins with known roles in Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases; breast, colorectal and pancreatic cancer and diabetes. They collected saliva from 23 healthy men and women of several races and tested saliva samples using some form of mass spectrometry, which determines the identity of proteins based on measurements of their mass and charge. Like a genome, which lists all of the genes in an organism, a proteome is a complete map of proteins. While genes provide the instruction manual, proteins carry out the instructions by regulating cellular processes. Already there are saliva-based antibody tests to detect human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, and hepatitis infections. This protein map will provide new targets.

The researchers envision in the future that spitting in a tube and looking for a marker like a breast cancer marker could potentially be done at home and maybe eliminate some mammograms. This information has been made publicly available, and it’s expected that a number of research groups will be picking their favorite targets and developing their own tests. That is the intent — to create a wealth of data to stimulate more research and increase the chances of producing better diagnostic tests.