NASA scientists and their colleagues are now proposing corporate financing for a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could one day go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the Red Planet.
The proposal suggests that companies could drum up $160 billion for a human mission to Mars and a colony there, rather than having governments fund such a mission with tax dollars.
Joel Levine, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, was quoted in a release in the Journal of Cosmology by Dr. Rhawn Joseph. The plan covers “every aspect of a journey to the Red Planet — the design of the spacecrafts, medical health and psychological issues, the establishment of a Mars base, colonization, and a revolutionary business proposal to overcome the major budgetary obstacles which have prevented the U.S. from sending astronauts to Mars,” said Levine.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.K. and one in Saudi Arabia has developed a way to produce jet fuel using carbon dioxide as a main ingredient. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their process and its efficiency.
As scientists continue to look for ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, they have increasingly focused on certain business sectors. One of those sectors is the aviation industry, which accounts for approximately 12% of transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. Curbing carbon emissions in the aviation industry has proved to be challenging due to the difficulty of fitting heavy batteries inside of aircraft. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a chemical process that can be used to produce carbon-neutral jet fuel.
The researchers used a process called the organic combustion method to convert carbon dioxide in the air into jet fuel and other products. It involved using an iron catalyst (with added potassium and manganese) along with hydrogen, citric acid and carbon dioxide heated to 350 degrees C. The process forced the carbon atoms apart from the oxygen atoms in CO2 molecules, which then bonded with hydrogen atoms, producing the kind of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise liquid jet fuel. The process also resulted in the creation of water molecules and other products.
Even Apple wants to get into the automobile business it seems.
(Reuters) — Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The iPhone maker’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019.
Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple’s plans are not public. Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.
New York has among the world’s tightest rules on fire safety and regular readers of this site will be aware that that has had a big impact on the ability to site lithium-ion based battery energy storage systems (BESS) within the boundaries of the state’s urban regions.
While the development of large-scale systems is taking place in less densely populated upstate areas of New York, commercial and industrial (C&I) battery storage, which has been used elsewhere around the country to help businesses manage their energy costs and the wider network to adopt greater shares of renewables, has not really been able to gain a foothold.
If you’ve ever heard someone refer to the idea of “working in space,” you’d be forgiven for thinking they were describing a science-fiction plot. But the number of humans actively working beyond Earth’s atmosphere — and living significant chunks of their lives there, too — is about to start growing at a potentially exponential rate. Given how small that population is now, the growth might look slow at first — but it’s happening soon, and plans are in place to help it start ramping up quickly.
The main company leading those plans in the near-term is Axiom Space, a private space station service provider, and eventual operator. Axiom is founded and led by people with International Space Station experience and expertise, and the company already operates R&D missions on behalf of private clients on the ISS with the help of NASA astronauts. It’s planning to begin shuttling entire flights of private astronauts to the station starting in 2021, and it’s also building a new, commercial space station to ultimately replace the ISS on orbit once that one is decommissioned.
Axiom Space’s Chief Business Office Amir Blachman joined us at TC Sessions: Space last week on a panel that included NASA Chief of Exploration and Mission Planning Nujoud Merancy, Sierra Nevada Corporation senior vice president and former astronaut Janet Kavandi, as well as Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+) co-founder Melodie Yashar. The panel was focused on how public and private entities are preparing for a (relatively near) future in which humans spend more time off Earth — and further away from it, too.
People who are sick can ask for EUA drugs, but you have to ask often. INDIANAPOLIS, Nov. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Eli Lilly and Company’s (NYSE: LLY) investigational neutralizing antibody bamlanivimab (LY-CoV555) 700 mg. Bamlanivimab is authorized for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients 12 years and older with a positive COVID-19 test, who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization. Bamlanivimab should be administered as soon as possible after a positive COVID-19 test and within 10 days of symptom onset. The authorization allows for the distribution and emergency use of bamlanivimab, which is administered via a single intravenous infusion.
The Investor Relations website contains information about Eli Lilly and Company’s business for stockholders, potential investors, and financial analysts.
Have you ever dreamed of building an actual house using your very own grown-up, sustainable version of LEGO? Meet Brikawood, the company making that dream a reality and transforming the modular home business.
Brikawood creates wooden bricks that interlock to create walls. This allows builders to assemble and disassemble an entire home without the use of glue, nails or screws. The wood-brick walls then get filled with wood shavings left over from the manufacturing of Brikawood bricks. These insulate both temperature and sound, which improve energy efficiency and peace of mind.
The company’s bricks are made out of wood harvested from quick-growing Douglas fir trees. The trees are sourced from sustainable forests and certified as eco-friendly. Since the wood shavings produced by the manufacturing of the bricks are used as insulation, the entire Brikawood production results in nearly zero waste.
The new ERV from Retreat Caravans travels to the most distant corners of Australia and beyond, using only electric power to keep equipment running. That would be a nice feat for an RV as simple as a tiny teardrop trailer, but the ERV is more a dual-axle luxury condo. Its lithium battery and solar roof power the all-season climate control, indoor/outdoor entertainment system, electrified kitchen and even washing machine. Leave the LPG tanks and electrical grid behind, explore Outback-style remoteness and live like a kingly nomad in a high-tech hideaway.
Electric motorhomes and pickup campers have stolen the spotlight throughout 2019, but all-electric caravans have been quietly creeping forward in the backdrop. In the US, Thor Industries, the world’s largest RV manufacturer, worked up a more rigid definition of “off grid” with the Sonic X caravan concept back in March. Later in the year, another brand under the Thor umbrella, Germany’s LMC, followed suit with its own electrified trailer at the Düsseldorf Caravan Salon. The two models were quite distinct, but both shared the same goal: leaving behind every last trace of liquified petroleum gas (LPG) and tying together all onboard equipment with a single electrical architecture.
Australia’s Retreat Caravans goes beyond concepts, breaking free from LPG with what it calls the world’s first fully electric caravan, the ERV. It relies on a Centralized Energy Management System (CEMS) supplied by Australian caravan tech startup OzXcorp. Co-founded by Andrew Huett, a businessman who spent nearly two decades living completely off the grid and has racked up some 43,000 miles (70,000 km) traveling around Australia, OzXcorp was formed to bring caravan tech and design into the smart age. With the CEMS, OzXcorp hangs an automotive-grade 14.3-kWh lithium battery pack inside a galvanized steel chassis and distributes power through a 48-volt electrical architecture.
As we sit here in 2020, in the middle of a major viral pandemic, we can’t forget the fact that a century after the first antibiotics were created, drug resistant bacterial infections have become a major threat around the globe, exactly at the same time that the antibiotic pipelines of pharma companies have either dried up, or they have gotten out of the business.
In the U.S. alone, Centers For Disease Control (CDC) estimates that antibiotic resistance causes more than 2 million infections, several million hospital stay days, and over 35, 000 deaths per year. Worldwide, such infections cause 750, 000 deaths every year. And a recent United Nations (UN) report concluded that by 2050, “super bugs” could kill 10 million people globally every year, if no action is taken to combat the problem.
A solution to this emerging threat lies in the area of bacteriophage therapy (or “phage” for short), which is a type of virus that infects, replicates within, and are very good at killing bacteria.
Interestingly, phages have been used for over 90 years as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe as well as in France. They are seen as a possible therapy against multi-drug-resistant strains of many bacteria and have been shown to interfere not just with bacteria life cycles, but also with biofilm production and quorum sensing involved bacterial colonization processes.
Dr. Robert Schooley, MD, is a Professor of Medicine, in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, at UC San Diego, the Co-Director of their Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), as well as Interim Faculty Director, Global Education and Senior Director, International Initiatives.
Dr. Schooley is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed an internal medicine residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and infectious disease fellowships at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
