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The only in-flight beverages on the 11-seat private jet were bottled water and a genetically modified bacterial slurry designed to prevent the worst effects of hangovers.

A handful of passengers on the short evening flight from Hawthorne to the edge of the Mojave — venture capitalists, a man with a mushroom-based manufacturing company and this reporter — downed the mixture. The pilot, along with two senior SpaceX engineers, politely declined.

At the Apple Valley Airport, a helicopter waited to take us beyond a far ridge, farther from civilization. Miles from paved roads were two tents, a ring of shipping containers and an “H” painted on the dirt marking a makeshift helipad.

Star Trek’s Montgomery Scott famously said “ye cannot change the laws of physics”, but a real-life space engineer says he might have just done that.

David Burns of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama has unveiled what he’s calling the ‘helical engine’, which could potentially power flights across space without using any fuel at all.

There’s just one small problem — it breaks the laws of physics as we know them.

From some viewpoints, Mars is kind of like a skeleton of Earth. We can see that it had volcanoes, oceans, and rivers, but the volcanoes no longer fume and the water is all gone. A new image from the ESA’s Mars Express drives the point home.

The new image is of Nirgal Vallis, one of the longest dried-up river system on Mars, at almost 700 km (435 miles) long. It’s just south of the equator, in a region shaped not only by water flowing on the ancient surface, but by impacts.

Satellite images show a region covered in all sizes of impact craters, and rivers and craters worked together to shape the surface of Mars. Scientists think that water from Nirgal Vallis contributed to a massive flood in Mars’ past, flowing into Holden Crater and creating a lake 200–250 m (650−850 ft.) deep. Water flowed from Nirgal Vallis into Holden Crater at between 5–10 times the discharge rate of the Mississippi River. This was probably during the Late Noachian or Early Hesperian epoch. There’s some uncertainty, but that’s probably somewhere around 3.7 billion years ago.

The Nobel Prize for physics was announced on October 8 where Mayor jointly shared half of the prize with Didier Quelzo while the other half was awarded to James Peebles. Both Mayor and Didier jointly discovered a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star.

NASA says the first humans will set foot on Mars in the mid-2030’s. It will be the most dangerous mission any human has ever taken. Glad You Asked host Cleo Abram wants to know: What comes after that? Not how do we get there, but how will we survive once we do?
Note: There are several Fahrenheit measurements in this piece.
The metric conversions are:
At 7:53: 212 degrees Fahrenheit = 100 degrees Celsius
At 8:04: 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit = 37 degrees Celsius
At 8:45: −81 degrees Fahrenheit = −62.8 degrees Celsius

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Key sources:
International Space Station Integrated Medical Group Medical Checklist https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/163533main_ISS_Med_CL.pdf

Examining Psychosocial Well-Being and Performance in Isolated, Confined, and Extreme Environments https://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/TM-2015-218565.pdf

Mars Exploration Program, NASA https://mars.nasa.gov/all-about-mars/facts/

NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HartsfieldHW/HartsfieldHW_6-12-01.htm

Wow!


Brain Computer interface technology opens up a world of possibilities. We are on the cusp of this technology that is so powerful and has the potential to so radically transform our lives and existence! After starting three venture-funded startups in Silicon Valley, Steven Hoffman, known as Captial Hoff, launched Founders Space with the mission to educate and accelerate entrepreneurs and intrapreneur. Founder Space has become one of the top startup accelerators in the world with over 50 partners in 22 countries. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

These images, taken from 1990 to 2019, show how Hubble’s views of Saturn have gotten better over time as its cameras have improved.


Credit: NASA/Hubble #NASA #Hubble #space #science #astronomy #universe #telescope #cosmos #saturn #year #classic #ringedplanet #solarsystem

Despite the level of understanding and knowledge the world has about so many things, everyone is still getting excited about new discoveries and this one is no exception. A rare meteorite, which was found in Siberia, contains a crystal, or at least what appears to be a crystal. The mineral itself is quite rare as well and is also a mystery. While crystal is the term used to describe it, no one’s sure what it actually is but here’s what they know so far:

A fair few years ago now, scientists discovered a small piece of a mineral that was created shortly after the solar system, some four and half billion years ago. The mineral was brought to Earth by the Khatyrka meteorite, which landed in Eastern Siberia. Obviously, a 4 billion-year-old mineral would be incredibly interesting to almost anyone, but not so much in this case. It was still quite intriguing but not for its sheer age, as many would expect, but for its atomic structure instead.

The structure that this mineral possesses is one that has never before been found in nature, although it has been created in laboratory environments. It was referred to as a quasicrystal because from the exterior it resembles a crystal, but on the inside, it’s a whole other kettle of fish.