New islands are being built in numbers and on a scale never seen before.
We are building more islands than ever before. In the latest edition of Anthropo-Scene, we explore the striking results of humanity’s attempts to colonise the world’s lakes and oceans.
A Cypriot scientist defended his assertion that a new strain of Covid-19 exists that combines characteristics of the delta and omicron variants.
Other scientists have speculated that Leonidos Kostrikis’s findings are a result of laboratory contamination. But he told Bloomberg in an emailed statement Sunday that the cases he has identified “indicate an evolutionary pressure to an ancestral strain to acquire these mutations and not a result of a single recombination event.”
SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites to the fourth shell of the constellation for the first global orbital launch attempt of the year.
Lifting off from historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the Starlink Group 4–5 mission lifted 49 Starlink v1.5 satellites southeastward from Kennedy into a 210 x 339 km low Earth orbit with an inclination of 53.22 degrees.
Following payload separation, the satellites will slowly raise their orbit until they are in their operational altitude of 540 km. This process takes several months due to the low-thrust but high-efficiency Krypton ion thrusters on the Starlink satellites.
NASA’s new X-Ray Observatory will unlock the universe’s most explosive secrets.
The IXPE mission could change our understanding of black holes, nebulae, and supernovas.
Recharging Drones in only 45 minutes.
Recently, Autel Robotics released a new drone charging platform that allows drones to take on multiple recursive missions independent of weather across a wide variety of industrial applications, including industrial energy inspection, natural disaster monitoring, and more.
But another tilt-rotor VTOL drone from Autel can transition to a “fixed-wing” mode, and “scout areas after a hurricane, with a lot of different really high-end camera options,” said John Simmons, a representative for Autel Robotics at the CES 2022 exhibit.
The drone charging platform is called EVO Nest, while the long-range, fixed-wing VTOL is called the “Dragonfish” series. And it could simplify the energy needs of visual surveillance, monitoring, and public service.
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The Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department are already using the technology.
Who can forget the attack on Capital last January 6th? For those who do remember it well, there is an urgency to do something to avoid it ever happening again. One way to do that is to predict these events before they happen just like you can predict weather patterns.
Some data scientists believe they can achieve exactly that, according to The Washington Post. “We now have the data — and opportunity — to pursue a very different path than we did before,” said Clayton Besaw, who helps run CoupCast, a machine-learning-driven program based at the University of Central Florida that predicts coups for a variety of countries.
This type of predictive modeling has been around for a while but has mostly focused on countries where political unrest is far more common. Now, the hope is that it can be redirected to other nations to help prevent events like that of January 6th. And so far, the firms working in this field have been quite successful.
According to an AP news release, Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow appeared on state television telling officials to put out the flames at the “Gates of Hell,” a giant natural gas crater in the middle of the Karakum desert, about 260 kilometers (160 miles) north of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan.
The crater was created in 1971 during a Soviet drilling accident that hit a gas cavern, causing the drilling rig to fall in and the earth to collapse underneath it. The Soviets decided to burn off the gas by setting it on fire to prevent the dangerous fumes from spreading. Unfortunately, tapping into a vast natural reservoir of flammable methane gas, the pit has been burning since then, even growing in size over time. The now 70 meters (229 feet) wide and 20 meters (65 feet) deep crater is a popular tourist attraction, especially at night time. Officially named the “Shining of Karakum,” the crater is also known as the Darvaza Crater, after the nearby village of Darvaza, and online as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, thanks to the boiling mud and roaring, red flames covering the crater floor.
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A great summary of everything SpaceX 2021, along with everything SpaceX to come in 2022.
You can expect blowups along the way, but you can also expect to see the starship fly this year.
Next-gen is a phrase that gets tossed around a bit too much, but it’s quite deserving here.
Cutting the weight of fuel tanks and continuing advances in fuel-cell technologies are key to making hydrogen competitive in aviation.
