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Mars City Design wants to 3D-print prototypes of Martian habitats in the Mojave Desert

Growing up in Jakarta’s polluted slums, Vera Mulyani loved building things. As a child, she dreamed of becoming an architect.

More than two decades later, Mulyani is a self-proclaimed “Marschitect,” and spends her time brainstorming how human life might be sustained on the red planet. After studying at École d’Architecture de Nantes in France and at New York Film Academy, in January 2015 she founded Mars City Design, a think tank of sorts aimed at developing blueprints for the first self-sustaining city on Mars.

Earlier this month, Mars City Design raised $30,382 on Kickstarter to realize the next phase of its mission: Within the next three years, the group wants to 3D-print three to-scale habitat prototypes of Martian cities at Reaction Research Society’s test area in the Mojave Desert.

Physicist offers leading theory about mysterious Large Hadron Collider excess

In December of last year, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced startling results hinting at the existence of an undiscovered subatomic particle—one with a mass six times heavier than the Higgs boson, the particle that made headlines in 2012.

The evidence is still thin, but if more data confirm the finding, it could sharpen humankind’s understanding of the building blocks of the universe.

“This was a very surprising announcement and a puzzle at the same time, because the lifetime and mass of the particle could reveal something else beyond simply one extra particle, if it turns out to be a real signal,” said Kyoungchul “K.C.” Kong, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. “Yet we do not claim this as a discovery, and we need more data.”

Russia to Create New Powerful Plasma Rocket Engine

A Russian rocket engine company, with the assistance of a major research and development institute, will work on a project to create a powerful electrodeless plasma rocket engine, Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation said Wednesday.

The project will be developed by the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s leading research and development institution in the field of nuclear energy, and the Chemical Automatics Design Bureau (CADB).

“The project involves the development of a new-generation electrodeless plasma engine. It is a high-power engine using fuel in a plasma state. It has a high energy efficiency, an ability to use almost any kind of rocket fuel… and its maximum engine power is limited only by the power supply of a high-frequency generator,” Roscosmos said in a statement.

Mars Colonists Must ‘Live Off the Land’: NASA Report

Long-term human colonization of Mars is feasible, as long as Red Planet pioneers “live off the land,” a recent NASA report concludes.

“There are massive resources on Mars obtainable from the atmosphere and extracted from the regolith which are capable of supporting human colonization,” write the authors of the report, which is called “Frontier In-Situ Resource Utilization for Enabling Sustained Human Presence on Mars.”

Using Martian resources, existing technologies could supply water, oxygen, fuel and building materials, the report adds, “to relax the dependence on Earth during the buildup of a colony on Mars.” [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Crewed Mars Mission Ideas].

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