Lifeboat Foundation

The material can help scientists understand the origins of the Earth.

After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.

Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen.

Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.

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In this video, we explore the biggest construction sites of the future — the ones that will one day provide us with real megastructures of all kinds and purposes.

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In a dramatic 13-minute plunge back to Earth, the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule safely landed in Utah after seven years in space.

“If you can get up to a watt per square meter, it would be very attractive from a cost perspective,” Assawaworrarit says.

The invention taps into a source of energy that’s easily overlooked

The Earth is constantly receiving a tremendous amount of energy from the Sun, to the tune of 173,000 terrawatts. Clouds, particles in the atmosphere, and reflective surfaces like snow-covered mountains immediately reflect 30 percent of that energy out into space. The rest of it ends up warming the land, oceans, clouds, atmosphere, and everything else on the planet.

Standing 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) tall, the Jeddah Tower will dwarf the Burj Khalifa by over 560 feet (172 m).

Jeddah Economic Company (JEC), the firm behind the ambitious Jeddah Tower Project in Saudi Arabia, has announced the resumption of work on the world’s tallest building, media reports have confirmed. The project that began in 2010 came to an abrupt halt in 2017.

Countries in the Middle East have been pouring money into ambitious projects to attract tourism and businesses and reduce their dependence on oil exports for income. The city of Dubai is replete with examples of structures meant to attract people from all over the world, whether one looks at the Palm Islands or the Moon-themed resort.

A depiction of a robot with human neurons.

Humanity is slowly losing access to the night sky, and astronomers have invented a new term to describe the pain associated with this loss: “noctalgia,” meaning “sky grief.”

Along with our propensity for polluting air and water and the massive amounts of carbon we’re dumping into the atmosphere to trigger climate change, we have created another kind of pollution: light pollution.

The universe naturally gravitates towards disorder, and only through the input of energy can we combat this inevitable chaos. This idea is encapsulated in the concept of entropy, evident in everyday phenomena like ice melting, fires burning, and water boiling. However, zentropy theory introduces an additional layer to this understanding.

This theory was developed by a team led by Zi-Kui Liu, the distinguished Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State. The “Z” in zentropy is derived from the German term “Zustandssumm,” which translates to the “sum over states” of entropy.

Alternatively, Liu said, zentropy may be considered as a play on the term “zen” from Buddhism and entropy to gain insight on the nature of a system. The idea, Liu said, is to consider how entropy can occur over multiple scales within a system to help predict potential outcomes of the system when influenced by its surroundings.