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Railguns, Coilguns, Gauss Cannons, MAC Guns, what does it all mean? This week we’re exploring the topic of Electromagnetic weapons. From Halo to just Science Fiction in general, they’re a staple due to their cool designs but also because of how close we are to building them today. We’ll look at a few of the weapons we see in Halo as well as some real world experiments and designs showing just how close we are to having MAC Guns in space ourselves!

If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!

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Halo © Microsoft Corporation.

The number of active fires recorded in the Brazilian Amazon in August-September 2022 was the highest since 2010, according to an article published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Besides the record number of fires (74,398), the researchers found they were due not to extreme drought, as in 2010, but to recent deforestation by humans.

“The idea of publishing our findings came up when we analyzed data provided free of charge by the Queimadas program,” said Guilherme Mataveli, first author of the article. ‘Queimadas’ in Portuguese means burnings, and he was referring to the forest monitoring service run by the National Space Research Institute (INPE). Mataveli is currently a postdoctoral researcher in INPE’s Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division.

The number of fires typically rises every year in August and September, when the weather favors fire in about half of the Amazon. “But the surge in the number of fires in 2010 was due to an extreme drought event that occurred in a large part of the region, whereas nothing similar occurred in 2022, so other factors must have been to blame,” Mataveli said.

While the U.S. was busy celebrating the Super Bowl on Sunday night, Europeans had their own spectacle. Early Monday morning, a bright flash streaked across the skies over western Europe as an asteroid discovered just hours earlier made its impact with Earth’s atmosphere. The asteroid, dubbed Sar2667, was first detected on the evening of Feb. 12 by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky in Hungary.

Saudi Arabia will send its first two astronauts, including its first female astronaut, to the International Space Station (ISS) during the second quarter of 2023, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported on Sunday.

Saudi nationals Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali al-Qarni will join the crew of the AX-2 space mission in an accomplishment that comes in line with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. The spaceflight is set to launch from the United States to the ISS.

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ICON has also completed a series of 3D-printed homes in Tabasco, Mexico. The company partnered with charity New Story in order to build 500 square-foot (47 square-metre) houses for families in need of shelter.

This community of homes withstood a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in June 2020 with no visible damage.

The Texan construction technology company is collaborating with BIG on a robotic construction project for the Moon.


Construction technology company ICON is making four 3D-printed houses in Austin, Texas, from concrete that’s designed to cope with extreme weather.

In 2021, Carbon Robotics unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers. The company now has taken the technology from that robot and built a pull-behind LaserWeeder — and it kills twice as many weeds.

The weedkiller challenge: Weeds compete with plants for space, sunlight, and soil nutrients. They can also make it easier for insect pests to harm crops, so weed control is a top concern for farmers.

Chemical herbicides can kill the pesky plants, but they can also contaminate water and affect soil health. Weeds can be pulled out by hand, but it’s unpleasant work, and labor shortages are already a huge problem in the agriculture industry.