Sending humans to Mars involves deep space missions that could last months, but shipping material there is costly; the price of transporting 1kg on Earth increases by a factor of 100 on a Martian mission. If the ultimate goal is to establish a long-term base on Mars, we’ll need make use of materials found on humanity’s greatest ever voyage.
Researchers in the US have reported what they believe is a first-of-its-kind reversal of brain damage, after treating a drowned and resuscitated toddler with a combination of oxygen therapies.
The little girl, whose heart didn’t beat on her own for 2 hours after drowning, showed deep grey matter injury and cerebral atrophy with grey and white matter loss after the incident, and could no longer speak, walk, or respond to voices – but would uncontrollably squirm around and shake her head.
Amazingly, thanks to a course of oxygen treatments – including hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) – administered by a team from LSU Health New Orleans and the University of North Dakota, doctors were able to significantly reverse the brain damage experienced by the toddler.
You know that creepy black sphere used as a floating interrogation droid in Star Wars? It seems like scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) pretty much designed the complete opposite of that, and we want one for our very own.
Called Int-Ball, this adorable little camera drone resembles something Pixar might have come up with, but it’s totally real, and is now a floating companion to astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) – where it helps out by taking photos and recording video, freeing up valuable astronaut time.
Int-Ball was delivered to the ISS in a SpaceX cargo shipment last month – the company’s first involving a reused Dragon cargo capsule – and is now operational, currently undergoing initial testing.
For the last few months, Intel and AMD have been playing a bit of one-sided chicken. With AMD’s Ryzen and Epyc initial launch cycles nearly complete, we’ve seen the smaller CPU company aggressively take the fight to Intel in CPU pricing. And the market has responded — the Ryzen 7 1700 is now the second-best selling CPU on Amazon. Six of the top 15 CPUs on Amazon are made by AMD (with 5 Ryzen SKUs) and eight of the top 20. Now there are rumors that Intel will respond to AMD’s moves in the consumer space as well, possibly with new Core i7 and i5 offerings that add six-core CPUs to Intel’s desktop lines.
There’s already some precedent for this. Intel’s Core X series and the recent Skylake-SP launch are both meant to reposition Santa Clara against its rival, particularly the Core i7-7820X, which has a list price of $589 to $599. Be advised, if you intend to overclock, you need to read about the problems overclockers have encountered with the X299 chipset. But when running at stock speed, you can already buy an eight-core Intel CPU for $600. While that’s $100 more than what you’ll pay for a Ryzen 7 1800X, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-based Core i7-6900K, which was an $1,100 chip.
Intel slashed prices on certain competitive SKUs within the new Core X series to bring them more in line with Ryzen, so it’s not surprising to hear that the company might fight back on the core count front. This news, according to CanardPC, claims Intel will introduce two six-core models with its new Coffee Lake CPUs. The Core i7-8700K will have six cores, 12 threads, 12MB of L3, a 95W TDP, and a base clock of 3.7GHz. Meanwhile, the Core i5 8600K would be a six-core chip at 3.6GHz with no Hyper-Threading, 9MB of L3, and the same 95W TDP.
