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A US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded prosthetic arm will be released for commercial use beginning in late 2016.

The LUKE arm, one of the world’s most advanced prosthetics, was designed by Segway creator Dean Kamen and has been under development for close to a decade.

The LUKE arm is named after Luke Skywalker’s advanced prosthetic from the Star Wars films, and its banner feature is its control system.

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The ISS has just installed a new technology known as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, the first stage in a new mission that aims to allow the implementation of a Solar System-wide Internet in the near future.

As more investment and innovation is given to space exploration, the ISS is becoming a very busy place. And with Moon colonies and manned missions to Mars looking more and more like reality, the nearly-20 year old station is in dire need of an upgrade.

And its getting one. New technology has been installed in the ISS, and it is designed to form the basis of an internet-style network spanning the whole (or most of the whole) of our cosmic neighborhood. It’s called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking.

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The methane seems to bloom in the Martian summers when the atmosphere is viewed with spectrography lenses on powerful telescopes I read once. Which always made me wonder if there’s algae of some form in the subsoil.


Scientists are getting closer to solving one of the biggest Martian mysteries.

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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.

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Norway has hatched ambitious plans to install the world’s first floating underwater tunnels to help travelers easily cross the nation’s many fjords. At present, the only way to travel across the bodies of water involves taking a series of ferries – an inconvenient and time-consuming process. The “submerged floating bridges” would consist of large tubes suspended under 100 feet of water, and each one will be wide enough for two lanes of traffic.

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