Lifeboat Foundation

While development is happening everywhere, these companies are the next big things to shoot past the stratosphere.

While a lot of end-of-the-year, turn-of-the-calendar roundups try to focus on the year that was or the year ahead, the space industry is very different. Developments are planned further in advance, so some of the qualifying news that gets companies on this list isn’t scheduled to happen until 2017. The industry is small compared to cloud computing or cybersecurity, for example, but the rate of growth is tremendous. There seems to be a cultural solidarity with spacetech on account of its tightly-knit history of cooperation and the still limited number of private companies that can facilitate space flight.

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Last year August, Stephen Hawking announced he had been working with Malcom Perry and Andrew Strominger on a solution to the black hole information loss problem, and they were closing in on a solution. But little was explained other than that this solution rests on a symmetry group by name of supertranslations.

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Elon Musk’s vision of the Hyperloop — a lightning-fast transportation system that would shuttle passengers at speeds nearing 700-mph using low pressure tubes and air compressors — is slowly coming to fruition in the Nevada desert.

In fact, the first ever Hyperloop tubes are neatly lined up in a ditch, waiting to be assembled and then later tested by Hyperloop Technologies at a site in North Las Vegas.

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This thing beats the lunar rover by 1,000 miles.

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Now this is something you don’t hear every day.

Or week.

Or year.

Continue reading “Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array may have found Super-Earth in our solar system” »

We shall see. We shall see. wink

For three decades, humans have searched for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, and yet we’ve only sampled a tiny drop of our vast cosmic ocean. If we’re ever to find a radio-hot, spacefaring civilization, we need to know where to point our telescopes.

But the answer may be simpler than we thought. According to a new study, there are roughly 150 brilliant patches of space that deserve our attention.

Continue reading “Alien Life May Be Hiding in These Brilliant Star Clusters” »

In a landmark study, researchers have used gene editing system CRISPR-Cas9 to treat a model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in mice

Proof of concept for future human treatment

Continue reading “Gene Editing Treats Disease In A Living Animal For The First Time” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TiZuG9K_xso

NASA recently provided $10 million in funding to Ad Astra Rocket Company of Texas for further development of its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), an electromagnetic thruster capable of propelling a spaceship to Mars in just 39 days. NASA’s funding was part of the “12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership.” Ad Astra’s rocket will travel ten times faster than today’s chemical rockets while using one-tenth the amount of fuel.

The VASIMR system would cut the trip to Mars by months according to Franklin Chang Diaz, a former MIT student, NASA astronaut, and now CEO of Ad Astra.

Continue reading “NASA’s New VASIMR Plasma Engine Could Reach Mars in 39 days” »

A milestone in the history of cybersecurity?

Cyberattacks on the power grid just became a much more real threat, according to researchers.

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