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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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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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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.

They’re called globular clusters, an evocative term for ancient, gravitationally-bound regions of space that can pack a whopping million stars per hundred cubic light years. Once thought to be uninhabitable, new research by Rosanne Di Stefano of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Alak Ray of the Tata Institute in Mumbai suggests that globular clusters may, in fact, be the ideal places for advanced civilizations to flourish.

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

While safety is still a concern, the use of gene editing methods to treat disease in adult patients isn’t controversial. Altering embryos is entirely different to treating an adult, predominantly as the implications are profound and an embryo obviously cannot give permission.

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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.

According to Diaz, “this is like no other rocket that you may have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket. The VASIMR Rocket is not used for launching things; it is used for things already in orbit. This is called “in-space propulsion.”

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If you thought the Kepler spacecraft’s glory days were over, think again. Today at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, astronomers announced a whopping 234 new exoplanet candidates discovered by Kepler in 2014. The best part? All of them are just tens of light years away.

The deluge of planetary candidates are distributed among 208 star systems, which means we have the honor of welcoming many new multi-planet systems to our cosmic neighborhood. While these candidates aren’t confirmed yet, there’s a good chance most of them will be, according to Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, who presented the findings today. All 234 were found during the first year of the K2 mission, which is scanning stars across the plane of our solar system, moving from one field of view to the next.

Add these K2 planets to the 4,600+ candidate worlds (1,918 confirmed planets) discovered during Kepler’s original mission, and it’s fair to say this little telescope has become one hell of a planet hunter.

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