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Exploring space while seated on Earth, gazing up on screens in museum theaters or at home via VR headsets. is exciting but the top imagination-grabber is the very idea of finding a way to access space. This is the present-day realm of creative thinking over space elevators, in the use of a giant tower to carry us to space.

Scientists working on space elevators are thinking about materials and designs that can be used to access space as an alternative to rocket technology. A sign of the times is the upcoming Space Elevator Conference 2015 which takes place this month in Seattle.

Imagine, said The Spaceward Foundation, the , serving as a track on which electric vehicles called “climbers” can travel up and down carrying about 10 tons of payload.“There are no intense gravity-loads during the trip, no acoustic vibration, no onboard fuel, nor any of the rest of the drama (and cost) associated with rocket launches,” it added.

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Vara-Google-Alphabet-Announcement-690

“In one sense, Page and Brin are just formalizing an arrangement that has evidently existed at Google for the past several years—the two of them at the helm of a company largely occupied with seeking out new and strange areas of innovation. The bet, it seems, is that this arrangement will improve the chances that Page and Brin’s unconventional investments will pan out—and that, if they don’t, the rest of the company will be better insulated from its founders’ mistakes. Until then, Sundar Pichai can focus on the boring, plodding business of actually making money.”

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Last week, the FDA approved the first 3D-printed prescription drug, essentially validating the technology as a new heavyweight player in big pharma. “This may be the first truly mass manufactured product made by 3D printing,” said Dr. Michael Cima, a professor at MIT who helped invent the pill-printing technology back in 1997, in an email to Singularity Hub. “It’s revolutionary.”

The printed pill, SPRITAM levetiracetam, is a drug that fights many kinds of epileptic seizures. The brainchild of a little-known Ohio-based company Aprecia, SPRITAM is essentially an old drug ingredient packaged into a brand new, more effective delivery system. Unlike current formulations of the same drug, SPRITAM immediately dissolves upon contact with water and bursts into effect — a property obviously beneficial when trying to curtail sudden-onset seizure episodes.

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Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (15th August, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity

This week: ‘Danielle’ — An Eye Opening Simulation Of The Aging Process; How Does Chronic Inflammation Lead To Cancer?; Low Inflammation and Telomere Maintenance Predict Healthy Longevity; 3-D Printing: Could Downloadable Medicine Be The Future?; And more.

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The UK government has announced it’s set to trial a new type of highway that wirelessly charges hybrid and electric cars that drive on it.

The supercharged highways would juice up hybrid or electric cars that would normally need to stop, using a straight line charging path between A and B.

The results of this off road trial, based on this feasibility test, will be published and could lead to real motorway trials in the next few years, if successful. But it will come at a cost.

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Researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, have developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.

It’s a major step forward in creating a quantum computer to solve problems such as designing new drugs, superfast database searches, and performing otherwise intractable mathematics that aren’t possible for super computers.

The fully reprogrammable chip brings together a multitude of existing quantum experiments and can realise a plethora of future protocols that have not even been conceived yet, marking a new era of research for quantum scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of quantum technologies.

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