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Could water-recycling suits help future astronauts survive on Mars?

It’s one of the most well-known pieces of speculative technology in science fiction: the Stillsuit.

As an essential feature of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Stillsuit is the body-fluid recycling full-body suit worn by the Fremen of Arrakis, a technological adaptation to a desert world with almost no water but home to an extremely valuable resource that leads to human colonization of the barren planet.

While there isn’t any of the spice melange on Mars (at least none that we know of), Dune’s Arrakis has some very strong parallels to the red planet just down the way from us, and some important lessons to teach about survival in such an unforgiving environment.

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Continue reading “Could a Real-life Stillsuit Keep Us Alive on a Desert World?” | >

More headroom, more legroom, more room in general.

A new design for an autonomous taxi without a steering wheel or pedals has been unveiled by Waymo. The company, which has partnered with the Chinese automaker Geely, announced this week its intention to build a Zeekr minivan filled with passenger seats and little much else.

The minivan will be all-electric and self-driving as in being designed and developed in Gothenburg, Sweden. According to the US-based Waymo, the robot minivan will be added to its existing fleet “in the years to come.”

The announcement came via a blog post where Waymo gave a hint as to some of Zeekr’s planned features. According to Waymo, the Zeekr will have “a flat floor for more accessible entry, easy ingress, and egress thanks to a B-pillarless design, low step-in height, generous head and legroom, and fully adjustable seats.”

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Continue reading “Alphabet’s Waymo Unveils Its New Taxi: No Steering Wheel or Pedals?” | >

Meta has reportedly poached about 100 engineers from Apple.

Apple is giving its top engineers in the hardware as well as software divisions out-of-cycle bonuses in a bid to stop them from jumping ship to Meta. These bonuses are largely in the form of restricted stock units valued in the range of $50,000 to $180,000, Bloomberg reported.

Earlier in October, we reported that Meta, then Facebook, was planning to hire 10,000 engineers to build Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse. In the little time that has passed since the company rebranded itself and even opened up its Horizon Worlds for users. But what is not in the public domain is that Meta has poached about 100 engineers from Apple during the period, according to Bloomberg’s report.

Apple now wants to put an end to this by offering its top talent significant stock options that lock them in with the company for years. These options that are being offered selectively to engineers in silicon design, hardware, software, and even operations groups are atypical and untimely, Bloomberg reported.

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Continue reading “Apple Pays Its Engineers 0,000 Bonuses to Stop Them From Joining Meta” | >

Lawns are becoming less and less popular these days. Besides being high-maintenance, they are terrible for the environment. The mono-crop grasses require lots of watering, fertilizing and “herbiciding.” With mounting water shortages around the world, should we really be dumping clean water on non-edible grass?

Naturally, people are looking for alternatives. Some are planting edible gardens, some are planting prairie grasses and flowers for pollinators, and some are planting eco-friendly clover lawns, for a look and feel more similar to a regular lawn.

And now we’ve found another alternative — creeping red thyme. Like clover, the fast-growing cover crop can take over your whole lawn like a carpet.

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Claim your SPECIAL OFFER for MagellanTV here: https://try.magellantv.com/launchpadastronomy. Start your free trial TODAY so you can watch ‘Planet Hunting with the James Webb Space Telescope’ and the rest of MagellanTV’s science collection: https://www.magellantv.com/video/planet-hunting-with-the-jam…-telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched, but now its deployments must work. Even though the launch was successful, the hardest part is yet to come. We’ll take a look at each of the deployment steps and understand why Webb has to be so complex to accomplish its mission.

00:00 Launch of JWST
02:19 Second Mid-Course Correction burn.
04:09 Magellan TV
04:50 Webb’s Requirements.
08:28 Unitized Pallet Structure Deployment.
09:11 Deployable Tower Assembly.
09:53 Aft Momentum Trim Tab.
10:34 The Sunshield.
12:52 Sunshield Deployment.
14:40 Secondary Mirror Support Structure.
15:37 Aft Deployed Instrument Radiator.
16:17 Primary Mirror Wings and Alignment.
17:27 L2 Orbit Insertion and Commissioning.
18:07 Contingency Operations.

🖖 Share this video with a fellow space traveler: https://youtu.be/QeiQEG450gc.

Continue reading “How James Webb’s Deployments MUST Work” | >

Earlier this month, Airtable announced it’s now worth $11 billion after its latest funding round. The company’s “code-for-everyone-else approach allows professionals who aren’t fluent in coding languages such as Java or Python, and don’t have their desk buried deep within the stack, to play a part in rethinking and remaking the consumer and client digital experience,” reports Riley de León of CNBC. “The low-code movement has attracted an even higher level of attention as a result of the pandemic, during which organizations from hospitals to government entities and corporations have had to develop online offerings at a faster pace than ever expected and for new use cases.”

This movement is part of an increasing democratization of programming — borne of extreme necessity. At a time when digital transformation is everywhere, “relying on IT departments and professional programmers is unsustainable,” an O’Reilly report states. “We need to enable people who aren’t programmers to develop the software they need. We need to enable people to solve their own computational problems.”

The Chinese inroads into space have got strategic circles abuzz with discussions about a possible revival of a Cold War-type competition between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

China has yet again made headlines with a move that goes beyond just sending missions to the Moon or Mars. It has claimed to have launched a satellite that could take high-resolution photos of American cities from space, which can capture even details of a vehicle’s number plate.

According to experts, a Chinese satellite captured photographs of a vast region around a US city in just 42 seconds, crisp enough to recognize a military vehicle on the street and tell what type of weapon it might be carrying.

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