Toggle light / dark theme

There’s no better way to kick-off Day 1 of the 2020 International Mars Society Convention than with a big announcement: SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk will be joining us virtually tomorrow (Friday, October 16th) at 3:00 pm PDT (6:00 pm EDT) [PLEASE NOTE NEW TIME] to provide our global audience with a special update about SpaceX and its plans for the Moon and Mars.

As a world leader in advocating for humanity to become a multi-planetary species, Mr. Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with the goal of creating affordable (reusable) launch vehicles and spacecraft to help open up exploration and settlement of the solar system, including the planet Mars.

To date, SpaceX achievements include the first privately funded liquid propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1, 2008), the first private company to launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft (Dragon, 2010), the first private company to send a spacecraft to the ISS (Dragon, 2012), the first vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9, 2015) and the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the ISS (Crew Dragon Demo-2 Mission, 2020).

Except someone—or, rather, something— can hear: your car. Hearing your angry words, aggressive tone, and raised voice, and seeing your furrowed brow, the onboard computer goes into “soothe” mode, as it’s been programmed to do when it detects that you’re angry. It plays relaxing music at just the right volume, releases a puff of light lavender-scented essential oil, and maybe even says some meditative quotes to calm you down.

What do you think—creepy? Helpful? Awesome? Weird? Would you actually calm down, or get even more angry that a car is telling you what to do?

Scenarios like this (maybe without the lavender oil part) may not be imaginary for much longer, especially if companies working to integrate emotion-reading artificial intelligence into new cars have their way. And it wouldn’t just be a matter of your car soothing you when you’re upset—depending what sort of regulations are enacted, the car’s sensors, camera, and microphone could collect all kinds of data about you and sell it to third parties.

Normally an insulator, diamond becomes a metallic conductor when subjected to large strain in a new theoretical model.

Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic properties, dialing them from insulating, through semiconducting, all the way to highly conductive, or metallic. This can be induced dynamically and reversed at will, with no degradation of the diamond material.

The research, though still at an early proof-of-concept stage, may open up a wide array of potential applications, including new kinds of broadband solar cells, highly efficient LEDs and power electronics, and new optical devices or quantum sensors, the researchers say.