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When six-time Powerboat World Champion Erik Stark climbs aboard a boat, it’s often to rocket toward a gold medal at around 150 mph (240 km/h). But today we’re all getting a chance to go along for a ride as he tests out a very different type of boat: Candela’s electric hydrofoil boat.

The opportunity comes via Stark’s new Team Subtech video where he toured the Candela factory in Stockholm, Sweden.

An extract from Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle.


At the other extreme is the massive Dyson Sphere, theorized by physicist Freeman Dyson – a metallic globe large enough to hold a star at its centre and contain a human population at a sufficient distance from the star to comfortably support their survival. This is a highly theoretical idea and is more of a thought experiment than a workable design, at least with any foreseeable technology.

Concerns have been raised about what kinds of governments might take hold in space settlements, and what possible risks they might face from ever more powerful economic and military establishments back on Earth.

Today, we are on the eve of some truly inspiring prospects for early outposts in the final frontier, places that could become reality with the next two decades.

Circa 2011


This gorgeous, stainless steel and bronze toy car is simply named Toy Car, which seems an appropriately stripped-down name for such a minimalist vehicle. Without a body, or even a cover over the engine, you can see exactly how the car works.

It’s essentially a fancy version of the pull-back-and-go cars found in cereal boxes and kids’ fast-food “meals” everywhere. Pull the car backwards while pushing down and the motion of the turning wheels is stored as energy in a coiled spring inside the big central toothed wheel. Let go and it unwinds, propelling the machine forward. When the spring has fully sprung, a clutch disengages and lets the car roll free.

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Testing teams have successfully completed a critical milestone focused on demonstrating that NASAs James Webb Space Telescope will respond to commands once in space.

Known as a “Ground Segment Test,” this is the first time commands to power on and test Webb’s scientific instruments have been sent to the fully-assembled observatory from its Mission Operations Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Since reliably communicating with Webb when in space is a mission-critical priority for NASA, tests like these are part of a comprehensive regimen designed to validate and ensure all components of the observatory will function in space with the complex communications networks involved in both sending commands, and downlinking scientific data. This test successfully demonstrated the complete end-to-end flow from planning the science Webb will perform to posting the scientific data to the community archive.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has updated the timeline on which he sees batteries enabling electric aircraft coming to maket. He now sees it happening in “3 to 4 years.” Several years ago, Musk, the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, said that he had a design for electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) a…


Featured image: @TomAbbotDavies1/Twitter

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been talking about the electric plane for a long time. He even said he has an electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft project, though he never went into details about plans to launch it into production.

Musk said that in order for his design to work, it is necessary to increase the specific energy of the batteries. He calculated that lithium-ion batteries would need to reach an energy density of 400 Wh / kg for the batteries to outperform kerosene (Jet A) and for his electric plane to be viable.

Summary: An estimated 13.6% of deaths in the U.S could be attributed to dementia. The number is 2.7 times higher than the official reported dementia-related deaths. The underestimation varies greatly by race, with 7.1 times more older Black adults, and 4.1 times more Hispanic adults, dying from dementia that public records indicate.

Source: boston university school of medicine.

Dementia may be an underlying cause of nearly three times more deaths in the U.S. than official records show, according to a new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study.

New simulations show that NASA ’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to reveal myriad rogue planets – freely floating bodies that drift through our galaxy untethered to a star. Studying these island worlds will help us understand more about how planetary systems form, evolve, and break apart.

Astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s. We quickly went from knowing of only our own planetary system to realizing that planets likely outnumber the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Now, a team of scientists is finding ways to improve our understanding of planet demographics by searching for rogue worlds.

“As our view of the universe has expanded, we’ve realized that our solar system may be unusual,” said Samson Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University in Columbus who led the research effort. “Roman will help us learn more about how we fit in the cosmic scheme of things by studying rogue planets.”