You know a new industry is born when investments pour in and results encourage more spending. Now, a new lab, the Collins Electric Aircraft Lab, wants to offer urban air mobility (UAM) and the general electric aviation world a 1MW electric airplane motor.
A prototype of the Starship spacecraft that SpaceX hopes to one day send to Mars has had its second outing, and a hugely successful one at that. The Starhopper completed its second test hop at the company’s Boca Chica test facility in Texas today, reaching its highest altitude yet before returning safely to solid ground.
A fully developed Starship would offer the carrying capacity needed to deliver dozens of people and cargo to the surface of Mars, though there is a long way to go before that happens.
Continue reading “Going up: Watch SpaceX’s Starhopper soar to new heights” »
MOUNTAIN VIEW (KPIX 5) — A Silicon Valley 3D printing company has been awarded a contract with NASA to launch a project creating a satellite that will manufacture and assemble itself in orbit.
A top NASA administrator visited Mountain View’s Ames Research Center Monday and toured state-of-the-art facilities of Made In Space. NASA awarded Made in Space a $73 million contract to launch Archinaut by 2022, an “autonomous robotic manufacturing and assembly platform.”
Jim Bridenstine, the space agency‘s top official, called Ames a “jewel” and praised the work of Made In Space as “impressive.” The manufacturing company 3D prints structures, parts, tools and more while in orbit.
Then again, maybe not.
In a previous post, I explained why quantum mechanics predicts that there are countless versions of you running around in what could be an infinite number of parallel universes.
This time, I’m going to introduce a controversial proposal by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, that uses these parallel universes to argue that you might actually be immortal.
Die neue Batterie von XNRGI verspricht 1.100 Kilometer Reichweite für Elektroautos. Zugleich ist der Akku leichter, günstiger und sicherer — wie geht das?
Who knew?
Not only are the batteries eco-friendly, but they are powerful as well. The researchers found a way to make them last longer and provide more electricity batteries by using silicon anodes — an electrode through which the current enters into an electrical device — instead of traditional graphite.
Continue reading “Researchers have found a way to make electric car batteries from glass bottles” »
A deadly outbreak of “superbug” salmonella sprung up in the US late last year. While this is certainly not the first time drug-resistant bugs have been found in the US, the outbreak marks yet another milestone on the road to a future without antibiotics.
Over 250 people across 32 states fell sick with a strain of Salmonella that’s resistant to multiple antibiotics between June 2018 and March 2019, according to a recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At least two people died from the infection, and a further 60 cases were so severe that they required hospitalization.
The outbreak of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella infections was linked back to beef bought in the US and a “Mexican-style soft cheese” obtained in Mexico. They found that the strain didn’t respond to ciprofloxacin and had “decreased susceptibility” to azithromycin, two of the main antibiotic drugs used to treat Salmonella infections. The unusual strain – known as Salmonella enterica serotype Newport – emerged no later than 2016 and is still continuing to spread among cattle.
It would be much easier to escape Earth’s gravity if you could skip the energy-intensive rockets.
That’s the idea behind the Spaceline, a newly-proposed type of space elevator that would link the Earth and the Moon in a bid drastically cut the cost of space travel.
Described in research published to the preprint server ArXiv by researchers at Columbia University and Cambridge University, the Spaceline would be tethered to the surface of the Moon and dangle down into geostationary orbit around the Earth like a plumb bob, waiting for astronauts to latch on and ride into the cosmos. The proof-of-concept paper found that the Spaceline could be constructed out of materials that exist today, raising the possibility of easier space travel and perhaps even orbital settlements.
