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Feb 23, 2018

A Little Robotic Submarine Could Ply Alien Seas

Posted by in categories: alien life, robotics/AI

NASA is designing a robot submarine to explore the ultrachilly, hydrocarbon-filled seas on Saturn’s moon Titan — the only body in the solar system, apart from Earth, with liquid on its surface. Researchers have been testing the probe with a bucket-sized mock alien ocean in a lab.

The seas of Titan are very different from their counterparts on Earth: instead of seawater, Titan’s seas consist mainly of a frigid mixture of methane and ethane, at a temperature of around minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 184 degrees Celsius). That’s what NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and its Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in 2005, found.

The plan is to send the autonomous submarine into the largest sea on Titan. called Kraken Mare, from the name of a Scandinavian sea-monster and the Latin word for “sea,” the extraterrestrial sea covers 155,000 square miles (400,000 square kilometers) of the moon’s surface. (The second-largest sea on Titan, about a quarter the size of Kraken, is Ligeia Mare, named after one of the monstrous sirens of Greek mythology.) [See Photos of Titan’s Oceans].

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Feb 23, 2018

Bigelow Aerospace Reveals Plans For Space Hotels

Posted by in category: space travel

The rise of commercial spaceflight companies such as SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace sparked the age of space tourism as the ultra-wealthy became able to buy a ticket for a rocket ride into space. Of course, there is a huge limit on tourism if there isn’t a place to stay in one’s intended destination, but that’s about to change in space. Bigelow has announced plans to build two space stations that will float in low-Earth orbit. The company has big plans for these space stations and ideas about who might pay to use them. Essentially, the stations will be like orbiting space hotels where astronauts and possibly even tourists might stay one day.

In a press release this week, Bigelow Aerospace announced that it has created a spin-off venture called Bigelow Space Operations, which will operate and manage two space stations that will serve as hotels. The company expects to launch both hotels in 2021, and it’s beginning to work toward building them this year. Bigelow describes the two space stations as “the largest, most complex structures ever known as stations for human use in space.”

The two stations are currently being referred to as B330-1 and B330-2, and they aren’t the only two that Bigelow Space Operations plans to build. The two space stations are inflatable and will provide shelter for up to six people in low-Earth orbit with about 12,000 cubic feet of living space.

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Feb 23, 2018

Two-way communication is possible with a single quantum particle

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

One photon can transmit information in two directions at once.

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Feb 23, 2018

Mini lab-created organs successfully check cancer treatments

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Lab-grown tumor tissue matched response of the patient’s tumor to cancer treatment.

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Feb 23, 2018

Laptops with 5G connectivity coming next year

Posted by in categories: computing, internet

Intel partners with Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

Intel has partnered with four major PC makers to bring 5G technology to laptops by the end of next year.

The chip giant is working with Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Lenovo to bring 5G connectivity to PCs with Intel’s XMM 8000 series modems.

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Feb 23, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Life After Death Technologies — Nation Swell

Posted by in categories: aging, bioengineering, biotech/medical, cryonics, futurism, genetics, health, life extension, science, transhumanism

http://nationswell.com/life-after-death-technologies/

Feb 23, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Good Men Project — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, bioengineering, biotech/medical, DNA, genetics, health, life extension, neuroscience, science, transhumanism

https://goodmenproject.com/business-ethics-2/guys-saving-wor…ship-kldg/

Feb 23, 2018

How ‘Cultural Evolution’ Can Give Us the Tools to Build Global-Scale Resilience

Posted by in category: evolution

There’s an unsettling premise at the heart of Joe Brewer’s life’s work.

Brewer is a change strategist dedicated to ensuring a thriving global civilization exists 100 years from now—and he believes this is becoming less likely every year. There’s rising instability in our fragile and rapidly changing biosphere, he says, and society is unlikely to escape harm.

“We are going through a period of planetary change, and there is a collapse dynamic that’s already happening. The global scale social complexity we have today is at risk, and we may lose it,” he told me in a conversation for Singularity Hub.

Continue reading “How ‘Cultural Evolution’ Can Give Us the Tools to Build Global-Scale Resilience” »

Feb 23, 2018

CERN scientists get antimatter ready for its first road trip

Posted by in categories: climatology, cosmology, particle physics

Antimatter is notoriously tricky to store and study, thanks to the fact that it will vanish in a burst of energy if it so much as touches regular matter. The CERN lab is one of the only places in the world that can readily produce the stuff, but getting it into the hands of the scientists who want to study it is another matter (pun not intended). After all, how can you transport something that will annihilate any physical container you place it in? Now, CERN researchers are planning to trap and truck antimatter from one facility to another.

Antimatter is basically the evil twin of normal matter. Each antimatter particle is identical to its ordinary counterpart in almost every way, except it carries the opposite charge, leading the two to destroy each other if they come into contact. Neutron stars and jets of plasma from black holes may be natural sources, and it even seems to be formed in the Earth’s atmosphere with every bolt of lightning.

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Feb 23, 2018

Meet the scientists running to transform Congress in 2018

Posted by in category: government

But first, science candidates must win their races. Most face long odds. For starters, voters may be impressed by a candidate’s scientific credentials, but such background is rarely a decisive factor when they go to the polls. In addition, most of this year’s STEM candidates are political novices who are starting out far behind their opponents when it comes to knowing how to run a professional campaign.


House races feature unusual upsurge in entrants with technical backgrounds.

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