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With pollution a major issue for Paris and the city’s public transport bursting at the seams, one start-up has a solution involving the River Seine.

The Bubble, a “flying taxi”, is powered by electricity and lifts out of the water on “wings” – and boasts green credentials such as being noise and pollution-free. It costs around €200,000 to build and can reach speeds of up to 18 knots (20.7mph). Test voyages in Paris are limited to a maximum speed of 18.6mph.

The service could launch as early as spring next year, according to a press release from the Paris mayor’s office. The Seabubbles start-up launched a four-day test run on the Seine on Monday.

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Guppies, a perennial pet store favorite, have helped a UC Riverside scientist unlock a key question about evolution:

Do animals evolve in response to the risk of being eaten, or to the environment that they create in the absence of predators? Turns out, it’s the latter.

David Reznick, a professor of biology at UC Riverside, explained that in the wild, guppies can migrate over waterfalls and rapids to places where most predators can’t follow them. Once they arrive in safer terrain, Reznick’s previous research shows they evolve rapidly, becoming genetically distinct from their ancestors.

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Downloading your brain may seem like science fiction, but some neuroscientists think it’s not only possible, but that we’ve already started down a path to one day make it a reality. So, how close are we to downloading a human brain?

How Close Are We to Fusion Energy? — https://youtu.be/ZW_YCWLyv6A

We’ve Put a Worm’s Mind in a Lego Robot’s Body
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-min…399/?no-is
“A wheeled Lego robot may not look like a worm, but it ‘thinks’ like one after programmers gave it the neuron connections in a C. elegans roundworm”

Crumb of Mouse Brain Reconstructed in Full Detail

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Astronomers have detected the most massive neutron star ever, and it almost shouldn’t even exist.

Neutron stars are the smallest in the universe, with a diameter comparable to the size of a city like Chicago or Atlanta. They are the leftover remnants of supernovae. But they are incredibly dense, with masses bigger than that of our sun. So think of the sun, compressed into a major city.

In the case of the newly detected neutron star, dubbed J0740+6620, it’s 333,000 times the mass of the Earth and 2.17 times the mass of the sun. But the star is only about 15 miles across. It’s 4,600 light-years from Earth.

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Self-driving vehicles will lead to a rise in car sex, according to a new study.

People will be more likely to eat, sleep and engage in on-the-road hanky-panky when robot cars become the new normal, according to research published in the most recent issue of the journal Annals of Tourism Research.

“People will be sleeping in their vehicles, which has implications for roadside hotels. And people may be eating in vehicles that function as restaurant pods,” Scott Cohen, who led the study, told Fast Company magazine.

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A RUSSIAN billionaire is bankrolling a bonkers project to build the world’s first country based entirely in space.

The nation of Asgardia plans to send millions of Earthlings up to live on giant orbiting space arks to escape the chaos as humanity “wipes itself out” in the coming decades.

The Sci-Fi community has its own flag and national anthem, and nearly 300,000 people have signed up to become citizens online.

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SpaceX is making progress assembling its Starship orbital spacecraft prototype, as seen in new photos shared by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. This full-scale testing version of the Starship will take over for the StarHopper, which was a scaled-down version used to test the Raptor engine initially with low-altitude “hop” flights.

The Starship Mk I Prototype and Mk II prototypes, which are under construction simultaneously at SpaceX facilities in South Texas and Florida, will be used to test flights at higher altitudes and higher speeds, and will use as many as three to six Raptor engines simultaneously, versus the single engine used with the StarHopper.

spacex 2

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