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Jul 7, 2017

World premiere of the Antarctic greenhouse EDEN-ISS

Posted by in categories: climatology, food, space travel, sustainability

Global food production is one of the key societal challenges of the 21st century. A growing world population with the simultaneous upheaval caused by climate change demand new methods of cultivating crops in regions with unfavourable climates. A closed greenhouse is a good way of growing food in deserts and low-temperature regions – as would be the case on missions to the Moon and Mars – as it permits harvesting regardless of the weather, the Sun and specific seasons. In a closed greenhouse, water consumption is immensely reduced and there is no need for pesticides and insecticides. This kind of model greenhouse will set off for the Antarctic at the end of 2017 for a year of long-term testing under extreme conditions as part of the EDEN-ISS project. Unparalleled elsewhere in the world, this Antarctic greenhouse was presented to the public for the first time at the Bremen site of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) on 7 July 2017.

“DLR is pursuing application-oriented research within the EDEN-ISS project. Its purpose is to bring fresh impetus to food production on Earth and for human space flight,” says Hansjörg Dittus, DLR Executive Board Member for Space Research and Technology. “In doing so, we are advancing the cause of a key technology that will provide a fresh diet to inhabitants of climatically harsh regions – in our case the Antarctic – as well as to astronauts on future long-term missions.”

A year on the eternal ice.

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Jul 7, 2017

A Black Hole Engine to Power a Starship

Posted by in categories: cosmology, space travel

Two scientists have laid out the basic technical specifications of a black hole powered starship.

Credit: SpaceRip

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Jul 7, 2017

Demand for Space Travel Is Out of This World

Posted by in category: space travel

Five of the most interesting ideas of the week, and the stories behind them.

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Jul 7, 2017

The Autonomous Car

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

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Jul 6, 2017

LHC double heavy particle to shine light on strong force

Posted by in categories: particle physics, space

In contrast to other particles of this type, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a particle with two heavy quarks is expected to act like a planetary system, where the heavy quarks are like two stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system.


Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.

The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called “strong force” which holds the centres of atoms together.

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Jul 6, 2017

Finding peace through mindful running — By Amy Chillag | CNN

Posted by in categories: business, human trajectories

“ “I was trained by my coaches that my competitor is my enemy. The truth is, they are my fellow competitors. Without them, there is no competition. We’re striving together.” ”

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Jul 6, 2017

Natural Disaster: 5.8 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Montana, Raising Supervolcano Concerns

Posted by in category: futurism

Yellowstone National Park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, lies on top of a supervolcano that could effectively wipe out the United States if it were to explode. The last time it did, 640,000 years ago, it expelled 240 cubic miles (think about that) of rocky debris into the sky.

Early Thursday morning, residents of southern Montana feared the worst when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the region. Though its epicenter was only 230 miles from Yellowstone, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) says the seismic activity was not irregular, and the supervolcano is not expected to erupt anytime soon.

Related: Yellowstone supervolcano hit by hundreds of earthquakes.

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Jul 6, 2017

Scientists Assert They Will Soon be Able to Edit Human Memories

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers have recently discovered two different types of memory use completely different processes in the same nerves, opening the way for a new pharmaceutical solution for treating anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The find challenges earlier research that had suggested memories of traumatic events used the same nerves in the same ways, making them impossible to physically distinguish.

A team of scientists from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University analysed neurons from a marine snail called an Aplysia in order to test a hypothesis explaining why memories of incidents surrounding a bad experience can themselves trigger anxiety.

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Jul 6, 2017

Amazon’s Alexa has gained 14,000 skills in the last year (AMZN)

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Amazon’s Alexa is gaining knowledge at a rapid clip.

The voice assistant now has more than 15,000 “skills” (Amazon’s term for voice-based apps), nearly all of them created in the little more than two years since Amazon opened Alexa to outside developers. That is boatloads more than the number of apps available for Alexa’s chief rivals, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, according to recent Voicebot data. And all those skills make Alexa able to do more tasks than its peers.

But Amazon’s “arms-wide-open” strategy means that, for every useful skill its assistant gains, it gets three skills dedicated to telling you egg facts. What’s more, Alexa is the dumbest of the major assistants when it comes to answering general knowledge questions, according to a recent study.

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Jul 6, 2017

A Plasma Rocket Engine May Get Us To Mars In 40 Days (Elon Musk, Are You Listening?)

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

In his new book, “To Mars and Beyond — Fast,” seven-time Shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz explains the 40-days-to-Mars high concept in layman’s terms. But will it work?

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