Some very good news.
Tesla plans to sell its solar panels at a price that’s 38 percent lower than the national average in an attempt to halt the decline of its solar business. The New York Times notes that the head of Tesla’s solar department, Sanjay Shah, wants to sell panels for between $1.75 and $1.99 a watt, compared to the national average of $2.85.
A fully-contained near-Earth asteroid retrieved to cislunar space can be used as a Research and Development destination for resource extraction and engineering tests as space-native material, unaltered by a radical change in environment, in industrial quantity, and in an accessible orbit.
As a geologist and data manager working in petroleum exploration, I’m not qualified to analyze an all-encompassing view of asteroid mining…but maybe I’m qualified to share what I see from my perspective. Rather than looking at all the reasons why asteroid mining is not currently happening, I’d like to dive deep into how changing decision-making perspectives may make a mission possible.
As human activity and accessibility to do business in space broadens, potential demand for resources delivered to space will also increase. Now is the time to start looking at alternative sources of materials to fuel this expansion. Rather than launching everything from Earth, some materials could be sourced from near-Earth asteroids that are energetically easier to reach than our Moon. While mining asteroids for bulk materials like water might be theoretically profitable compared to launch from Earth, the upfront costs so far have been prohibitive. We’ve already seen the first wave of asteroid mining startups come and go. The high cost of technology development and long timescales for return-on-investment have kept commercial asteroid mining missions grounded.
The companies that are leading research into AI in the US and China, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and Tencent, have taken very different approaches to AI and whether to develop technology that can ultimately be used for military and surveillance purposes.
Companies criticised for overruling and even dissolving ethics boards.
Drones might be a favorite toy among adults with significant disposable income, but they’ve also proven to be incredibly useful as tools, and sometimes life-saving ones at that. The latest example of this growing trend comes to us from the University of Maryland Medical Center, where a medical drone delivered a kidney that was subsequently successfully transplanted into a patient.
The delivery, which was documented in a brief YouTube video published by UMMC, is just a small first step in a larger effort to enhance the delivery systems used for vital items like organs and other medical materials.
Last observed in 2015, the black hole is spewing out ‘wobbly’ plasma jets that move so fast they change orientation within minutes.
Some 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation (“The Swan”), a small black hole weighing just nine times the mass of Earth’s sun is gobbling up a sun-like star. The black hole and its stellar victim are locked together in what astronomers call a binary system and orbit each other once every 6.5 days – with spectacular effects, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is reporting.
While the black hole may be relatively tiny as far as these celestial objects go – for instance, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A*, is 4 million times more massive than the sun, per a previous report from The Inquisitr – it does pack a pretty mean punch. Dubbed V404 Cygni, the black hole is continuously siphoning material from its stellar companion, slowly consuming the unfortunate star.
At a glance, meteorites might only be marginally more interesting than regular old rocks, but look closely and they can tell us stories of ancient stars and long-lost planets. One of these stories has now been uncovered in a piece of space rock retrieved from Antarctica, containing grains from a stellar explosion that predates the Sun.
