Lifeboat Foundation

A new assessment says the city could have better handled a water crisis this summer, but it still did a lot right.

SpaceX’s CEO shrugs off 20 years of NASA research.

SORRY, ELON. To be ready for human occupants, Elon Musk has long called Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet.” But according to a new NASA-sponsored study, a better description might be a “tear-down.” The scientists behind that project say it’s simply not possible to terraform Mars — that is, change its environment so that humans can live there without life support systems — using today’s technology.

BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE. Mars has a super thin atmosphere; a human unprotected on the surface of Mars would quickly die, mostly because there’s not enough atmospheric pressure to prevent all your organs from rupturing out of your body (if you survived a little longer, you could also suffocate from lack of oxygen, freeze from low temperatures, or get fried from too much ultraviolet radiation).

Continue reading “Scientists Say We Can’t Terraform Mars. Elon Musk Says We Can” »

In the over two-decades-long search for dark matter, scientists so far have come up short. In recent years though, construction of new experiments and upgrades to already existing detectors are giving new hope that we’re closer than ever to understanding dark matter.

One of those new efforts is SABRE, an international collaboration that will house multiple detectors working in tandem in the southern and northern hemispheres: two at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory, and another at an underground lab in an Australian gold mine.

Continue reading “The New Hunt for Dark Matter” »

The ancient Aztecs first picked the spot. They built their city atop the huge lakes that filled this valley, leaving the natural freshwater supply intact around them. The city flooded back then too, but the Aztecs, probably the last civilization to properly manage this watershed, built a system of dikes to control the problem.

The “historic mistake” kicked in around the 1600s, when Hernándo Cortés and his band of conquerors arrived. To make room for their expanding empire, over a few hundred years, they slowly but surely drained all the valley’s lakes.

By the 20th century, long after Mexico’s independence from Spain, the fresh surface water was mostly gone and the hunt for new sources had taken over. Hundreds of miles of pipes now bring in about 30 percent of the city’s water needs from faraway rivers and lakes. The rest comes from the valley’s vast underground aquifer.

Continue reading “Mexico City Keeps Sinking As Its Water Supply Wastes Away” »

A $1 billion NASA mission that will use a laser to track changing ice levels on Earth soared into space early Saturday (Sept. 15), launching into a predawn California sky on a mission that also marked the final flight of a record-setting rocket.

A magnitude-5.6 earthquake has hit near the West Australian town of Walpole, about 430 kilometres south-west of Perth, with tremors felt as far away as Perth and Albany.

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The sheer scale of a series of gas explosions which ripped through three Boston neighbourhoods and killed a teenager became apparent on Friday as it emerged 8,000 people had been evacuated.

Some 70 separate fires, blasts and gas odours were reported during the incident, in which 18-year-old Leonel Rondon was killed by a falling chimney.

Besides healing wounds, this technique could be useful for repairing skin damage, countering the effects of aging, and better understanding skin cancer.