ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Is this the future of gardening? U.S. students have created a prototype autonomous machine (pictured) that not only cuts grass in a specified area, but uses the waste cuttings to power itself - potentially saving gardeners both time and money

изгледа да је џон брунер лансирао успешну експедицију у 2010.
stand on zanzibar (хуго 1969) има веома интересантне моменте:

Quote
Stand on Zanzibar is that rarity among science fiction novels — it really made accurate predictions about the future. The book, published in 1969, is set in the year 2010, and this allows us to make a point-by-point comparison, and marvel at novelist John Brunner's uncanny ability to anticipate the shape of the world to come.  Indeed, his vision of the year 2010 even includes a popular leader named President Obomi — face it, Nate Silver himself couldn't have done that back in 1969!
Let me list some of the other correct predictions in Brunner's book:
(1) Random acts of violence by crazy individuals, often taking place at schools, plague society in Stand on Zanzibar.
(2) The other major source of instability and violence comes from terrorists, who are now a major threat to U.S. interests, and even manage to attack buildings within the United States.
(3) Prices have increased sixfold between 1960 and 2010 because of inflation. (The actual increase in U.S. prices during that period was sevenfold, but Brunner was close.)
(4) The most powerful U.S. rival is no longer the Soviet Union, but China. However, much of the competition between the U.S. and Asia is played out in economics, trade, and technology instead of overt warfare.
(5) Europeans have formed a union of nations to improve their economic prospects and influence on world affairs. In international issues, Britain tends to side with the U.S., but other countries in Europe are often critical of U.S. initiatives.
(6) Africa still trails far behind the rest of the world in economic development, and Israel remains the epicenter of tensions in the Middle East.
(7) Although some people still get married, many in the younger generation now prefer short-term hookups without long-term commitment.
(8 ) Gay and bisexual lifestyles have gone mainstream, and pharmaceuticals to improve sexual performance are widely used (and even advertised in the media).
(9) Many decades of affirmative action have brought blacks into positions of power, but racial tensions still simmer throughout society.
(10) Motor vehicles increasingly run on electric fuel cells. Honda (primarily known as a motorcycle manufacturers when Brunner wrote his book) is a major supplier, along with General Motors.
(11) Yet Detroit has not prospered, and is almost a ghost town because of all the shuttered factories. However. a new kind of music — with an uncanny resemblance to the actual Detroit techno movement of the 1990s — has sprung up in the city.
(12) TV news channels have now gone global via satellite.
(13) TiVo-type systems allow people to view TV programs according to their own schedule.
(14) Inflight entertainment systems on planes now include video programs and news accessible on individual screens at each seat.
(15) People rely on avatars to represent themselves on video screens — Brunner calls these images, which either can look like you or take on another appearance you select — "Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere."
(16) Computer documents are generated with laser printers.
(17) A social and political backlash has marginalized tobacco, but marijuana has been decriminalized.

остатале мање успешне путнике кроз време можете видети овде

NASA laying foundation for Jupiter moon space mission

Potential Jupiter moon Europa visit still faces daunting financial gauntlet




NASA recently began laying out the groundwork for the technology it will need to fly an unmanned mission to Jupiter's intriguing moon Europa.

Scientists say Europa - which orbits the planet Jupiter about 778 million km (484 million miles) from the Sun - could support life because it might have an ocean of liquid water under its miles-thick frozen crust.  NASA said in December the Hubble Space Telescope observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-laying-foundation-jupiter-moon-space-mission

Eto kako se ostvaruje predviđanje SF pisca sa naše radionice...
Jes' da mi niko nije dao bodove i da priča niš' ne valja, ali je zato vizionarska... 

Još onda smo znali da će teško biti skupiti pare.

[size=0.9375rem]This visualization, created by UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Parker, is one of the most beautiful representation of alien worlds we've ever seen.[/size]




http://space.io9.com/this-is-the-prettiest-visualization-of-keplers-planets-1590318125/1591056577/+rtgonzalez

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Astronauts to Reveal Sobering Data on Asteroid Impacts
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/111278/astronauts-to-reveal-sobering-data-on-asteroid-impacts/#ixzz34o7WTgrs











How 3D bioprinting is changing the world: Photos of 10 great projects

Next Mars Rover Will Make Oxygen from CO2



The spacecraft, due in 2020, will have a reverse fuel cell to produce oxygen for fuel—or to breathe


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/next-mars-rover-will-make-oxygen-from-co2/

Tiny, Vast Windows Into Human DNA









http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/science/human-fly-worm-dna.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/17_million_year_old_giant_sperm_discovered_and_it_was_preserved_in_a_very_strange_way/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Scientists' depressing new discovery about the brain



Forget the dream that education, scientific evidence or reason can help people make good decisions



This article originally appeared on Alternet.

AlterNet

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan's new research paper is called "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government," but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney's piece about it in Grist:  "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math."

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people's ability to think clearly.  His conclusion, in Mooney's words: partisanship "can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.... [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs."

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions.  It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn't the real problem.  The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are.  We want to believe we're rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no.  When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/17/the_most_depressing_discovery_about_the_brain_ever_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Australian scientists have created a tractor beam that can move particles up to 20 centimetres

Physicists have developed the first ever long-distance optical tractor beam, and it can both repel and attract objects.


A functional tractor beam, like the kind used in the Star Wars films to pull ships in, is one of those sci-fi technologies that scientists dream about. And scientists from the Australian National University are a step closer to creating one that can both repel and attract objects.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142110-26371.html

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has sent home several spectacular images that show a large pyramid-shaped boulder studding the surface of its target comet.

Rosetta mission team members have named the 82-foot-tall (25 meters) boulder on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko "Cheops," after the largest pyramid in Egypt's famous Giza complex. The rock is much smaller than its namesake, however, which rises 456 feet (139 m) into the Egyptian sky.

Rosetta first photographed Cheops upon arriving in orbit around Comet 67P in early August. Over the past few weeks, the probe has taken close-up pictures and several wide-angle views that highlight the rock and its surrounding boulder field.


http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/1014/Bizarre-pyramid-on-comet-How-did-it-get-there-video

Science Graphic of the Week: How Magic Mushrooms Rearrange Your Brain

Brain-to-brain interface via Internet replicated, improved




University of Washington researchers have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team's initial demonstration a year ago, reported on KurzweilAI.

In the newly published study, which involved six people (instead of two), researchers were able to transmit the signals from one person's brain over the Internet and use these signals to control the hand motions of another person within a split second of sending that signal.

In the 2013 study, the UW team was the first to demonstrate two human brains communicating in this way. The recent more-comprehensive study was published Wednesday (Nov. 5) in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

"The new study brings our brain-to-brain interfacing paradigm from an initial demonstration to something that is closer to a deliverable technology," said co-author Andrea Stocco, a research assistant professor of psychology and a researcher at UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. "Now we have replicated our methods and know that they can work reliably with walk-in participants."

Collaborator Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, is the lead author on this work.

The research team combined two kinds of noninvasive instruments and fine-tuned software to connect two human brains in real time. One participant is hooked to an electroencephalography machine that reads brain activity and sends electrical pulses via the Web to the second participant, who is wearing a swim cap with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil placed near the part of the brain that controls hand movements.

Using this setup, one person can send a command to move the hand of the other by simply thinking about that hand movement.

The UW study involved three pairs of participants. Each pair included a sender and a receiver with different roles and constraints. They sat in separate buildings on campus about a half mile apart and were unable to interact with each other in any way — except for the link between their brains.

Each sender was in front of a computer game in which he or she had to defend a city by firing a cannon and intercepting rockets launched by a pirate ship. But because the senders could not physically interact with the game, the only way they could defend the city was by thinking about moving their hand to fire the cannon.

Across campus, each receiver sat wearing headphones in a dark room — with no ability to see the computer game — with the right hand positioned over the only touchpad that could actually fire the cannon. If the brain-to-brain interface was successful, the receiver's hand would spontaneously twitch, pressing the touchpad and firing the cannon that was displayed on the sender's computer screen across campus.

The researchers found that accuracy varied among the pairs, ranging from 25 to 83 percent. Misses mostly were due to a sender failing to accurately execute the thought to send the "fire" command. The researchers also were able to quantify the exact amount of information that was transferred between the two brains.

Another research team from the company Starlab in Barcelona, Spain, recently published results in the same journal showing direct communication between two human brains, but that study only tested one sender brain instead of different pairs of study participants and was conducted offline instead of in real time over the Web.

'Nanomotor lithography' provides simpler, affordable nanofabrication


Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego recently invented a new lithography method for creating nanoscale electronic and medical devices, using nanorobots (nanomotors) that are chemically powered, self-propelled, and magnetically controlled.

These nanorobots swim over the surface of light-sensitive material to create complex surface patterns.

Their research, published recently in the journal Nature Communications, offers a simpler and more affordable alternative to the high cost and complexity of current state-of-the-art nanofabrication methods, such as electron beam writing, the researchers say.

Led by distinguished nanoengineering professor and chair Joseph Wang, the team developed, the team's proof-of-concept study demonstrates the first nanorobot swimmers able to manipulate light for nanoscale surface patterning. The new strategy combines controlled movement with unique light-focusing or light-blocking abilities of nanoscale robots.


"All we need is these self-propelled nanorobots and UV light," said Jinxing Li, a doctoral student at the Jacobs School of Engineering and first author. "They work together like minions, moving and writing and are easily controlled by a simple magnet."

As scientists invent devices and machines on the nanoscale, there is new interest in developing unconventional nanoscale manufacturing technologies for mass production.

State-of-art lithography methods such as electron beam writing are used to define extremely precise surface patterns on substrates used in the manufacture of microelectronics and medical devices.

These patterns form the functioning sensors and electronic components such as transistors and switches packed on today's integrated circuits.

Li was careful to point out that this nanomotor lithography method cannot completely replace the state-of-the-art resolution offered by an e-beam writer, for example.

However, the technology provides a framework for autonomous writing of nanopatterns at a fraction of the cost and difficulty of these more complex systems, which is useful for mass production.

Wang's team also demonstrated that several nanorobots can work together to create parallel surface patterns, a task that e-beam writers cannot perform.

The team developed two types of nanorobots: a spherical nanorobot made of silica that focuses the light like a near-field lens, and a rod-shape nanorobot made of metal that blocks the light. Each is self-propelled by the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide fuel solution.

Two types of features are generated: trenches and ridges. When the photoresist surface is exposed to UV light, the spherical nanorobot harnesses and magnifies the light, moving along to create a trench pattern, while the rod-shape nanorobot blocks the light to build a ridge pattern.

"Like microorganisms, our nanorobots can precisely control their speed and spatial motion, and self-organize to achieve collective goals," said professor Joe Wang.

His group's nanorobots offer great promise for diverse biomedical, environmental and security applications.

Joe Wang is the director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and holds the SAIC endowed chair in engineering.

A possible alternative to antibiotics



Scientists from the University of Bern have developed a novel substance for the treatment of severe bacterial infections without antibiotics, which would prevent the development of antibiotic resistance.


Ever since the development of penicillin almost 90 years ago, antibiotics have remained the gold standard in the treatment of bacterial infections. However, the WHO has repeatedly warned of a growing emergence of bacteria that develop antibiotic resistance. Once antibiotics do no longer protect from bacterial infection, a mere pneumonia might be fatal.

Alternative therapeutic concepts which lead to the elimination of bacteria, but do not promote resistance are still lacking.

A team of international scientists has tested a novel substance, which has been developed by Eduard Babiychuk and Annette Draeger from the Institute of Anatomy, University of Bern in Switzerland. This compound constitutes a novel approach for the treatment of bacterial infections: the scientists engineered artificial nanoparticles made of lipids, "liposomes" that closely resemble the membrane of host cells. These liposomes act as decoys for bacterial toxins and so are able to sequester and neutralize them. Without toxins, the bacteria are rendered defenseless and can be eliminated by the cells of the host's own immune system. The study will be published in Nature Biotechnology Nov 2.

Artificial bait for bacterial toxins

In clinical medicine, liposomes are used to deliver specific medication into the body of patients. Here, the Bernese scientists have created liposomes which attract bacterial toxins and so protect host cells from a dangerous toxin attack.

"We have made an irresistible bait for bacterial toxins. The toxins are fatally attracted to the liposomes, and once they are attached, they can be eliminated easily without danger for the host cells", says Eduard Babiychuk who directed the study.

"Since the bacteria are not targeted directly, the liposomes do not promote the development of bacterial resistance", adds Annette Draeger. Mice which were treated with the liposomes after experimental, fatal septicemia survived without additional antibiotic therapy.


http://phys.org/news/2014-11-alternative-antibiotics.html#ajTabs

Discovery of Oldest DNA Scrambles Human Origins Picture


The bones were first thought to belong to European Neanderthals, but analysis showed they are genetically closer to the Siberian Denisovans.




http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131204-human-fossil-dna-spain-denisovan-cave/

Ancient Computer Even More Ancient Than We Thought

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ancient-computer-even-more-ancient








The astonishing Antikythera mechanism is even older than previously suspected, new research suggests. Instead of being "1500 years ahead of its time," it may have been closer to 1800.

The mechanism was found in 1901 in the wreck of a ship that sank in the Aegean Sea around 60 BC. Though its origins are unknown, it could be used to calculate astronomical motion, making it a sort of forerunner to computers.

The sheer sophistication of the device makes it mysterious, being more advanced than any known instrument of its day – or for centuries thereafter. Even with parts missing after spending such a long time in the briny deep, it was examined to have at least 30 gears. This is perhaps why for many, it represents the pinnacle of technology of the ancient world and what was lost during the Dark Ages.

If devices such as this had survived, Kepler might have found the task of explaining the orbits of the planets far easier to achieve. Although the makers likely would not have understood why the moon slowed down and sped up in its orbit, they were sufficiently aware of the phenomenon. In fact, the mechanism mimics it precisely.

One of the mechanism's functions was to predict eclipses, and a study of these dials indicates it was operating on a calender starting from 205 BC.

Estimates of the mechanism's date of manufacture have gradually been pushed back, starting with the year in which it sank. The device was housed in a box, which has engravings dated to 80 to 90BC, but the lettering appears consistent with a date of 100 to 150BC.

However, in The Archive of History of Exact Sciences, Dr. Christian Carman of Argentina's National University of Quilmes and Dr. James Evans of the University of Puget Sound believe they have identified the solar eclipse that occurs in the 13th month of the mechanism's calender. If so, this would make its start date, when the dials are set to zero, May 205BC.

Carman and Evans add, "We also examine some possibilities for the theory that underlies the eclipse times on the Saros dial and find that a Babylonian-style arithmetical scheme employing an equation of center and daily velocities would match the inscribed times of day quite well. Indeed, an arithmetic scheme for the eclipse times matches the evidence somewhat better than does a trigonometric model."

While the device might theoretically have been built with a starting date set many years before its construction, doing so would have reduced its usefulness. Precise as the mechanism is, errors naturally accumulate, reducing its accuracy and suggesting its makers would not have wanted to start it too far in the past.

Speculation about the origins of the Mechanism has often focused on Archimedes, if not as the inventor then at least as the inspiration for its creation. However, the Babylonia influence makes this unlikely, despite the starting date being just seven years after his murder.

To gain some idea of the Antikythera mechansim's complexity, consider this Lego recreation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk

The Cretaceous era was a truly terrifying place, with galloping crocodiles capable of giving the better-known dinosaurs a run for their money. A documentary on the giant crocodiles of the era will screen on December 20th.

In 2009, National Geographic expeditions to Morocco and Niger revealed three new species of 100-million-year-old crocodiles, formally described in Zookeys.

The first specimen unearthed of Kaprosuchus saharicus would have been 6.5-meters-long (21 feet). Combined with three sets of sharp tusks and a snout that could probably have been used as a sort of battering ram, this must have been the stuff of nightmares for the beasts of the time. While it is thought that K. saharicus fed mainly on dinosaurs, our ancestral mammals probably had plenty of reason to be afraid.




Laganosuchus thaumastos grew to a similar size, but its flat head appears to have been more suited to ambush attacks on passing fish.

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/galloping-crocodiles-ate-dinosaurs-north-africa

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/orion-capsule-returns-to-earth-after-dramatic-test-flight/


Boosted to an altitude of 3,604 miles by a powerful Delta 4 rocket, NASA's Orion deep space exploration vehicle fell back to Earth Friday in the program's maiden voyage, slamming into the atmosphere at nearly 20,000 mph, enduring a hellish 4,000-degree re-entry and settling to a Pacific Ocean splashdown to wrap up a critical unmanned test flight.

Navy recovery crews and NASA personnel stationed near the landing zone quickly moved into position to recover the spacecraft and its three huge parachutes, along with quick-look video of the capsule's heat shield. Recorded video and data from more than 1,200 sensors will be recovered after the spacecraft is hauled back to port in San Diego.

But elated engineers said the Exploration Flight Test 1 -- EFT-1 -- mission appeared to go off without a hitch.

"It's hard to have a better day than today," said Mark Geyer, the NASA program manager.

"It was a lot of fun, very exciting, each part of the mission. Part of the reason it's exciting is it's a difficult mission, it's a tough environment to fly through, tough objectives we set for this flight. But it appears that Orion and the Delta 4 were nearly flawless. Great job by the team."

Mike Hawes, the senior manager with Orion-builder Lockheed Martin, said he started with NASA in the early days of the shuttle program when many Apollo engineers still worked at the space agency.

"So we've kind of now finally done something for the first time for our generation," he reflected, choked with emotion, during a post-splashdown news conference. "It's a good day."

As if following a script, the Orion test craft sailed through one test objective after another, blasting off on time atop the heavy-lift Delta 4 after a variety of countdown delaysThursday, successfully jettisoning structural panels and a launch abort tower during the climb to space and then enduring extreme space radiation as it flew through and then beyond the Van Allen belts.

Live television views near the top of the spacecraft's trajectory provided spectacular shots of Earth from an altitude some 14 times higher than the International Space Station, the highest point any spacecraft designed to carry astronauts has reached since the final Apollo moonshot more than 40 years ago.

Appropriately enough, a small lunar soil sample made the trip back into orbit aboard Orion along with a part from an Apollo lunar suit and a variety of other mementos, including a "Star Trek" Captain Kirk action figure and an assortment of flags, medallions, patches and pins, according to collectSPACE.

Falling back to Earth after separation from the Delta 4's second stage, the Orion capsule's flight computer fired thrusters to properly orient the spacecraft for re-entry and the spacecraft plunged into the discernible atmosphere 75 miles above the Pacific Ocean around 11:18 a.m. EST (GMT-5).

на неки начин и ово припада овде

Rosetta results: Comets 'did not bring water to Earth'

Quote
Scientists have dealt a blow to the theory that most water on Earth came from comets.
Results from Europe's Rosetta mission, which made history by landing on Comet 67P in November, shows the water on the icy mass is unlike that on our planet.
The team found that there was far more heavy water on Comet 67P than on Earth.
David Shukman reports on the findings....

The brainwaves of a parasitic roundworm are now driving a Lego robot.






When you think about it, the brain is really nothing more than a collection of electrical signals. If we can learn to catalogue those then, in theory, you can upload someone's mind onto a computer, allowing them to live forever as a digital form of consciousness, just like in the Johnny Depp film Transcendence.

But it's not just science fiction. Sure, scientists aren't anywhere near close to achieving such  feat with humans (and even if they could, the ethics would be pretty fraught), but now an international team of researchers have managed to do just that with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans.

C. elegans is a little nematodes that have been extensively studied by scientists - we know all of their genes and their nervous system has been analysed many times.

Now a collective called the OpenWorm project has mapped all the connections between the worm's 302 neurons and managed to simulate them in software, as Marissa Fessenden reports for the Smithsonian.

The ultimate goal of the project is to completely replicate C. elegans as a virtual organism, but for now, they've only managed to simulate its brain, and they've now uploaded that into a simple Lego robot.

This Lego robot has all the equivalent limited body parts that C. elegans has - a sonar sensor that acts as a nose, and motors that replace its motor neurons on each side of its body.

Amazingly, without any instruction being programmed into the robot, the C. elegans brain upload controlled and move the Lego robot.

Lucy Black writes for I Programmer:

"It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward."

This video of the Lego-worm-robot was released by Timothy Busbice, a founder of OpenWorm, showing it moving, stopping and then travelling backwards.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQnzylhgHc


Of course, the brain simulation still isn't exact - for one, the researchers had to simplify the process that triggers an artificial neuron to fire. But the fact that this robot can move, stop before it bumps into something and reverse using nothing more than a network of connections that mimic a worm's brain, is pretty incredible.

Scientists are now working out how to map all the connections in the human brain - something called the connectome. Even if we're not uploading our brains into computers, just being able to simulate a human brain would help to revolutionise artificial intelligence and computers.

And if we could one day get to the point where we can somehow get our minds to escape the vulnerable fleshy meat sacks that currently house them, the opportunities would, quite literally, be mind-blowing.


http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-scientists-have-put-a-worm-s-brain-into-a-lego-robot-s-body-and-it-works

The Search for Starivores, Intelligent Life that Could Eat the Sun

There could be all manner of alien life forms in the universe, from witless bacteria to superintelligent robots. Still, the notion of a starivore—an organism that literally devours stars—may sound a bit crazy, even to a ​seasoned sci-fi fan. And yet, if such creatures do exist, they're probably lurking in our astronomical data right now.

That's why philosopher Dr. Clement Vidal, who's a researcher at the Free University of Brussels, along with Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick, futurist John Smart, and nanotech entrepreneur Robert Freitas are soliciting scientific proposals to seek out star-eating life. Vidal, who coined the term starivore in a paper he wrote in 2013, is the first to admit how bizarre it sounds. Yet he insists that some of the most profound scientific discoveries have come about by examining natural processes through a radically different lens.

"Newton did not discover new gravitational bodies: He took a different perspective on a phenomena and discovered new things exist," Vidal told me. "It might well be that extraterrestrial intelligence is already somewhere in our data. Re-interpreting certain star systems as macroscopic living things is one example."

Simple forms of life may be strewn all over universe, but if we ever discover intelligent aliens, they'll probably vastly outstrip us in technology and intellect. It's impossible to say exactly how a hyper-advanced civilization would live, but one very likely feature—according to the handful of scientists who ponder such matters—is their ability to harness tremendous quantities of energy.

"Our civilization produces minuscule amounts of energy—a trillion times less than the power produced by the sun," Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard University's astronomy department, told me. "You can imagine that some advanced civilization would be able to harness the entire energy of its host star. The question is, how would they do it?"

Is star-eating life one possible answer? That may depend on how we actually define life. Vidal's starivores call for a definition free of our terrestrial biases (that life will require carbon, oxygen, water and so forth). But metabolism—the controlled conversion of matter to energy and expulsion of waste—is, by definition, common to all living organisms. And, it so happens, there are a number of stellar bodies in the universe that display similar behaviors, including certain binary stars.

"Energy flow, a maintenance of an internal organization and an exportation of entropy, all appear to be present in some binary systems," Vidal writes in his PhD thesis, which was published as a book last year.

Which is to say, what astronomers may have taken to be two massive balls of plasma locked in a gravitational embrace could actually be a very large, very hungry civilization devouring a hapless star.

Now, not all binary star systems behave even remotely like metabolic systems. Contact binaries vigorously exchange matter and energy, but the process is unstable, while detached binaries don't appear to exchange matter at all. But in certain semi-detached binary systems, energy flows from one star to another in a controlled manner, while gas is expelled regularly via novae or jets. It's this latter sort of binary system, Vidal argues, that may be hiding some form of metabolism—perhaps belonging to intelligent life.

Strictly speaking, Vidal's idea is not entirely new. In the 1953 novel The Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon envisioned an advanced civilization that feeds off the energy of an artificial star, in a binary system constructed to fuel an endless journey through space. Vidal also takes inspiration from Dyson spheres, hypothetical megastructures that encircle stars and soak up nearly all their energy.

But intriguing as it sounds, the notion of advanced life masquerading as a star faces a major hurdle: Some way of empirically proving or disproving the presence of intelligence.

"The difficulty with this idea, like any other idea for advanced intelligence, is in finding signals," Loeb said. "If we knew what to look for, we would have found it already."

Vidal agrees. "Obviously, the confirmation or refutation of this idea is over my head. It needs to be a team effort, composed of high energy astrophysicists and astrobiologists."

Whether any researchers decide to take up the starivore challenge remains to be seen. But it'd be shortsighted to write off the possibility. After all, new searches for life's techno-signatures—waste heat, industrial pollution and even Dyson spheres—are bubbling forth from the astronomical community.

And if Vidal happens to be right, well, that would pretty much change the way we conceive of the universe. We could have thousands of starivores in our galaxy alone.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/starivores-intelligent-life-that-could-eat-the-sun

To Find Aliens, We Should Look for Industrial, Polluted Wastelands


The subject of extraterrestrial life tends to bring out both our inner utopianists and dystopianists. In fiction, aliens are usually depicted as either extremely cute and benevolent (E.T.-style) or ruthless planet pillagers (Kaiju-style).

Still, both extremes have one thing in common: The alien characters show basic competence when it comes to ensuring the survival of their race. They may lose their kids on other planets as with E.T., and they may underestimate that priceless Smith/Goldblum chemistry, but they aren't as fundamentally self-destructive as our own species.

But as it turns out, aliens saddled with comparable foibles to humanity might be the easiest for us to find. At least, that's what researchers based out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics speculate in a study announced today. The team suggests for signs of specific industrial pollutants in the atmospheres of exoplanets could help streamline the search for alien life.

"We consider industrial pollution as a sign of intelligent life, but perhaps civilizations more advanced than us, with their own SETI programs, will consider pollution as a sign of unintelligent life since it's not smart to contaminate your own air," said lead author Henry Lin in Harvard's statement.

Admittedly, this concept of screening exoplanets for signs of industrial waste is not entirely new. Astronomers have searched for telltale megastructures like Dyson spheres in the spectrums of distant stars, while others have suggested looking for artificial debris used for mining.

What sets the Harvard team's approach apart, however, is its focus on using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to specifically detect chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in exoplanet atmospheres.

The JWST is currently scheduled for launch in 2018, and it will have the ability able to root out CFCs—but only in very specific conditions. As in: only on Earth-sized planets with at least 10 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth that also orbit white dwarf stars.

That narrow set of parameters will allow the chemical signal of CFCs to be maximized to levels that the JWST can pick out. Looking for CFCs on exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars will require a much more advanced telescope, so for now we're stuck with whatever weird civilizations are polluting up a storm on their pressurized exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs.

Of course, it's natural to raise the question of what we would even do if we found such a civilization. Some might be skeptical about reaching out to another unhinged society with self-destructive tendencies. But then again, there's that theory that, to quote Bill Watterson's Calvin, "the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." It might be nice to have a pal in the same boat.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/to-find-aliens-we-should-look-for-industrial-polluted-wastelands

Physicists achieve superconductivity at room temperature


German researchers have figured out how to put a piece of ceramic in a superconducting state at room temperature - no cooling required.

Physicists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter have kept a piece of ceramic in a superconducting state, disproving the widely-held assumption that materials need to be cooled to temperatures of at least -140 degrees Celsius to achieve superconductivity.

Superconducting materials have the potential to change everything that relies on electrical power, such as power grids, transportation, and renewable energy sources. This is because they're able to transport electric currents without any resistance, which means they're incredibly efficient and cost-effective to run. Except right now, they're not, because in order to get a material to a superconducting state, it needs to be cooled to near absolute zero temperatures, which has really hampered the potential of this technology up to this point.

Over the past few decades, scientists have come to realise that metals cooled to temperatures of around -273 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen or helium aren't the only materials capable of reaching a superconducting state. During the 1980s, it was discovered that ceramic materials can reach this state at significantly higher (and yet still extremely cold) temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius. This is why they're called high-temperature superconductors.

One such ceramic material, called yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), has since been singled out, thanks to its great potential for use in a range of technical applications such as superconducting cables, electrical motors, and generators. Made from super-thin double layers of a copper oxide material stacked in-between layers made from barium, copper and oxygen, this material is designed to allow the bonding of electrons into what's known as Cooper pairs,  the team reports in a press release.

These Cooper pairs of electrons are able to 'tunnel' between the alternating layers "like ghosts can pass through walls, figuratively speaking - a typical quantum effect," they report, but it was thought this could only occur at super-cooled temperatures.

But then the physicists from Max Planck decided to see what would happen if they irradiated the YBCO ceramic material with infrared laser pulses. They found that for a fraction of a second, the ceramic becomes superconducting at room temperature. And when we say "a fraction of a second", we mean a fraction. "It was only a few millionths of a millisecond," says Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo. "That's a very, very brief lifespan for our amazing new room temperature superconductor. However, the successful experiment is proof that such a thing is possible."

The team suspects this is because the pulses from the laser cause individual atoms in the crystal lattice structure of the ceramic to shift momentarily, which increases the superconductivity of the material.

The team explains the results in a press release from the Max Planck Institute:

"The infrared pulse had not only excited the atoms to oscillate, but had also shifted their position in the crystal as well. This briefly made the copper dioxide double layers thicker - by two picometres, or one hundredth of an atomic diameter - and the layer between them became thinner by the same amount. This in turn increased the quantum coupling between the double layers to such an extent that the crystal became superconducting at room temperature for a few picoseconds."

Publishing the results in the journal Nature, the team hopes the discovery will help drive the potential of superconductor technology in the future. "It could assist materials scientists to develop new superconductors with higher critical temperatures," said lead researcher, physicist Roman Mankowsky. "And ultimately to reach the dream of a superconductor that operates at room temperature and needs no cooling at all."

http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-achieve-superconductivity-at-room-temperature

intermeco...

When these 3D printed sculptures are spun, they come alive. The master behind these works of art, John Edmark, teaches design at Stanford University. They were created using the Fibonacci Sequence, which occurs naturally in nature in objects like pine cones, flowers and seashells, who knew math could be so stunning and hypnotic?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nom7NiTLrFg#t=13

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope recently discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star within the habitable zone of our galaxy. Kepler-186f is approximately 500 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation.

The habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, is the region around a star within which planetary-mass objects with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water at their surfaces. While it has been estimated that there are at least 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in our Milky Way Galaxy, this particular discovery is labeled the first Earth-sized planet to be found in the habitable zone of another star.





http://in5d.com/scientists-discover-another-earth/

NASA has its sights set on a visit to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, where astrobiologists believe there could be possible extraterrestrial life forms.

"For the first time in the history of humanity we have the tools and technology and capability to potentially answer this question. And, we know where to go to find it," Kevin Hand, a NASA astrobiologist, said last year.

Getting a closer look could soon be a reality. The $18.5 billion NASA budget recently proposed by the White House for next year includes money earmarked "for Planetary Science including formulation of a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa."








Under its icy shell, Europa, one of the many moons orbiting Jupiter, has an interior ocean that could perhaps be ten times deeper than those on Earth, and include two to three times the volume of all liquid water on our planet, according to Hand.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nasa-mission-europa-search-extraterrestrial-life/story?id=28719191&cid=fb_wn



http://io9.com/were-going-to-europa-1683721134?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, on approach to dwarf planet Ceres, has acquired its latest and closest-yet snapshot of this mysterious world.

At a resolution of 8.5 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel, the pictures represent the sharpest images to date of Ceres.

After the spacecraft arrives and enters into orbit around the dwarf planet, it will study the intriguing world in great detail. Ceres, with a diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), is the largest object in the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The framing cameras were provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, built by Selex ES, and is managed and operated by the Italian Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. The gamma ray and neutron detector was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.

For more information about Dawn, visit:


http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.earthporm.com/woman-spent-last-14-years-photographing-worlds-oldest-trees/

3D Printing: The Future Is Now

Ever sketched a design idea on paper and wondered what it might look like if it could be brought to life? An earring design, a pendant, perhaps? A sculpture, or special widget? Or even a house plan?


One of the greatest challenges faced by artisans, entrepreneurs and small business operators is turning an idea into a tangible product. Often, the task of moving from concept to a functional prototype can be so difficult, many great ideas simply remain just that - ideas.




A Printing Revolution




3D printing is not really that new, it's just newly affordable. It popularity was confined to the world of engineering, architecture and manufacturing until the last few years. That all changed with the introduction of relatively low-cost 3D-pirinters, and the wider availability of 3D-printing software, online how-to guides and thousands of practical applications. This convergence has sparked a 3D printing revolution, fuelled by mainstream media interest and growing popularity with consumers and small businesses. Today, 3D printing is one of the most hyped advancements in the technology arena.



Why? 3D printing puts the power of affordable prototyping and short-run manufacturing into everyone's hands. With one machine and a digital design, 3D printers can build a three-dimensional object of virtually anything right on the spot. It can allow jewelry designers, for example, to go from flat sketch to an exact physical model in just hours.


Driving Innovation




A relatively sophisticated, 3D printer can cost between $2,500 and $5,000. Cruder models are available for as little as $300-$400. This is giving rise to a growing community - from individual inventors and creative types, to nascent businesses - exploring the potential of 3D printing. They are driving innovation beyond the novelty of uniquely made printed objects.




Now, boutique engineering and manufacturing firms as well as aspiring inventors and innovators can afford to offer clients physical mockups and models of design concepts. Do-it-yourselfers can print replacement parts for common household items such as washers, picture-frames and light-fixtures.




In Sierra Leone, David Sengeh a 27-year-old doctoral student is using 3-D printing and advanced math to create a new kind of artificial limb he believes can significantly improve the lives of amputees in Sierra Leone and across the rest of the world. Earlier this year, NASA announced that it would be sending a test 3D printer to the International Space Station to allow astronauts the ability to print their own spare parts.




Business models are evolving as well. A number of companies are emerging that enable anyone to upload a design to a website and order and receive their 'prints'. Companies like Sculpteo and Shapeways take it even further. They help promote and sell products in a 3D marketplace. They will take the orders, print it and send it to interested buyers. You collect the profit from your designs. This opens a world of possibility for creative types who would typically be stymied by the hurdles of traditional manufacturing and sales processes.




These types of innovation create unique opportunities and threats for a broad range of industries. Companies can take advantage of the local 3D printing and use it to create cheaper, more responsive supply chains.

http://www.3d-print.today/?categoryId=29888&itemId=52085

Living forever as robot? Prototype lets humans upload their mind into mechanized 'heads'




An Artificial Intelligence pioneer is embracing the controversial idea of uploading the memories, thoughts and feelings of a living person into a computer to create a Mind Clone or "second self." The prototype for this new self is called 'Bina-48'.

Entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt has created a new robotic head that she hopes, one day in the future, humans will be able to upload their minds into. Bina-48 is named after Rothblatt's real-life wife, Bina Aspen, and serves as a proof-of-concept for the futuristic idea. The robot version is designed to carry on a conversation, with scientists hoping that these mind clones could give human owners a sort of artificial afterlife.

"I believe Mind Clones will be humanity's biggest invention. The market opportunity is limitless," Rothblatt told Bloomberg News. "Ultimately – just like we all want a smart phone, we all want a social media account – we are all going to want a Mind Clone. It will make everything in our life more useful, more valuable. It will give us twice as much time to do everything."

http://rt.com/usa/229811-mind-clones-robot-afterlife/

Today, Leonardo da Vinci is renowned for being one of the Renaissance's most illustrious polymaths – but back in the
late 15th Century, the artist, inventor and all-around genius still had to job hunt like the rest of us. And yes, his resume was... intimidating.

Photos: Europe's Rosetta Comet Mission in Pictures

mali apdejt za Ceres:


(Reuters) - A U.S. space probe slipped into orbit around Ceres, a miniature planet beyond Mars believed to be left over from the formation of the solar system, NASA said on Friday.

Launched in 2007, the Dawn spacecraft made a 14-month tour of the asteroid Vesta before steering itself toward Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn shifted its path to allow itself to be captured by Ceres' gravity at 7:39 a.m. EST, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet.

"We feel exhilarated," lead researcher Chris Russell at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement after Dawn radioed back to Earth.

NASA's New Horizons probe is scheduled to fly by another dwarf planet, Pluto, in the far reaches of the solar system later this year. Like Ceres, Pluto was once considered a full-fledged planet, but was reclassified after the discovery of similar bodies.

Dawn will spend about a month repositioning itself from its initial orbit about 38,000 miles (61,000 km) above Ceres to the first survey altitude of 2,730 miles (4,400 km).

By the time the mission ends in June 2016, Dawn will have flown as low as 230 miles (375 km) above the surface.

Scientists already have a mystery to solve. Last month as Dawn neared Ceres, it relayed images of startlingly bright spots on the surface, which could be patches of subsurface ice exposed after an asteroid or comet impact. They also could be deposits of salt or other minerals.

"These spots were extremely surprising," Dawn scientist Carol Raymond of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters on Monday.

Scientists suspect Ceres may have had an underground ocean early in its history that later froze. Europe's Herschel telescope last year detected water vapor around Ceres, a clue that impacting bodies may periodically send plumes of watery material shooting into space. Dawn will try to confirm those findings.

The mission, which is costing NASA about $473 million, is the first to include stops at more than one extraterrestrial body.

Dawn is outfitted with an ion electric propulsion engine, which requires far less fuel that traditional chemical engines.

The spacecraft was designed and built by Orbital ATK (OA.N).

No new pictures of Ceres are expected until April when Dawn will be able to see the sunlight side of its new home.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/06/us-space-ceres-dawn-orbit-idUSKBN0M21QC20150306

Man undergoing head transplant could experience something 'a lot worse than death', says neurological expert



Yesterday, 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov volunteered to become the first person in the world to undergo a complete head transplant. Literally his entire head. On a different body.



The operation will be carried out by Italian surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero, in what he expects to be a 36-hour procedure involving 150 doctors and nurses.

A Werdnig-Hoffmann disease sufferer with rapidly declining health, Spiridonov is willing to take a punt on this very experimental surgery and you can't really blame him, but while he is prepared for the possibility that the body will reject his head and he will die, his fate could be considerably worse than death.

"I would not wish this on anyone," said Dr Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons.

"I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."

The problem is, fusing a head with a separate body (including spinal cord, jugular vein etc) could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity.

Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Centre, who described Dr Canavero as "nuts", believes that the bodies of head transplant patients "would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they'd go crazy."

A head transplant was performed on a monkey 45 years ago in 1970. It lived, but only for eight days, with the body rejecting the new head and the monkey being left unable to breathe and unable to move because the spinal cord of the head and body were not connected properly.

Dr Canavero hopes to complete the operation in 2017.

NASA Posts a Huge Library of Space Sounds, And You're Free To Use Them

EVAGo Pro

This footage was taken by U.S. astronaut Terry Virts during two spacewalks (EVAs) on the International Space Station on February 25, 2015 and March 1, 2015.

How China Entered the Space Race

China's space program once cribbed from other agencies. Now it's vaulting ahead of them.

Project HAVOC: NASA Concept Could Explore Venus with Airships

najpre - zalazak sunca na Marsu 



"NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity. The image comes from the left-eye camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam)."

If you look closely, you can see Tars Tarkas leading a tribe of Tharks into battle  (ludi boingboing)



a onda:

NASA Announces Bold Plan To Still Exist By 2045

према овом чланку, изгледа да би експедиције требало слати директно у олују, а онда, рецимо, жњети позитроне, онда те позитроне у контролисаним условима спојити са електронима, по могућству изнад или на територији неке непријатељске земље

но, (оправдани) сарказам на страну - A Plane Took a Wrong Turn and Ended Up in a Cloud of Antimatter виа гизмодо

Quote
Where the hell did the antimatter come from? That's what atmospheric scientist Joseph Dwyer has been trying to figure out for the past six years, after his research plane accidentally flew through a thunderstorm into a cloud of antimatter in 2009.

Dwyer's plane was outfitted to detect atmospheric gamma-rays (or γ-rays), high-energy photons that can be caused by cosmic rays colliding into the atmosphere or by intense lightning storms. Here's what happened on that stormy day in 2009, as recounted by Nature:

QuoteIt was to study such atmospheric γ-rays that Dwyer, then at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, fitted a particle detector on a Gulfstream V, a type of jet plane typically used by business executives. On 21 August 2009, the pilots turned towards what looked, from its radar profile, to be the Georgia coast. "Instead, it was a line of thunderstorms — and we were flying right through it," Dwyer says. The plane rolled violently back and forth and plunged suddenly downwards. "I really thought I was going to die."

But Dwyer survived and his particle detector ended up detecting three 511-kiloelectronvolt gamma-rays spikes. Here's another thing you should know about gamma-rays: They can also be the result of an electron colliding with its antiparticle, a positron. Particles of matter and antiparticles of antimatter have the same mass but opposite properties such as charge, and they instantly annihilate when their counterparts collide, turning into things like gamma-rays. As our universe is made of matter, the presence of antimatter is usually fleeting.

And the 511 kiloelectronvolt gamma-ray spikes were a smoking gun for electron-positron annihilation. A few more calculations led Dwyer to the conclusion that the plane was surrounded by a small cloud of positrons.

But where did these positrons, the antimatter, come from? Intense thunderstorms can indeed produce positrons, but other data from this storm led the scientists to rule that explanation out. Same with cosmic rays, which should have caused other types of radiation to show up in the data.

Dwyer ended up publishing his results after failing to come up an explanation. But Nature reports he is now planning to send balloons and even another plane into a thunderstorm to collect more data and get to the bottom of the mysterious antimatter.

NASA Challenges Designers to Construct Habitat for Deep Space Exploration

NASA and the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, known as America Makes, are holding a new $2.25 million competition to design and build a 3-D printed habitat for deep space exploration, including the agency's journey to Mars.


The multi-phase 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge, part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, is designed to advance the additive construction technology needed to create sustainable housing solutions for Earth and beyond.


Shelter is among the most basic and crucial human needs, but packing enough materials and equipment to build a habitat on a distant planet would take up valuable cargo space that could be used for other life-sustaining provisions. The ability to manufacture a habitat using indigenous materials, combined with material that would otherwise be waste from the spacecraft, would be invaluable.


The first phase of the competition, announced Saturday at the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, runs through Sept. 27. This phase, a design competition, calls on participants to develop state-of-the-art architectural concepts that take advantage of the unique capabilities 3-D printing offers. The top 30 submissions will be judged and a prize purse of $50,000 will be awarded at the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York.


"The future possibilities for 3-D printing are inspiring, and the technology is extremely important to deep space exploration," said Sam Ortega, Centennial Challenges program manager. "This challenge definitely raises the bar from what we are currently capable of, and we are excited to see what the maker community does with it."


The second phase of the competition is divided into two levels. The Structural Member Competition (Level 1) focuses on the fabrication technologies needed to manufacture structural components from a combination of indigenous materials and recyclables, or indigenous materials alone. The On-Site Habitat Competition (Level 2) challenges competitors to fabricate full-scale habitats using indigenous materials or indigenous materials combined with recyclables. Both levels open for registration Sept. 26, and each carries a $1.1 million prize.


Winning concepts and products will help NASA build the technical expertise to send habitat-manufacturing machines to distant destinations, such as Mars, to build shelters for the human explorers who follow. On Earth, these capabilities may be used one day to construct affordable housing in remote locations with limited access to conventional building materials.


"America Makes is honored to be a partner in this potentially revolutionary competition," said Ralph Resnick, founding director of America Makes. "We believe that 3D printing/Additive Manufacturing has the power to fundamentally change the way people approach design and construction for habitats, both on earth and off, and we are excitedly awaiting submissions from all types of competitors."

NASA's potential squid rover is straight out of sci-fi

 Critical Shit on the spot:



On the Taxonomy of Spaceships

NASA's New Horizons Sees More Detail as It Draws Closer to Pluto

What a difference 20 million miles makes! Images of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are growing in scale as the spacecraft approaches its mysterious target. The new images, taken May 8-12 using a powerful telescopic camera and downlinked last week, reveal more detail about Pluto's complex and high contrast surface

Miniature origami robot self-folds, walks, swims, blows our minds

https://youtu.be/f0CluQiwLRg

Here Are The 9 Instruments We'll Use To Reveal The Secrets Of Europa

Memories emerge intact from cryogenic resurrection machine