Space Perspective raises $40M for balloons that can take people into space

Billed as the world’s first luxury spaceflight experience, Cape Canaveral-based Space Perspective argues that you can enjoy the thrill of space exploration without having to endure a multi-g-force ride on a rocket. Instead, a balloon the size of a football stadium will take you up gently to the edge of the atmosphere, 20 miles above the Earth. There, you can snap pictures that show the view of Earth from space, including the curvature of the planet.

- @gadget_news

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Adorable Crab Encased in Amber Is Among The Oldest True Crabs Ever Found

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#space Lockheed Martin together with Nanoracks, and Voyager Space plan to build Starlab commercial space station by 2027. The purpose of Starlab is to carry out a wide variety of activities, including general science, materials research, plant growth, astronaut training, and tourism.

In its current iteration, it consists of a large inflatable habitat module and a metallic docking node. It will have a volume of 340 m3 (12,000 ft3) and four solar arrays totaling 60 kW.

It will support a permanent crew of four astronauts plus visitors.

Starlab will deploy from one single launch in 2027.

Source: Nanoracks.

- @science -

Energy-harvesting nanogenerator inspired by swaying seaweed

If you've ever taken a peek below the surface of the ocean, you'll have seen seaweed waving back and forth in the current. Scientists from China's Dalian Maritime University have now utilized that same motion in an underwater energy-harvesting device.

https://youtu.be/XuVKRhRMogY

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The Pupil in Your Eye Can Perceive Numerical Information, Not Just Light

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The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/41/e2021636118

For the first time, a vaccine designed to prevent triple negative breast cancer is being studied in humans. The researchers explain this early phase clinical trial: https://youtu.be/3iNB5NxWI9A

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Physicists Finally Made The Weird 'Superionic Ice' That Could Exist on Alien Worlds

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Sun-Powered Prototypes That Harvest Water From The Air Could Help Billions of People

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No Tricks, Only Treats: Huge Solar Flare May Mean Super-Charged Auroras For Halloween

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Microbes could be used to make rocket fuel on Mars

A team of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with a concept that would see bacteria shipped to Mars produce rocket fuel and liquid oxygen from atmospheric CO2 to power a spacecraft on its return journey to Earth.

Around the end of the decade, a rocket will lift off from Mars containing about half a kilogram (1 lb) of geological samples collected by NASA's robotic Perseverance rover. Though the rocket will only be sending the samples and their container into Mars orbit for retrieval by another spacecraft for the trip home, it will weigh about 880 lb (400 kg), with most of that taken up by the solid rocket fuel needed for the ascent.
To cut down on costs and free up payload space for something more useful than fuel for the return trip, the Georgia Tech team wants to use cyanobacteria and genetically engineered E. coli to produce an alternative fuel, which is used on Earth to make synthetic rubber and other polymers.

Lucy: The First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids

During the course of its mission, Lucy will fly by seven Jupiter Trojans. This time-lapsed animation shows the movements of the inner planets (Mercury, brown; Venus, white; Earth, blue; Mars, red), Jupiter (orange), and the two Trojan swarms (green) during the course of the Lucy mission.
Time capsules from the birth of our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago, the swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. The Trojans orbit the Sun in two loose groups, with one group leading ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trailing behind. Clustered around the two Lagrange points equidistant from the Sun and Jupiter, the Trojans are stabilized by the Sun and its largest planet in a gravitational balancing act. These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.
Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojans.

Some news from Mars: https://www.inverse.com/science/organic-molecules-found-on-mars-for-the-first-time

Scientists may have made a giant leap in fighting the biggest threat to human health by using supercomputing to keep pace with the impressive ability of diseases to evolve.

A new study by an international team, co-led by Dr Gerhard Koenig from the University of Portsmouth, tackled the problem of antibiotic resistance by redesigning existing antibiotics to overcome bacterial resistance mechanisms.

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Getting Enough Sleep? New Study May Be a Wake-Up Call For Those Who Doze This Long

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Autonomous robotic rover helps scientists with long-term monitoring of deep-sea carbon cycle and climate change.

The sheer expanse of the deep sea and the technological challenges of working in an extreme environment make these depths difficult to access and study. Scientists know more about the surface of the moon than the deep seafloor. MBARI is leveraging advancements in robotic technologies to address this disparity: https://youtu.be/Nqe6tKIn628

An autonomous robotic rover, Benthic Rover II, has provided new insight into life on the abyssal seafloor, 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the surface of the ocean. A study published today in Science Robotics details the development and proven long-term operation of this rover. This innovative mobile laboratory has further revealed the role of the deep sea in cycling carbon. The data collected by this rover are fundamental to understanding the impacts of climate change on the ocean: https://youtu.be/lM8j0rQlAuo

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Brain Implant Translates Paralyzed Man's Thoughts Into Text With 94% Accuracy

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Storing energy in plants with electronic roots

The researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University investigated the possibility of using the roots to store energy, and built a root-based supercapacitor in which the roots functioned as electrodes during charging and discharging.
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-energy-electronic-roots.html

Facebook is no longer Facebook, but Meta. And what does capitalism have to do with it?

The essence of Facebook's rebranding is in the name. It reflects the new goals of the entire company and shows its transition from a simple social network to a Metaverse. You've probably already read what Zuckerberg's Metaverse is (all news portals in all languages of the world have written about it at least a couple of times in the last couple of weeks).

And here's an idea worth discussing: the metaverse can save the humanity from big conflicts that emerge from the usual development of the human society. Here's an explanation in the video (english): https://youtu.be/YvPOshlZXBg .

Basically, humanity has been developing for centuries according to the capitalist model, providing itself with new markets through various types of colonization. But, since there is nothing left to colonize, in the literal sense of the word (economically or militarily) (the Russian Federation + a couple of other countries), the drive for finding new markets should inevitably lead to a major conflict. For some reason, the Russian Federation and the remaining two or three states do not want to become colonies. And Zuckerberg sees that. His metaverse, which global business hasn't yet colonized, opens up phenomenal opportunities for the continued development of capitalism. These opportunities, in their scope and scale, are quite comparable to the colonization in the time of Columbus.

What does this mean for you and me? There is a chance that there would not be any major troubles on planet Earth for the next number of years.

However, it seems like in the nearest decades the rapid climate change will become our biggest problem.

SpinLaunch's rocket-free kinetic launch system conducts first test flight

SpinLaunch has been developing its alternative launch system since 2015, imagining a future where satellites and spacecraft can escape the Earth's atmosphere with zero emissions. It aims to achieve this with the help of a giant accelerator powered by an electric drive that it says could cut fuel use by four times and the costs by 10 times compared to traditional rocket launches, while also firing multiple payloads into orbit each day.
Initially, it is pursuing these ambitions through its Suborbital Accelerator. This consists of an upright disc-shaped, vacuum chamber that uses a carbon fiber tether to whip a projectile around to speeds of up to 8,047 km/h, before releasing it through a launch tube and upward through the atmosphere.
https://www.spinlaunch.com/