Group items tagged

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors

Plastic may be with us a lot longer than we thought. In addition to clogging up landfills and becoming trapped in Arctic ice, some of it is turning into stone. Scientists say a new type of rock cobbled together from plastic, volcanic rock, beach sand, seashells, and corals has begun forming on the shores of Hawaii. The Anthropocene might just be on its way

Collecting space rocks.

if a geologist hears you calling them rocks they will curse you collectively. I am in a workshop where some of those are present and I constantly remind myself to call them "minerals".

minerals sound much better indeed ... but what is wrong with rocks ? :-)

Its in italian sorry ... but its worth trying to understand ..basically its how an important italian news channel (TG4) gave the rosetta news ... WOW ... middle ages Basically they say ESA spoilt the magic of comets (jesus birth and similar stuff) revealing to the world that it is just a rock and nothing more spending 100 Meuros in the process.

A pearl of the italian national news channels. A comet is nothing more than a dusty rock. Wow, brilliant, such level of understanding of what is happening! Can we use the typhoon control or some other project to get rid of them? They're so confused and ignorant that it's not even clear what their point is, apart from "spoiling the magic of comets", which is not the case.

What did work in 2010. The Quirky model might be of interest to ACT...

Some great ideas in there. I particularly like the Flattr micropayments system, and find the concept of PayWithaTweet a bit disturbing.

Here we go: we might not need liquid water after all on mars to get some nice flowering plants there! ... and terraform ? :-) Thirsty plants can extract water from the crystalline structure of gypsum, a rock-forming mineral found in soil on Earth and Mars.

Some plants grow on gypsum outcrops and remain active even during dry summer months, despite having shallow roots that cannot reach the water table. Sara Palacio of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca, Spain, and her colleagues compared the isotopic composition of sap from one such plant, called Helianthemum squamatum (pictured), with gypsum crystallization water and water found free in the soil. The team found that up to 90% of the plant's summer water supply came from gypsum.

The study has implications for the search for life in extreme environments on this planet and others.

Nature Commun 5, 4660 (2014)

Very interesting indeed. Attention is to be put on the form of calcium sulfate that is found on Mars. If it is hydrated (gypsum Ca(SO4)*2(H2O)) it works, but if it is dehydrated there is no water for the roots to take in. The Curiosity Rover tries to find out, but has uncertainty in recognising the hydrogen presence in the mineral: Copying : "(...) 3.2 Hydration state of calcium sulfates Calcium sulfates occur as a non-hydrated phase (anhydrite, CaSO4) or as one of two hydrated phases (bassanite, CaSO4.1/2H2O, which can contain a somewhat variable water content, and gypsum, CaSO4.2H2O). ChemCam identifies the presence of hydrogen at 656 nm, as already found in soils and dust [Meslin et al., 2013] and within fluvial conglomerates [Williams et al., 2013]. However, the quantification of H is strongly affected by matrix effects [Schröder et al., 2013], i.e. effects including major or even minor element chemistry, optical and mechanical properties, that can result in variations of emission lines unrelated to actual quantitative variations of the element in question in the sample. Due to these effects, discriminating between bassanite and gypsum is difficult. (...)"

forgot the reference http://www.msl-chemcam.com/doc/documents/577/Nachon%20et%20al%20Calcium%20sulfate%20veins%20characterized%20by%20ChemCam%20Curiosity%20at%20Gale%20Crater%20Mars_2013.pdf

"has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location"

Read before you go to Rijksmuseum;) My fav quote though: "US officials said they had no explanation for the Dutch discovery." I could find one or two...

nice story indeed :-)

Herschel starts to ROCK. At the moment this is the most distant human-made object I've seen with my own eyes ;) Fortunately someone in ESA does some *real* science...

Rock Festival as Human Experiment: Hip Hopping for Science

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form - naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

First really strong evidence that the vestibular system affects sleep architecture, sleep stability and sleep spindles. If there is an effect due to a changing acceleration there might also be an effect of no gravity vector. We'll find out when I get the space shuttle data.

A rocking bed might help you to fall asleep and maintain you in deep sleep!

"The latest idea comes from engineers at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde who suggest that a swarm of laser-wielding satellites could nudge Earth-bound asteroids off their collision course.... One proposed deflection technique involves using lasers to pulverize the surface of the asteroid, ejecting tiny bits of rock that would act as a propellant and push it onto a different course."

Indicators found in 3 billion year old rocks

apparently first time that somebody filmed a meteorite falling after the luminous phase .... impressive pics

I've seen someone suggest it could have been a rock that ended up inside the parachute bag when it was folded, and then fell when the parachute was deployed.

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form-the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle-the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir.