A large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater on the Moon, the South Pole-Aitken basin, and it may contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater. If this is a massive metal resource then it would make lunar colonization and the industrial development of space …
This week, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found a surprising result: the largest amount of methane ever measured during the mission — about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv). One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane. The finding came …
Bitcoin is trading around $11,000 and other major cryptocurrencies ike ethereum are also up. There seem to be four major driving factors: 1. The bitcoin price spike was led by India. There has been a bitcoin trading of about $500 premium on the few remaining local exchanges as the government cracks down on internet services …
Low-salinity submarine groundwater contained within continental shelves is a global phenomenon. While low-salinity groundwater is thought to be abundant, its distribution and volume worldwide is poorly understood due to the limited number of observations. Researchers have imaged laterally continuous aquifers extending 90 km offshore New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on the U.S. Atlantic margin using …
There are three major competing Quantum computer technologies for qubits. They are nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond lattices, trapped ions, and superconducting qubits. The benefit of trapped-ion systems is that the ions are inherently going to affect one another. They’re easily entangled, plus scientists can turn that interactivity on and off easily so that individual …
Neven’s law says quantum computers are improving at a doubly exponential rate. Dec 2018 – Google’s best quantum computer chip matched up to a laptop Jan 2019 – Google’s best quantum computer chip matched up to a powerful desktop Feb 2019 – Google’s best quantum computer chip was better than any single server and had …
The Carnival of Space 616 is up at Every Day Spacer Universe Today – Black hole simulation solves a mystery about their accretion disks Universe Today – You Can Use a Live Webcam to Watch NASA Build the Mars 2020 Rover Universe Today – The Japanese asteroid-hunter had another photo opportunity when it dropped a …
Carnival of Space 615 is up at Urban Astronomer. Universe Today – Subaru Telescope Sees 1800 Supernovae Japanese astronomers have captured images of an astonishing 1800 supernovae. 58 of these supernovae are the scientifically-important Type 1a supernovae located 8 billion light-years away. Type 1a supernovae are known as ‘standard candles’ in astronomy. A supernova is …
Startup First Light Fusion (FLF) claims it is on target to achieve fusion gain (more energy out than goes in) by 2024. They are not using lasers or intense magnetic fields which can prove to be very complicated and costly to build. Pulsed power is their main technology. They hope to have reduced the cost …
The Universe is 13.7 billion years old. About five billion years ago, an energy field that we call dark energy became important. Dark energy is a repulsive form of gravity, which means that the expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating. After 9 billion years of the expansion of space slowing down, it’s …
Direct Fusion Drive, is a unique fusion engine concept based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The truly game-changing levels of thrust and power in a modestly sized package could integrate with our current launch infrastructure while radically expanding the science capability of these missions. …