NASA makes prototype ice and water mining lunar robot

NASA has developed a water and ice mining robot for the moon and it is called RASSOR RASSOR, for Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot and pronounced “razor,” the autonomous machine is far from space-ready, but the earliest design has shown engineers the broad strokes of what their lunar soil excavator needs in order to …

Read more

Reaction Engines Targets Skylon Space Plane test flights for 2019 and Cargo Flights to Space by 2022

Culham Science Centre’s Reaction Engines Ltd has carried out successful tests on a revolutionary rocket engine for its Skylon vehicle. The space plane will be able to reach speeds of more than 19,000 miles an hour – which would cut the journey time from London to Australia to just four hours. Reaction Engines hopes to …

Read more

Calorie Restricted Telomerase Enhanced Mice Live Longer and Healthier

Fightaging reports that researchers have tried out calorie restriction (CR) on their transgenic telomerase-enhanced (TgTERT) mice, with a wild-type (WT) control group. Apparently calorie restriction somewhat synergizes with the effects of additional telomerase, and thus calorie restricted TgTERT mice live longer than their ad libitum peers. Beyond that, this is also a study of how …

Read more

Telepresence Robots from $350 to $16000

Several remote telepresence robots have come to market over the past few years, and more are on the way. Shown below are drivable remote telepresence robots from MantaroBot, Vgo, Anybots, and Suitable Technology. A lower cost non-mobile desktop alternative from Revolve Robotics, known as the “Kubi,” is shown at the right. ABI Research has projected …

Read more

Creation of Ghost Illusions Using Metamaterials

Arxiv – The creation of wave-dynamic illusion functionality is of great interests to various scientific communities, which can potentially transform an actual perception into the pre-controlled perception, thus empowering unprecedented applications in the advanced-material science, camouflage, cloaking, optical and/or microwave cognition, and defense security, etc. By using the space transformation theory and engineering capability of …

Read more

NASA Researchers Studying Advanced Nuclear Rocket Technologies

Advanced propulsion researchers at NASA are a step closer to solving the challenge of safely sending human explorers to Mars and other solar system destinations. By using an innovative test facility at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., researchers are able to use non-nuclear materials to simulate nuclear thermal rocket fuels — ones …

Read more

New study shows that Soot is twice as bad for the Environment

A new study indicates that the role in climate change for soot is twice as large as previous estimates. Soot has 66% of the impact of carbon dioxide. Mitigating soot would cost about $6 per ton of CO2 equivalent. CO2 mitigation costs about $100 per ton. Nextbigfuture has frequently written that soot is the most …

Read more

Perspective and Economics of 3D Printers

In 2012, Deloitte predicts that 3D printers will likely become a viable segment in several markets including the $22 billion global power tools market, and the industrial manufacturing market with growth rates of greater than 100 percent versus 2011. 3D printers are also expected to enjoy success in several niche areas such as the “do …

Read more

Regenerating ear hair cells and stem cells to regrow dental pulp and rebuild arteries

1. Medical xpress – Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School researchers demonstrate for the first time that hair cells can be regenerated in an adult mammalian ear by using a drug to stimulate resident cells to become new hair cells, resulting in partial recovery of hearing in mouse ears damaged by noise trauma. …

Read more

Planet Hunting Volunteers Comb Kepler Data to find more Habitable Planet and Moon Candidates

Wired – Volunteers from the Planethunters website have identified 15 new habitable planet candidates among data collected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. One of the 15, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the solar-type star KIC 12735740, has been officially confirmed as a planet (with 99.9 percent certainty). Named PH2 b, it is the second confirmed planet to …

Read more

Mercury damages US$10 to 40 billion per year in Europe alone

A new study calculates that preventing Mercury health damage in Europe could provide an economic benefit of US$10 to 40 billion per year. this will help about 1.8 million children. Coal pollution is a primary cause of mercury emissions The hair-mercury concentrations were the highest in Southern Europe and lowest in Eastern Europe. The results …

Read more