Hasta La Gadget!

Only a handful of men have ever walked on the Moon, and a very limited amount of soil and rock samples have ever returned to Earth. The rarity of these samples means that the vast majority of them are owned by the US and Russian governments –  as the two nations that put men on the moon. On one visit to the Moon in 1970, Russian astronauts collected samples, and brought them home.

On return, some small soil samples were gifted to a woman called Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, who was previously head of the Soviet space program. Now, the samples are up for auction.

The tiny samples are encased under glass with an adjustable lens that can be used for viewing on what appears to be a metal plate with Russian writing on the front. The writing translates to “Soil Particles from Luna-16.” The particles have been identified by scientists as a basaltic central fragment with feldspar crystals, surficial debris called regolith, and glass coatings caused by micro-meteorite impact. Tests show that they contain more than 70 elements and are dated approximately 3.4 billion years old.

As the only known sample of lunar soil in private hands along with the provenance to back it up, these are very valuable. In fact, they last sold at auction in 1993 for $442,500. That buyer is now selling them again and the samples are expected to fetch between $700,000 and $1 million at a Sotheby’s auction called “Space Exploration,” taking place in New York on November 29.

[via Barron’s]

The heat is on in an apparent fight between two e-scooter companies after Lime said earlier this week that some of the batteries made by one of its manufacturers, Segway Ninebot, could catch fire. Now, Segway is squaring up against the allegation, suggesting instead that Lime doesn’t understand how batteries work.

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During BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard launched a brand new animated short for its Overwatch franchise. Dubbed “Reunion”, this seems to be a short focused around McCree, one of Overwatch’s original heroes, and also Ashe, who is one of the new playable heroes that Blizzard announced that would be coming to the game.

Based on this animated short, it seems that both McCree and Ashe seem to know each other and they might even have been friends at one point (although the short does seem to hint at romantic overtones between the characters). They’re both of the gunslinger variety so it does make it a rather fun short to watch, which in a way also serves as an introductory video of sorts for Ashe and B.O.B, her butler/bodyguard companion.

While the title of the short is called “Reunion”, we’re not sure if it necessarily means a reunion between McCree and Ashe. At the end of the short, it reveals a robotic character whom McCree refers to as “partner”, so it could be referring to that as well. It is unclear as to who the new character is and whether or not she will end up being a playable character in the future.

In any case if Overwatch lore is something you’re interested in, then perhaps you might want to set aside a few minutes to check out the latest animated short in the video above.

Overwatch ‘Reunion’ Animated Short Released , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The continuing die-off of the world’s coral reefs is a depressing reminder of the reality of climate change, but it’s also something we can actively push back on. Conservationists have a new tool to do so with LarvalBot, an underwater robot platform that may greatly accelerate efforts to re-seed old corals with healthy new polyps.

The robot has a history going back to 2015, when a prototype known as COTSbot was introduced, capable of autonomously finding and destroying the destructive crown of thorns starfish (hence the name). It has since been upgraded and revised by the team at the Queensland University of Technology, and in its hunter-killer form is known as the RangerBot.

But the same systems that let it safely navigate and monitor corals for invasive fauna also make it capable of helping these vanishing ecosystems more directly.

Great Barrier Reef coral spawn yearly in a mass event that sees the waters off north Queensland filled with eggs and sperm. Researchers at Southern Cross University have been studying how to reap this harvest and sow a new generation of corals. They collect the eggs and sperm and sequester them in floating enclosures, where they are given a week or so to develop into viable coral babies (not my term, but I like it). These coral babies are then transplanted carefully to endangered reefs.

LarvalBot comes into play in that last step.

“We aim to have two or three robots ready for the November spawn. One will carry about 200,000 larvae and the other about 1.2 million,” explained QUT’s Matthew Dunbabin in a news release. “During operation, the robots will follow preselected paths at constant altitude across the reef and a person monitoring will trigger the release of the larvae to maximise the efficiency of the dispersal.”

It’s something a diver would normally have to do, so the robot acts as a force multiplier — one that doesn’t require food or oxygen, as well. A few of these could do the work of dozens of rangers or volunteers.

“The surviving corals will start to grow and bud and form new colonies which will grow large enough after about three years to become sexually reproductive and complete the life cycle,” said Southern Cross’s Peter Harrison, who has been developing the larval restoration technique.

It’s not a quick fix by any means, but this artificial spreading of corals could vastly improve the chances of a given reef or area surviving the next few years and eventually becoming self-sufficient again.

The comedian conjured up the scene following a report claiming Democrats and Republicans have different fantasies.