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 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.

Back in 2017 during BlizzCon 2017, the company officially announced that they will be launching servers dedicated to hosting the vanilla version of World of Warcraft, also known as World of Warcraft Classic. However Blizzard did caution that the game could take a while to be launched, and it looks like players will still need to wait a bit.

If you were hoping that the game and its servers would be going live anytime soon, you will be disappointed to learn that during BlizzCon 2018, the company announced that World of Warcraft Classic will only be launching come summer of 2019. No specific dates were mentioned, which means that players could potentially be waiting until September 2019 before they’ll be able to play the game.

There have been many players who feel that Blizzard’s been making the game too “easy” over the years. It is understandable why they might do that, because they might be trying to encourage new players to join the game to help boost subscriptions, although some veteran players feel that this ends up spoon feeding players.

Fans eventually created their own vanilla servers which Blizzard shut down, although it seems that some good came out of that as Blizzard recognized the demand for it. Whether or not this translates into actual active players remains to be seen.

World Of Warcraft Classic Will Launch In Summer 2019 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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 former president spoke at a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.