Though chances are Curiosity is going to come up empty-handed as far as living, potentially breathing Martians are concerned, four billion years ago might have told a very different tale. After recently examining meteorites and rocks from Mars, scientists have discovered that not only did Mars once have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, but it was developed over one billion years before Earth’s.
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Rust. It’s the product of metal oxidation, which we interpret as everything from a ruined car to a highly sought antique patina. And for this week’s Shooting Challenge, you’ll capture the beauty (or horror) of rust.
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Take away all of the water, cities, and roads on Earth’s surface, and you’re left with nothing but patches of lush, lovely green. These are exactly the kinds of pictures that the Suomi NPP satellite from NASA and the NOAA, produce. The satellite tracks only the planet’s vegetation, and the video above covers the shift in one full calendar year. It’s amazing how much change takes place in such a short period of time.
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It’s a great time for Lego: there’s going to be a movie based on the building bricks, and the company just announced its latest set. As a part of Lego’s Cuusoo project, fans are able to send in designs and ideas for future Lego sets, and the Mars Curiosity rover won this round, beating out
We often hear about the coming nanobot revolution, but just how are scientists planning on powering these future marvels? Well, researchers from Harvard and the University of Illinois may have found the solution in a 3D-printed battery: it’s smaller than a grain of sand, yet has areal energy and power densities comparable to your cellphone battery. The team used a custom 3D printer with a 1mm wide nozzle to deposit two separate lithium metal oxide pastes into comb-like shapes, which then hardened to create an anode and cathode. After adding an electrolyte, a sub-hair-width cell was created with “performance comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy densities.” Those could someday wind up in medical devices, wearable electronics or tiny flying drones, for instance. To see how they did it, check the video after the break.
Filed under: Science
Via: Gigaom
It looks dangerous—because it is—but there’s more to fire breathing than meets the eye. In order to do it safely, you need to think about the science involved, and this video explains why.
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NASA has been aggressive about identifying near-Earth objects that could pose a threat to our planet in the future, as well as pursuing ideas to deal with space rock aimed at Earth. It has taken its efforts to the next level with its new Grand Asteroid Challenge, which was announced at the space agency’s headquarters
Scanadu clearly knows to tap into our collective Star Trek dreams, as the company just reached $1 million in funding for its Scout tricorder. The backing so far comes from people in 91 countries, including luminaries like Eugene Roddenberry (who else?) and Steve Wozniak. That figure is more than symbolic, we’d add — backers who’ve paid for a Scout can now get theirs in black rather than a clinical-looking white. Should the new color option prove tempting, it’s not necessarily too late; as of this writing, there’s still a few days left to make a pledge.
Filed under: Household, Science
Source: Indiegogo
A cheetahs can be a very scary animal. With chases that are often over in less than a sixty seconds you probably do not want face a real one. But what about a robot cheetah? A robot that is modeled after the cheetah is currently in development may be used for search and rescue in the future.
It’s not everyday you get to tour CERN, the international particle physics research facility that spans the border of both France and Switzerland. It’s even more rare to go down into the sprawling facility’s tunnels to see an inactive and under repair Large Hadron Collider — currently, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. But that’s just what we did this past week, as we spent some quality time with CERN’s physicists and visited the dormant LHC, as well as two of its detectors: ALICE and CMS (pictured above). There’ll be much more to come from our trip to CERN, so stay tuned. But for now feast your eyes on the birthplace of the Higgs Boson discovery.
Filed under: Science
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