The next-gen TF-X is a four-passenger flying vehicle with collapsible wings and retractable propellers. Continue reading â
Want a flying car, brah?
Just a friendly reminder that the United States, Canada, Japan, the Russian Federation, and eleven Member States of the European Space Agency (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) BUILT A FUCKING INHABITABLE SPACE STATION THAT IS ORBITING OUR PLANET.
Meanwhile, down on Earth: drones, war on drugs, state terrorism, war, pollution, deforestation, climate change, sex slavery, genocide, rape, theft, a 6+ billion human being population bubble dependent on nonrenewable energy consumption and unsustainable chemical agriculture, as well as mass extinction of plant and animal species caused by humans. Can we get our fucking shit together, please?
Is clothing crushing us? Are we trapped in tomb-like textiles, exiling our flesh from experiencing the environment? Are we atrophying our epidermis, our senses, our neuro-intelligence? If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm the skin starves for Vitamin D, the muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion, the nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids? We shroud our entire skin…
Fascinating considerations. The greatest illusion is the illusion of separation. Imagine the myths of artificial beauty in relation to self-worth that advertising consumer empire have created, shattered, because nobody gives a fuck what they look like and we don’t hide under clothes we attempt to define ourselves with.
The emergence of lithic technology by ~2.6 million years ago (Ma) is often interpreted as a correlate of increasingly recurrent hominin acquisition and consumption of animal remains. Associated faunal evidence, however, is poorly preserved prior to ~1.8 Ma, limiting our understanding of early archaeological (Oldowan) hominin carnivory. Here, we detail three large well-preserved zooarchaeological assemblages from Kanjera South, Kenya. The assemblages date to ~2.0 Ma, pre-dating all previously published archaeofaunas of appreciable size. At Kanjera, there is clear evidence that Oldowan hominins acquired and processed numerous, relatively complete, small ungulate carcasses. Moreover, they had at least occasional access to the fleshed remains of larger, wildebeest-sized animals. The overall record of hominin activities is consistent through the stratified sequence – spanning hundreds to thousands of years – and provides the earliest archaeological evidence of sustained hominin involvement with fleshed animal remains (i.e., persistent carnivory), a foraging adaptation central to many models of hominin evolution.
Why antimatter loses out to matter
Rare mesons may be influencing particles, but scientists will have to wait until 2015 to fully test their hypotheses.
Wrapping my mind around this
A religious Pennsylvania couple that’s already serving probation in connection with the 2009 death of their child could face jail time after they chose to pray instead of seeking medical attention for another son, who has also died.
A guy at work just told me he’s “not an ‘evolutionist’”, as if evolution was something to be believed in. Science isn’t faith-based. That’s what makes it science. This is why we can’t have nice things.
The famed inventor believed the solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine
Other than his dietary advice, I can get down on this.
The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery — and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye. The new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.
Friend: Wow, you're pregnant?! Congratulations!
Misanthropist: Wow, you guys had unprotected sex and nature did the rest? I'm so impressed.
Doctor: Congratulations, it's a boy!
Misanthropist: Congratulations, it's a squalling sack of bacteria that is going to mindlessly consume everything in its path and ultimately ruin everything. I know at least 4 species that just went extinct that would have wanted to shake your hand.
The US Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in a case challenging patents on breast and ovarian cancer genes. If the court upholds the company’s right to patent human genes, the course of US medical research could forever be altered.
The case involves the Utah biotech firm Myriad Genetics, which for years has been facing a lawsuit for placing patents on human genes and restricting cancer patients’ treatment options.
We all know IP is bullshit, but this. I don’t even have words.
First Tests For Fusion-Powered Spaceship Propulsion Successful
The fusion driven rocket test chamber at the UW Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond. The green vacuum chamber is surrounded by two large, high-strength aluminum magnets. These magnets are powered by energy-storage capacitors through the many cables connected to them.
University of Washington researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are currently building components of a fusion-powered rocket, which could enable astronauts to travel to Earth’s neighboring planet Mars within weeks instead of months, at speeds considerably faster than feasible until now. The current travel speeds using fuel rockets make Mars travel a journey of about four years but the new fusion technology being tested by researchers at the University of Washington promises that in 30 to 90 days.
The lab tests have proven to be successful on each part of the process and the scientists are now planning to combine the sections into a one final and overall test.
“Using existing rocket fuels, it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. “We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.”
The team has developed a technology using a special type of plasma that will be encased in a magnetic field. When the plasma is compressed with high pressure by the magnetic field, nuclear fusion takes place.
The process has successfully been tested by researchers and they plan on having the first full test to be done by the end of this summer.
In practice the powerful magnetic field causes large metal rings surrounding the plasma to implode which will compress it to the point of fusion. The process takes only a few microseconds but that will be enough to release heat and ionize the rings that form a shell around the plasma. The super-heated ionized metal, in turn, ejects out from the rocket at a high velocity pushing the rocket forward. Repeating the process in intervals of about 30 seconds or more can propel a spaceship.
The research was funded by NASA in hopes that the technology would ultimately replace rocket fuel and yield to much faster spacecrafts that ever built before. Scientist say that just a grain size of the material from the plasma used can equal to a gallon of rocket fuel. That by itself will reduce the size of the spacecraft and the payload considerably making deep space travel much more cost effective.
All I need now is a 3D printer and I’m going to Mars.
Men’s sex chromosome is doomed: scientist
The poorly designed Y chromosome that makes men is degrading rapidly and will disappear, even if humans are still around.
Evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves says while the process is likely to happen within the next five million years it could have begun in some isolated groups.
“As long as something came along it its stead, we would not even suspect without checking the chromosomes,” she told AAP on Tuesday.
Professor Groves, who first made the prediction some years ago, was in Canberra to give a public lecture on the subject for the Australian Academy of Science.
There have been dissenting research papers, but her prediction hasn’t changed.
“Its very bad news for all the men here,” she told her audience.
Prof Graves has been studying sex-determining genes in Australian animals to shed light on human genetics.
“You would think that sex is so important it wouldn’t change a lot. But it changes all over the place and the Y chromosome sort of self-destructs,” she told AAP.
Y is always in the male and active mostly in the testes - making sperm.
That is a “very dangerous” place because there’s a lot of cell division going, she says.
With every split there’s a chance for a mutation or gene loss.
“The X chromosome is all alone in the male, but in the female it has a friend so it can swap bits and repair itself. If the Y gets a hit it’s a downward spiral.”
The X has about 1000 genes left, too many relating to sex and intelligence, she says.
The smaller Y started with about 1700 genes but only has 45 left, and that’s mostly “junk”.
“It is a lovely example of what I call dumb design,” she told AAP.
“It is an evolutionary accident.”
If humans don’t become extinct, new sex-determining genes and chromosomes will evolve, maybe leading to the evolution of new hominid species.
This had happened in the Japanese spiny rat, which had survived the loss of its Y, she said.
Professor Graves is thinker-in-residence at Canberra University’s Institute for Applied Ecology, a distinguished professor at the La Trobe Institute of Molecular Science, an ANU emeritus professor and University of Melbourne Professorial fellow.
