ESA is challenging companies in its Member States to design a compact plant to demonstrate the manufacture of oxygen on the Moon. Industrial teams are competing this summer to propose and prove designs through testing, with the winner set to be declared in September. This small piece of technology will evaluate the prospect of building larger plants to produce propellant for spacecraft, air for astronauts and metallic raw materials for equipment.

Paris (AFP) July 28, 2021
The global economy's business-as-usual approach to climate change has seen Earth's "vital signs" deteriorate to record levels, an influential group of scientists said Wednesday, warning that several climate tipping points were now imminent. The researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said that go

Atlanta GA (SPX) Jul 27, 2021
A new wearable brain-machine interface (BMI) system could improve the quality of life for people with motor dysfunction or paralysis, even those struggling with locked-in syndrome - when a person is fully conscious but unable to move or communicate. A multi-institutional, international team of researchers led by the lab of Woon-Hong Yeo at the Georgia Institute of Technology combined wirel

Woods Hole MA (SPX) Jul 28, 2021
In September of 2017, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution postdoctoral scholar Maggie Johnson was conducting an experiment with a colleague in Bocas del Toro off the Caribbean coast of Panama. After sitting on a quiet, warm open ocean, they snorkeled down to find a peculiar layer of murky, foul-smelling water about 10 feet below the surface, with brittle stars and sea urchins, which are usually

Washington DC (AFNS) Jul 28, 2021
Frank Kendall won confirmation from the Senate July 26 to be the 26th Secretary of the Air Force, placing an official with decades-long service in defense issues in the top civilian job at a time when the department is navigating new global challenges and wide-reaching modernization efforts. The vote reflected both Kendall's well-known record in previous active duty and policy jobs and his

New York (AFP) July 26, 2021
US electric carmaker Tesla reported its first-ever quarterly profit above $1 billion Monday as it reiterated its 2021 production targets despite supply chain upheaval. Record deliveries of electric cars during the period allowed Elon Musk's company to garner earnings of $1.1 billion in the quarter, up from $104 million in the year-ago period as revenues nearly doubled to $12.0 billion.

Paris (AFP) July 28, 2021
Imagine a world where you could sit on the same couch as a friend who lives thousands of miles away, or conjure up a virtual version of your workplace while at the beach. Welcome to the metaverse: a vision of the future that sounds fantastical, but which tech titans like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are betting on as the next great leap in the evolution of the internet. The metavers

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 28, 2021
Army Gen. James H. Dickinson said today that the role of the Space Force is to organize, man, train and equip space forces, while Spacecom employs those forces in operations. Both Spacecom and the Space Force were created because of the threat from adversaries in the space domain and the need to protect and defend space assets from those adversaries, he said. Dickinson noted that the

Washington DC (UPI) Jul 28, 2021
Gas, dust and light that get sucked into a black hole are lost forever - so it shouldn't be possible to see light from behind a black hole. But that's just what astronomers spotted while observing a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away. While studying a series of X-ray flares emitted by the black hole, Stanford University astrophysicist

Image: Jupiter mission passes space vacuum test