The Inspiration Mars team planning to send a couple on a fly-by mission to Mars in 2018 have an idea of how to protect the astronauts from cosmic rays on the long journey: pack the walls of the spaceship with food, shit, and piss. "Dehydrate (the human waste) as much as possible, because we need to get the water back," team member Taber MacCallum told New Scientist. "Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall… (Also,) food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding." The food he adds, would block the cosmic rays but wouldn't become radioactive itself.
Today in the Mojave desert, Virgin Galactic had a successful test flight that reached 50 miles above the surface of the earth, meeting the Federal Aviation administration’s definition of space. This places the company one step closer to the long-awaited goal Richard Branson promised: space tourism. SpaceShipTwo, welcome to space. — Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December […]
NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe has officially left our solar system and entered interstellar space. Now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft has crossed the boundary of the bubble-like heliosphere around the planets and is no longer touched by the plasma wind from our sun. Voyager 2’s twin Voyager […]
For the first time, we can hear the “sounds” of wind on Mars as captured by the scientific instruments on NASA’s InSight robotic lander. From NASA: “Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California… Two very sensitive sensors on the spacecraft […]
Everybody’s flown a paper airplane. But what if you could fly on a paper airplane? Until we invent shrink-ray technology, the PowerUp X FPV Video Paper Airplane Kit will have to do – but it’s as fun as that sounds and more. The original version of this creative toy added drone tech to the old, […]
Adobe’s design software catalog is essential to any graphics program, as much for their simplicity as their versatility. Anyone can be an effective graphic designer with tools like Illustrator and InDesign – and the right training in their potential. That’s where the Adobe CC A-Z Lifetime Bundle comes in. Whether you’re getting your feet wet […]
Businesses of any size continue to use PDFs despite – and perhaps because of – their stubborn resistance to simple editing. But for those who need a little flexibility on their documentation, the search is over for alternative software. PDF Expert for Mac is the catch-all solution for wrangling those PDFs, and it’s available at […]
