Carbon dioxide is society’s ultimate waste product: We inject billions of tons of it into the air every year. Now, researchers have found two efficient ways to recycle CO2 into energy-rich fuels. # Science MagArchives
Carbon dioxide–splitting techniques could store excess electricity from renewable sources.
The universe is a big place, so when we get beautiful images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, they cover a very small spot in the sky that may not fully represent what the universe at large looks like. To change that, we’re expanding our view by significantly enlarging the area covered around huge galaxy clusters previously seen to get a better look at the universe. Take a look: https://go.nasa.gov/2QAw5hc
SpaceX’s CEO shrugs off 20 years of NASA research.
SORRY, ELON. To be ready for human occupants, Elon Musk has long called Mars a “fixer-upper of a planet.” But according to a new NASA-sponsored study, a better description might be a “tear-down.” The scientists behind that project say it’s simply not possible to terraform Mars — that is, change its environment so that humans can live there without life support systems — using today’s technology.
BUILDING AN ATMOSPHERE. Mars has a super thin atmosphere; a human unprotected on the surface of Mars would quickly die, mostly because there’s not enough atmospheric pressure to prevent all your organs from rupturing out of your body (if you survived a little longer, you could also suffocate from lack of oxygen, freeze from low temperatures, or get fried from too much ultraviolet radiation).
This study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, considers how difficult it would be to increase the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet enough so that humans can walk on Mars’s surface without a pressurized suit and, ideally, without a breathing apparatus.
Posted in cosmology
In the over two-decades-long search for dark matter, scientists so far have come up short. In recent years though, construction of new experiments and upgrades to already existing detectors are giving new hope that we’re closer than ever to understanding dark matter.
One of those new efforts is SABRE, an international collaboration that will house multiple detectors working in tandem in the southern and northern hemispheres: two at Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory, and another at an underground lab in an Australian gold mine.
In episode two of The Most Unknown, Motherboard travels to Gran Sasso National Laboratory with physicist Davide D’Angelo and geomicrobiologist Jennifer Macalady to get an early look at SABRE’s latest phase of development.
Read more about The Most Unknown here: https://vice.video/2CQcMZw
The ancient Aztecs first picked the spot. They built their city atop the huge lakes that filled this valley, leaving the natural freshwater supply intact around them. The city flooded back then too, but the Aztecs, probably the last civilization to properly manage this watershed, built a system of dikes to control the problem.
The “historic mistake” kicked in around the 1600s, when Hernándo Cortés and his band of conquerors arrived. To make room for their expanding empire, over a few hundred years, they slowly but surely drained all the valley’s lakes.
By the 20th century, long after Mexico’s independence from Spain, the fresh surface water was mostly gone and the hunt for new sources had taken over. Hundreds of miles of pipes now bring in about 30 percent of the city’s water needs from faraway rivers and lakes. The rest comes from the valley’s vast underground aquifer.
