If you like sampling new beers or hate having money, you might want to try one of these.
Sapporo’s Space Barley
Price: $110/six-pack
ABV: 5.5%
In 2006, Japanese and Russian scientists tested how well barley could grow in space. They rocketed barley seeds to the International Space Station and planted them aboard the Zvezda Service Module. After spending five … Read More → "10 of the world’s most expensive beers"
Scientifically speaking, the ideal test subject for medical research is the human being. But, for obvious reasons, we resort to the next best option: experimenting on animals. A relatively new trend in research labs, however, seeks to bridge the divide between the ideal human subject and ethical barriers. Researchers are using human tissue to create devices that mimic the three-dimensional realities of organs. These & … Read More → "Gut-an-a-chip, the latest in scientists’ attempt to mimic organs in the lab"
It has been a long road, but electric vehicle maker Tesla is set to ship its first Model S EVs as early as today. The first 10 Signature performance versions of the EV will be picked up by their owners at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. These cars priced between $95,400 and $105,400.
The electric driving range for the Model S is 265 … Read More → "First Tesla Model S cars ready for delivery this week"
Where a crown jewel once stood in NASA’s ambitious plans for human space exploration now lies a decontaminated nuclear grave.
Current laws bar NASA from building or researching fueled nuclear devices. Yet in a bygone era five decades ago, the space agency’s future was dependent on one: the Plum Brook Reactor Facility in Sandusky, Ohio.
NASA turned on its first, last and only nuclear fission test reactor in 1961 to research nuclear-powered airplanes, then eventually nuclear-powered space rockets. But the mounting cost of the Vietnam War and waning interest in manned … Read More → "Tour the tomb of NASA’s first and last nuclear reactor"
3D silicon is all the rage, and now nanowire transistors have further potential to keep Moore’s Law on life support. Researchers at A*STAR have found a way to double the the number of transistors on a chip by placing the atomic-scale wires vertically, rather than in the run-of-the-mill planar mode, creating two “wrap-around … Read More → "Researchers take nanowire transistors vertical, double up on density"
One of the things NASA has long to discover on the moon is the existence of water ice. There have been numerous scientific missions dedicated to the task of discovering ice on the moon. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is now helping scientists to confirm of the existence of water ice on the moon. The discovery was made on the floor of Shackleton crater.
via Read More → "NASA discovers ice in Shackleton crater on the moon"
Michael O’Malley is a “human capital consultant” (whatever that is) but has also been a beekeeper for the past ten years. Here’s what he’s learned about how bees organize themselves and manage risk.
Take, for example, their approach toward the “too-big-to-fail” risk our financial sector famously took on. Honeybees have a failsafe preventive for that. It’s: “Don’t get too big.” Hives grow through successive divestures or spin-offs: They swarm. When a colony gets too large, it becomes operationally unwieldy and grossly inefficient and the hive splits. … Read More → "The risk management strategies of bee hives"
The first invisibility cloaks appeared about a decade ago. Since then, the theory behind these devices and the technology used to implement them has developed at a breathtaking pace.
We’ve looked at ways to make optical cloaks, at self assembling cloaks and even examined’illusion cloaks’ that make one thing look like another.
Today, Darran Milne and Natalia Korolkova at the … Read More → "An invisibility cloak with an on-off switch"
