Lifeboat Foundation

Mr. Bezos introduced reporters to Blue Origin for the first time on Tuesday, offering updates on his space tourism plans and a new engine that is being developed.

Private space company Blue Origin expects it will launch its first human test flights into space in 2017.

Here’s how scientists think we could turn Mars into Earth 2.0…

Not a great time to be living on Mars, me thinks. wink

Space is so metal.

“The goal of the yearlong expedition is to better understand how the human body reacts to microgravity for long durations. Researchers say they hope the data acquired in this mission will help them figure out how to send humans on even longer missions, like one to Mars, which would take two-and-a-half years, roundtrip.”

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Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are a source of endless fascination. But despite a decade of observations, not all astronomers are sure that they’re real. A study out in Nature today, which reports the very first recurring FRB, is now causing lingering skepticism to evaporate.

“I think this is pretty huge,” Peter Williams, an astronomer at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study, told Gizmodo. “For awhile, I wasn’t sure these things were genuinely astrophysical. This paper settles the question.”

And Williams is not one to take splashy new claims about FRBs—high energy radio pulses of unknown origin, which flit across the sky for a fraction of a second—lightly. In fact, he’s spent the last week raising major doubts about another recent study, which, as Gizmodo and other outlets reported, claimed to have pinpointed the location of an FRB in space for the first time.

Continue reading “Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts Just Got Even More Interesting” »

How Legos, lasers, and reindeer are building the interplanetary internet.