173584016
submission
garyisabusyguy writes:
Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.
“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years until the next thing comes.”
172679489
submission
garyisabusyguy writes:
“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren said in a Thursday statement. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”
74624977
submission
garyisabusyguy writes:
This Forbes article provides the best analysis of the loss of the last Falcon 9 mission based on information released by Elon Musk.
Highlights:
1. Sound triangulation led them to identify a strut holding helium tank as root cause where the falling helium tank pinched a line causing overpressure in the LOX tank.
2. The failure occurred at 2,000 pounds of force, and the struts were rated at 10,000 pounds of force. They initially dismissed this as a cause until sounds triangulation pointed back to the strut
3. Further testing of struts in stock found one that failed at 2,000 pounds of force, with further analysis identifying poor grain structure in the metal, which caused weakness
4. It will be months before the next launch while SpaceX goes over procurement and QA processes all struts and bolts, and re-assesses any "near misses" with Air Force and NASA
5. Next launch will include failure mode software, which will allow recovery of the Dragon module during loss of the launch vehicle since they determined that it could have saved the Dragon module in this lost mission
I'm still waiting for them to stick the landing,which could be a way in the future
73821761
submission
garyisabusyguy writes:
This is not the first time that it has been proposed that an extinction event is underway. However, this new study takes into consideration many other factors that may be tilting the data, and still come up with the inevitable conclusion that we have triggered a large die-off, and that we may become victims of it as well.
From the paper summary:
"Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 114 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear. These estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already "
http://advances.sciencemag.org...
But wait, the authors suggest that rapid work to avert the worst of the die-off is still possible. The question may really be whether we can get past paid trolls, fud and finger pointing in order to act wisely in a timely manner.
73633205
submission
garyisabusyguy writes:
According to Sunday Times:
RUSSIA and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...
And this non-paywalled Reuters version:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China. This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war.
Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?
