Category Archives: Mars Colony

A high-tech silver cylinder currently located in a basement on the University of Regina campus could someday soon make its way far above ground.

After more than two years of design and months of construction, a team of undergrad students has completed a mockup prototype of an airlock, a pressure-sealed compartment which could one day be used, in this case, to help humans adapt to life on the surface of Mars.

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It is designed to be a bridge between two environments. The habitat that humans will live in and the hostile Martian environment, said Celestial Labs team member Anwit Adhikari, who said a human trip to the Red Planet might not be that far off.

The airlocks design is made up of four major subcomponents: a mylar-based fabric, 3D-printed discs made up of replaceable parts, and special ventilation and electronics systems designed by the team.

The air on Mars is different in every way imaginable. The pressure is different. The temperature is very low. It has charged particles. So we have to heat, pressurize and filter the air with as small of a volume as possible, Adhikari said.

Design on the airlock started in 2019 when the University of British Columbias Mars Colony engineering team launched the Project Airlock Challenge.

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The nationwide contest challenged students to design and prototype sustainable habitation for colonies without atmospheres.

Teams from nearly 20 Canadian schools signed up for the competition, which was broken down into a design phase and a prototype phase.

The University of Regina team, made up of students from campus, won both. The second victory came this past August.

Engineering student Samuel Reddekop joined Celestial Labs after a team member overheard him discussing 3D printers with a fellow student.

Im really proud of our team that we could actually, you know, get this far. That we have this mockup of the airlock together we were actually able to build, and it looks very promising that well be able to build a functioning prototype, Reddekop said.

With the competition now complete, the team has turned its focus on finishing the mock-up into a working prototype to debut to the aerospace industry.

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They hope to accomplish that in the coming months.

Im really proud of our team that we could actually, you know, get this far. That we have this mock up of the airlock together we were actually able to build, and it looks very promising that well be able to build a functioning prototype, Adhikari said.

Our most optimistic expectation is that some of the sub-components will be used, that some of the research that weve done will be valued highly by the industry.

2021 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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With award-winning prototype, U of R team brings world a little closer to life on Mars - Globalnews.ca

Update 1.30 has arrived for Surviving Mars, and heres the full list of changes and fixes added with this patch.

A new patch has now been released for all versions of Surviving Mars today. If you are playing the game on PS4, the patch number is 1.30. Otherwise this patch is known as Below & Beyond: Hotfix #4 and its game version number 1008298.

This patch comes with two gameplay improvements. One is that the Elevator colonist cap has been increased and the other change is some new warning notifications.

Aside from these improvements, the rest of the patch covers the usual bug fixes. You can check out the full patch notes.

Gameplay Improvements

-Elevator colonist cap has been increased to 250-New warning notifications when trying to launch a lander with colonists while not having a habitat on the asteroid or when the habitat does not have enough resident slots

Bug Fixes

-Fixed no disasters rule not working-Fixed no terraforming rule not working-Fixed disabling no Below and Beyond content rule awarding Space Explorers achievement-Fixed a crash on starting a new game on macOS-Fixed a crash when sending a planetary expedition that requires an RC vehicle-Fixed a crash when a lander rocket returns to mars with cargo containing a transporter that carries resources-Fixed a crash when requesting colonists from an asteroid-Fixed a crash after the event rough touchdown when drones unload the payload-Fixed a rounding error on resources prevent the lander rocket from launching-Fixed a Waste Rock value being incorrect during landscaping-Fixed event anomalies spawning under resource deposits-Fixed the amount of surface polymers being very high-Fixed The last War event preventing the loading of cargo onto asteroid landers-Fixed not being able to send multiple drones through the elevator by right clicking-Fixed the lander rocket request payload tooltip showing the ready status for prefabs that the player does not have-Fixed the issue where the number of requested colonists gets reset to 0 in the lander rocket cargo menu-Fixed where one drone gets transported through the elevator when assigning multiple drones to the elevator as -drone controller-Fixed maintenance getting stuck on certain buildings (fusion reactor and electronics factory)-Fixed where drones were active in drone hub extender range while the extender wasnt powered-Fixed the effect ranges remaining visible after refabbing a building-Fixed rovers leaving the lander rocket twice-Fixed the issue where multiple capital cities could be built after terraforming (Old saves will continue to contain multiple capital cities, but the option to build more is now restricted)-Fixed the RC explorer continuing to scan queued surface anomalies while the RC explorer has been transported to the underground-Fixed incorrect landing angle of the supply pod on a landing pad-Fixed the asteroid banner not working without the Space Race DLC-Fixed the issue where landscape cursor does not show-Fixed the colony being automatically renamed to missing text in the planetary view-Fixed the concrete extractor not being able to build underground at specific coordinates-Fixed domes not being built underground because drones stop delivering resources

The following info taken above comes from theofficial Paradox forums. Surviving Mars is out now for PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox One.

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Surviving Mars Update 1.30 Patch Notes - Attack of the Fanboy

Of course, being part of the Royal Family (and the second in line to the throne), HRH the Duke of Cambridge does not name any names. He does, however, talk about the so-called space race, and thats hint enough that hes referring to the three billionaire and their efforts of launching private rockets into space with paying customers, in a bid to kick off the new age of space tourism.

Prince William sat down for a one-on-one interview with the BBC ahead of the launch of The Earthshot Prize. The organization will pick five winners each year whose projects mark big steps toward a more sustainable future, and award an estimated $70 million to such projects over the next decade.

As Prince William puts it, if concrete action isnt taken today to reduce the effects of climate change, our planet will be past the point of saving within three decades. All this time, instead of focusing on measures that must be taken here on Earth, billionaires like Bezos, Branson, and Musk are blasting themselves off into space. Musk is the only exception to that since hes yet to fly himself, but he does plan a colony on Mars, with the end goal of having a plan B when Earth goes kaput.

We need some of the worlds greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live, Prince William says. Understandably, because of this, he has no interest in becoming a space tourist himself. The second reason he wont even consider it is that hes not much of a fan of big heights, even though hes a trained pilot.

Prince William and, before him, his father Prince Charles, as well as brother Prince Harry, are all deeply involved in a variety of charities and non-profits for a more sustainable future. The billionaires he elegantly calls out are doing their own charitable work but, at the same time, theyve also cited as motivation for space tourism the need to find solutions for our problems here on Earth. They never mentioned how commercial travel to space would lead to these solutions.

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Billionaires Should Focus on Saving Earth Not Space Tourism, Says Prince William - autoevolution

Its often said Earths resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.

Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, comets, and asteroidsand it hardly cornered the market when it comes to the valuable materials we use to make smartphone batteries or raise skyscrapers.

A recent study puts it in perspective.

Lead author Juan Sanchez and a team of scientists analyzed the spectrum of asteroid 1986 DA, a member of a rare class of metal-rich, near-Earth asteroids. They found the surface of this particular space rock to be 85% metallic, likely including iron, nickel, cobalt, copper, gold, and platinum group metals prized for industrial uses, from cars to electronics.

With the exception of gold and copper, they estimate the mass of these metals would exceed their global reserves on Earthin some cases by an order of magnitude (or more).

The team also put a dollar figure on the asteroids economic value.

If mined and marketed over a period of 50 years, 1986 DAs precious metals would bring in some $233 billion a year for a total haul of $11.65 trillion. (That takes into account the deflationary effect the flood of new supply would have on the market.) It probably wouldnt make sense to bring home metals like iron, nickel, and cobalt, which are common on Earth, but they could be used to build infrastructure in orbit and on the moon and Mars.

In short, mining one nearby asteroid could yield a precious metals jackpot. And there are greater prizes lurking further afield in the asteroid belt.

Of course, asteroid mining is hardly a new idea. The challenging (and expensive) parts are traveling to said asteroids, stripping them of their precious ore, and shipping it out.

But before we even get to the hard parts, we need to prospect the claim.

This study, combined with future NASA missions to the asteroid belt, should help bring the true extent of space resources into sharper focus.

What makes 1986 DA particularly interesting is its proximity to Earth.

Most metal-rich asteroids live way out in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Famous among these is 16 Psyche, a hulking, 140-mile-wide asteroid first discovered in 1852.

The asteroid belt was once thought to be the remnants of a planet, but its origins are less certain now.

Still, scientists speculate Psyche may be the exposed core of a shattered planet-in-the-making. And indeed, smaller metal-rich asteroids may also be the shards of a protoplanetary core.

Under this theory, developing planets in the asteroid belt grew large enough to differentiate rocky mantles and metal cores. These later suffered a series of collisions, leaving their shattered rocky remains and broken metal hearts to wander the belt.

We may never observe Earths core in person, so, if the theory is true, Psyche could be our next best alternative. Also, the existence of so much exposed metal in one place is tantalizing for those who would extend humanitys presence beyond Earth.

In either case, we have yet only managed to assemble a basic portrait of Psyche. Its simply too far away to study in any great detail. Which is where 1986 DA and 2016 ED85 (another asteroid in the study) come in.

Both 1986 DA and 2016 ED85 are classified as near-Earth asteroids. That is, they live in our neighborhood.

At some point in the past, gravitational interactions with Jupiter nudged them out of the asteroid belt and into near-Earth orbits. So, a key motivation of the study was to trace the asteroids lineage. Because theyre closer, we can observe them in more detail and infer the characteristics of their distant family members, including Psyche.

According to the study, spectral analysis of the asteroids, combined with orbital simulations, suggests theyre likely from one of four families in the outer asteroid belt.

We believe that these two mini Psyches are probably fragments from a large metallic asteroid in the main belt, but not Psyche itself, study coauthor David Cantillo said. Its possible that some of the iron and stony-iron meteorites found on Earth could have also come from that region in the solar system too.

According to the study, the two asteroids have a composition similar to Psyche. Even if it isnt a parent, its a close relation, so they can add further clues as to Psyches make-up.

We started a compositional survey of the NEA population in 2005, when I was a graduate student, with the goal of identifying and characterizing rare NEAs such as these metal-rich asteroids, said Vishnu Reddy, who co-led the study and is a University of Arizona associate professor and principal investigator of the NASA grant that funded the work. It is rewarding that we have discovered these mini Psyches so close to the Earth.

In the vision of the sci-fi novel and TV series, The Expanse,the asteroid belt is a source of raw materials for the solar system. Settlers have burrowed into dwarf planet Ceres and spun it up to provide artificial gravity for a sizable colony. Huge ships mine ice in Saturns rings and rock hoppers ply the belt for metal, water, and other resources.

The potential is there, but the reality is still firmly science fiction.

The dream of mining asteroids had a moment in the last decade. A number of space startups, since acquired or wound down, were aiming to kickstart a movement. The proximate vision was to mine water, not metal, to supply ships with oxygen and fuel. (Others have suggested moon mining may prove the easier feat in the near term.)

Space agencies have landed on and even returned samples from asteroids. But large-scale mining will likely depend on cheaper access to space and a viable market. Until then, well be stuck in the prospecting phase.

NASAs planned trip to Psyche is the most intriguing future mission. The spacecraft will launch in 2022 and arrive in 2026. Its hoped the mission will provide a better sense of the asteroids composition, confirm whether it is indeed the core of an ancient protoplanet, and yield insights into the solar systems violent past.

In the meantime, the cost of going to space is decreasing, and SpaceXs Starship may yield another leap.

Eventually, future explorers might tap into the solar systems vast resources to fuel ships and build habitats.

For now, well look up and dream.

Image Credit: Addy Graham/University of Arizona

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This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanetand Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth - Singularity Hub

Mars, the Red Planet, is hot. Not just thermally, but also culturally. Current news of the Perseverance Rover titillates us. The Martian, a surprise bestselling novel by Andy Weir became a hit movie starring Matt Damon.

Author David Ebenbach enters this space with the cheekily titled How to Mars. As the title implies the novel reads like a Mars for Dummies entry co-authored by Ray Bradbury and Larry David. Ebenbachs imaginative, witty tale was launched from his reading about the Mars One project, a private companys attempt to send civilian colonists on a one way journey to the Red Planet. Mars One flamed out being declared bankrupt and dissolving in 2019.

The author engages in a fanciful what if? scenario and follows the exploits of six volunteers who survive the rigorous vetting and training process conducted by Destination Mars!, a private entity owned by an unnamed eccentric billionaire. The six space travelers, three men and three women, bring with them varied disciplines; astrophysicist, psychologist, botanist, geologist, engineer and medical doctor. They also bring varied, sometimes dark, reasons for having made the decision to leave Earth permanently and live out their lives on Mars.

While the tale is told from multiple points of view with each citizen/astronaut providing details, it is Josh, the psychologist, who is the primary narrator. In the very first sentence Josh reveals that Jenny, the astrophysicist, is pregnant on Mars. He also knows two more things; he has to be the father and the pregnancy goes against the stern warnings in the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook.

Ah, the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook! Written by the founder of the Destination Mars! corporation this document is hilariously splattered throughout How to Mars. Its droll observations, quirky comments plus multiple charts and diagrams fill a substantial portion of this 236-page novel.

Two examples from Section 9 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook titled, What You Cant Bring With You :

You cannot bring your favorite chair, with the body dents already in place.

No full length curtain that your mother crocheted.

While Ebenbachs bent is toward wit, there are serious undertones in How to Mars. We learn of Jennys bipolar sister who committed suicide and Joshs fiancee who perished in a car accident. Each character has a backstory which led them to depart planet Earth.

Then there are The Patterns. Ebenbach skillfully, hauntingly addresses the issue of life on Mars by creating the amorphous, everywhere and nowhere, presence he calls The Patterns. Are they real or imagined? Evil or compassionate? What has the human invasion done to them and their planet?

The publication of How to Mars comes as the trio of Citizen Space Cadets: Branson, Bezos and Musk race to be the first private citizens to circle in space above the Earth in their search for an undefinable higher status.

In his Afterwords Ebenbach concludes, this novel was (and is) supposed to be about all of us ... trying to figure out what to do with the lives that have been handed to us. Thus How to Mars is also supposed to be about how to Earth. How to human. How to be.

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BREEZE BOOKS 'How to Mars' follows six space travelers on the journey to the Red Planet - Valley Breeze

Update 1.29 has arrived for Surviving Mars, and heres the full list of changes and fixes added with this patch.

Developer Haemimont Games has now released a new update for Surviving Mars today. If you are playing the PS4 version of the game, the patch number is 1.29. However, this is officially known as game version number 1008107.

One of the more interesting features of this new patch are Turkish translations. These translations are available for both the PS4 and PS5.

Other than that, several vital bug fixes have been made. This includes two fixes that made the game crash for no reason. You can read the full patch notes below.

Notes

-The in-game bug reporting tool has been removed in favour of an automatic system-PlayStation 4 and 5 now have Turkish translations

Bug Fixes

-Fixed the game crash after loading a save game with invalidated drones.-Fixed the game crash when a player selects the Rock Formation object on an old retail save.-Fixed missing Terraforming tech tree in the old saves.-Fixed the Advanced Martian Engines tech adding 20 fuel to Cargo Rockets.-Fixed the Transport Optimization tech not adding extra cargo space.-Fixed the description of the Banner mentioning Mars while on an asteroid map.-Fixed the Cave of Wonders description.-Fixed the Lander rocket disappearing when the Rough Touchdown event occurs.-Improved feedback when the Asteroid Lander requires maintenance.-Fixed ramps being instantly built.-Fixed the progress bar of Required Waste Rock not changing while flattening.-Fixed the problem when a fired worker immediately returns to work.

And several other underlying code fixes that were presumably causing bugs, especially to save games from before the update.

Known issues

-Incorrect value of Excess Waste Rock is displayed when Flatten in progress.-The limit for colonists being allowed through the elevator is too low.-Crash on certain Mac versions.

The following info taken above comes from theofficial Paradox forums. Surviving Mars is out now for PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox One.

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Surviving Mars Update 1.29 Patch Notes - Attack of the Fanboy

Two at play are the corporate race to space (which pits Amazon founder Jeff Bezos against Tesla founder Elon Musk) and efforts by a startup company called Colossal (among others!) to bring back the woolly mammoth, which became extinct more than 4,000 years ago. Both initiatives have been framed as potentially bettering the world.

According to the Washington Post, Both Bezos and Musk portray their space ambitions as a way to help humanity by creating a city on Mars, as Musk would like, or building colonies in Earths orbit, as Bezos envisions. Elephants are highly social and sensitive animals. Is it ethical to keep them in captivity, experiment on impregnation and/or gestation techniques, and play around with their genes in the hopes of merging current species with unfrozen DNA from the past just because one has the resources to do so?

Yet ethical issues abound with both projects. Further, who would be responsible for them once released? What if they dont adapt to the current environment and starve? What they freeze because their hair isnt thick enough? What if they destroy the tundra and dont create grasslands?

Ben Lamm, founder of a Texas artificial intelligence company and a key Colossal financial backer, called the mammoth project a proof of concept for Colossals technology, which could be used for thoughtful, disruptive conservation, according to Global News. George Church, the biologist leading the team of geneticists at Colossal working to re-create the mammoth, believes that if a population can successfully be established, it could help mitigate climate change by converting, through their waste and foraging impacts (and with the assistance of a warming climate) the northern tundra to grasslands that sequester and store more carbon. (In a recent interview on Canadian radio, he said his team is having ongoing conversations with the Indigenous people who call the tundra home, and who have not yet weighed in on the project.)

Nature is resilient, but of its own accord and time scale. Whos to say how likely it is for adaptations to succeed in the highly unnatural circumstance of plopping a species into a landscape it hasnt occupied for millennia, if ever? London School of Economics philosopher Heather Bushman identifies issues of concern for human-created woolly mammoth calves in the New York Times: You dont have a mother for a species that if they are anything like elephants has extraordinarily strong mother-infant bonds that last for a very long time. Once there is a little mammoth or two on the ground, who is making sure that theyre being looked after?

What if, instead of looking back 4,000 years, or out to space and planets, the clever thinkers behind these projects were to focus their sights on whats in front of us: a world much in need of attention and repair, and species that are not yet extinct but could be, if we dont act quickly to recover them and the habitats they rely on. Some ethicists have spoken about the risks of bio-contamination in space travel, as humans could unwittingly upend a sensitive ecosystem on Mars by bringing unwanted contaminants. But a far more central ethical issue with these initiatives exits: the state of our home planet here and now.

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Forget about Mars and the mammoths, we have problems here and now. - Space Bollyinside - BollyInside

Humanitys search for life on Mars may have just been dealt a sizeable blow.

New research suggests Mars's relatively small size may have prevented it from holding large amounts of water crucial for life on Earth and other planets.

The revelation may also dampen hopes of establishing a human colony on the Red Planet in the future.

In the 1980s, studies done by NASA on Martian meteorites, using remote sensing capabilities had revealed considerable evidence that Mars was once a water-rich world. Further analysis of the planet by the Viking Orbiter and more recently by Martian surface rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, unearthed even more evidence, including stunning images showing landscapes shaped by flood channels and river valleys.

Despite the evidence, the search for liquid water on the planets surface so far has yielded no results. Various explanations for the lack of water on the planet have been put forward, the most prominent of which suggests that the planets weakening magnetic field could have led to the loss of its atmosphere and liquid water.

But, in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, United States suggest a more fundamental reason could be behind the Red Planets loss of liquid water.

Mars may have just been too small to retain large amounts of water.

According to Kun Wang, lead author of the study, and assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences at Washington University, there is likely a threshold for size requirements of rocky planets that exceeds the mass of Mars, for them to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics.

The researchers used stable potassium isotopes, which are moderately volatile to detect the presence and measure the abundance, and distribution of more volatile elements and compounds such as water, on different planetary surfaces.

The team measured the composition of potassium isotope on 20 confirmed Martian meteorites, selected to be representative of the red planets silicate composition. They found that compared to Earth, Mars had lost more potassium and other volatile elements during its formation, yet had retained more volatile elements than the moon, which is much smaller and direr than both Earth and Mars.

Cover Photo: Shutterstock

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Mars Was Always Limited By Its Small Size To Support Life: Study - Mashable India

A part of NASA's "We Asked a NASA Professional" series on YouTube, the space agency has answered the following question - "Is there oxygen on Mars?"

The short answer is "yes", but it's hardly the amount that we have here on Earth and definitely not enough for a human to breathe while walking around on the surface. To put it into perspective of how little oxygen Mars' atmosphere contains, NASA says the amount of oxygen present in Mars' atmosphere is 0.13%, compared to 21% in Earth's atmosphere. What Mars' atmosphere is rich in is carbon dioxide, which can be useful.

NASA technologists have created a piece of technology called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. NASA has equipped Perseverance with a MOXIE, and only a few months ago, the rover was able to successfully extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere. The amount of oxygen that was extracted was only small, but the experiment proved the concept works.

When thinking about future human exploration, NASA says it will need to send a MOXIE that is around 200 times the scale of the MOXIE on Perseverance. This large-scale MOXIE would then provide oxygen for the astronauts living in the colony.

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'Is there oxygen on Mars?', NASA's answer may surprise you - TweakTown

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New Delhi: A team of scientists at MIT has created a light-emitting plant using nanoparticles embedded in plant leaves that can glow brightly for several minutes after being charged just for a few seconds with an LED.

Although the team had developed similar plants in 2017, the new breed of plants is almost ten times as bright.

The team wanted to create a light-emitting plant with particles that would absorb light, store some of it, and emit it gradually. The idea was to ultimately develop plant-based lighting by using the renewable chemical energy of living plants

The plants use nanoparticles containing the enzyme Luciferase also found in fireflies to produce light.

The particles are several hundred nanometers in diameter and can be infused into the plants through the stomata, the small pores located on the surfaces of leaves. The particles accumulate in a spongy layer called the mesophyll, where they form a thin film.

A major conclusion of the new study is that the mesophyll of a living plant can be made to display these photonic particles without hurting the plant or sacrificing lighting properties.

This film can absorb photons or light particles either from sunlight or an LED. The researchers showed that after 10 seconds of blue LED exposure, their plants could emit light for about an hour. The light was brightest for the first five minutes and then gradually diminished. The plants can be continually recharged for at least two weeks. Read more.

Also read: Scientists create concrete using blood, sweat, tears of astronauts for construction on Mars

Scientists from the University of Utah discovered a genetic mutation that can explain why some breeds of domestic pigeons have smaller beaks a phenomenon that had baffled evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin over a century ago.

The ROR2 gene is linked to beak size reduction in numerous pigeons. The same gene also leads to a human disorder called Robinow syndrome.

Robinow syndrome is an extremely rare genetic disorder in humans that is characterised by short-limbed dwarfism, and abnormalities in the head such as a broad, prominent forehead and a short, wide nose and mouth.

The gene ROR2 plays an important role in the craniofacial development of vertebrates.

Darwin was known to be fascinated with domestic pigeons, and he thought that they held the secrets of natural selection in their beaks. Natural selection is a key mechanism of evolution, which involves subtle changes in the inherited genetic traits of a population over generations in a way that makes them fitter for survival.

But, in the case of these domestic pigeons beaks of all shapes and sizes exist within a single species. Sometimes, the beaks are so short that they prevent parents from feeding their own young. Geneticists have failed to solve this mystery by pinpointing the molecular machinery that leads to short beaks until now. Read more.

Scientists have discovered a set of fossilised footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico dating back to over 23,000 years ago, which shows that humans arrived in the Americas much earlier than previously thought.

The footprints were formed in soft mud on the margins of a shallow lake. Using radiocarbon dating, researchers from the US Geological Survey confirmed that these were the oldest known human footprints in the Americas.

The size of the footprints indicates that the tracks were left mainly by teenagers and younger children, with the occasional adult. The area also had animal tracks, including those of mammoths, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, and birds.

This shows that humans and animals coexisted at the site as a whole researchers hope to recreate a more accurate picture of the landscape during this period. Read more.

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati in the US have developed a reactor that can convert carbon dioxide into methane using quantum dots an advance that may not only help tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate change on Earth, but also provide fuel for human colonies on Mars.

The basic chemistry behind this process is already used abroad at the International Space Station to remove the carbon dioxide from the air the astronauts breathe out.

But the researchers from Cincinnati have included the use of graphene quantum dots, which are layers of carbon just a few nanometers big, that can increase the yield of methane.

According to the team, this would mean that instead of having to carry fuel for the return trip to Mars, astronauts in the future could simply pump it out of the planets atmosphere.

By using different materials instead of the carbon quantum dots, the reactor can also produce ethylene, used in the manufacture of plastics, rubber, synthetic clothing, and other products. Read more.

A study suggests that melting polar ice caps is not only contributing to a sea-level rise but also changing the Earths crust beneath the polar ice caps in a way that its impact can be measured hundreds of miles away.

By analysing satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studying changes in Earths crust, researchers were able to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally research showed that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting up.

To understand how the ice melt affects what is beneath it, imagine a wooden board floating on top of a tub of water. When you push the board down, the water beneath would move down. If you pick it up, you will see the water moving vertically to fill that space.

Understanding all of the factors that cause the movement of the crust is really important for a wide range of earth-science problems. For example, to accurately observe tectonic motions and earthquake activity, we need to be able to separate out this motion generated by modern-day ice-mass loss. Read more.

(Edited by Paramita Ghosh)

Also read: 15,000-yr-old viruses found in China & the unique shark intestines that work like a Tesla valve

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MIT scientists create glow-in-the-dark bionic plants that can be charged with LEDs - ThePrint