Space blog superstar Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait has a prediction about a news conference set to take place next Tuesday. It will feature Peter Diamandis, leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson, former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones.
It promises an announcement nothing short of “a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity.”
Plait says that means the mining of asteroids.
The big clue comes from the press release.
the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.
Plait breaks it down…
If I were being optimistic, I might say something like this could get off the ground in 20 years or so, depending on several variables, and maybe sooner. Let me be frank: I don’t think this is a crazy idea.
This’ll take a lot of money… but he seems to have some fairly wealthy people — billionaires, and more than one — affiliated with this. So whatever idea he’s got, he’s being backed very seriously for it.
Will it be “Drill baby drill!” on Tuesday? We will have to wait and see but the concept is something truly mind blowing. For all the nostalgic handwringing surrounding the Discovery’s assisted flight around Washington D.C. this week, the dawn of a bold new space age is upon us.
Except this time, we aren’t visiting. We are annexing. We are occupying. We are moving in.
Three lovely young ladies are patrolling Arizona with murder on their minds. Who are they trying to kill and how do they plan on doing it? Andrew blows Brian’s mind with the concept of a blimp to space. But does the new hotness spell doom for Brushwood’s beloved space elevator? The boys bicker about which celebrity they would most (or least) like to see resurrected in hologram form, Tupac style.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Angel Killer just click on the image below.
File that under things you don’t want to say if you ever find yourself living next to a Brazilian cannibal couple accused of cooking human flesh empanada and selling the savory treats to their neighbors.
A man, his wife and their mistress were part of a sect which followed a “voice” that gave them orders to murder “evil women” and eat them in a purification ritual. Their deeds were discovered after the husband wrote and published a memoir about his activities.
All three are now detained.
As for the neighbors that got sold the tricksy munchies? According to authorities they burned down the suspect’s house.
Long the unmatched standard for artificial intelligence, it looks like the Turing Test might be ready to crack.
According to a new essay in the April 12th edition of Science, a cognitive scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research says that two major breakthroughs could finally push an AI over the top.
“The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data.
Is it possible to recreate something similar to the subcognitive low-level association network that we have? That’s experiencing largely what we’re experiencing? Would that be so impossible?”
In detailing the long history of the Turing Test, Wired asks the ultimate question: why?
Just because we can beat the Turing Test, what does it serve humanity?
In the meantime, check out this quick video of two AIs bickering amongst each other.
Seriously, compare the skull you see above to the massive dragon skulls found in the subterranean pathways of King’s Landing in HBO’s Game of Thrones.
While it is inconclusive that Dracorex ever consorted with the House Targaryen or reduced cities and armies alike to smoldering ash, what is clear is how much the shape this herbivore bares a resemblance to our common understanding of a fictional dragon. The skull was first donated for study in 2004 and was formally described first in 2006.
Meanwhile, the beast has a more permanent connection to yet another popular fantasy franchise. The official name for Dracorex is Dracorex hogwartsia. This was inspired by young visitors to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, where it was official donated, who kept referring to it as the dragon from the book and subsequent 2005 film adaptation Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
This thrilled author J.K. Rowling…
“I am absolutely thrilled to think that Hogwarts has made a small (claw?) mark upon the fascinating world of dinosaurs. I happen to know more on the subject of paleontology than many might credit, because my eldest daughter was Utahraptor-obsessed and I am now living with a passionate Tyrannosaurus rex-lover, aged three. My credibility has soared within my science-loving family, and I am very much looking forward to reading Dr. Bakker’s paper describing ‘my’ dinosaur, which I can’t help visualising as a slightly less pyromaniac Hungarian Horntail.”
But the question remains, is Dracorex really even its own species?
All around dinosaur badass authority and HPIC (Head Paleontologist In Charge) of our hearts Jack Horner says the beast is probably just a juvenile version of the well documented dino Pachycephalosaurus which looks decidedly less dragon-esqe.
In fact, he has an awesome TEDx talk going into the phenomenon of misclassification and our misunderstanding of “shape shifting” dinosaurs.
So what came first? Our modern dragon myth that looks like Dracorex? Or did Dracorex shape the myth? Is Dracorex even really Dracorex?
No matter what, we now know something that Daenerys Targaryen, Jack Horner and Harry Potter have in common. Which is pretty awesome.
You watch a massive glowing object fall into a lake. What could it be? UFO? Fat ghost? A plane make entirely out of glow-in-the-dark plastic?
Whatever it is, we are going to keep guessing because a search of the lake is plummeted into hasn’t turned up anything.
The Republican-American of Waterbury reports that a person driving in Litchfield at about 2 a.m. Tuesday reported that an object the size of a whale fell from the sky and crashed into Bantam Lake. Officials say that at about the same time, a state trooper 10 miles away in Warren called dispatchers to report that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam or Morris.
Morris fighters made several passes up and down the lake in a boat looking for a possible plane crash, but didn’t find any debris.
Authorities called off the search, leaving the mystery unsolved.
Astronomers might have the answer, they say a meteor shower occurred that evening. It still doesn’t answers why it was glowing as if it just got out from a rave.
As you may have heard, North Korea tried to launch a long-range rocket today and the results were not so hot.
But while the truth of what happened is being reported world wide, the question remains, how will North Korea’s famously stringent state-run broadcasters break the bad news to the locals?
Short answer: they won’t.
What you see above is footage broadcast by North Korean state television in 2009 depicting the fate of a rocket launch. The problem? In reality, it was a total failure according to Washington Post East Asia correspondent Chico Harlan on Twitter.
That didn’t stop the DRPK from getting their CGI on and creating this gem to show all the boys and girls back home that Glorious Leader had lead them to the stars. Strike up the band.
Check out this video from our good buddy Tony Ley. It purports to show a UFO from the point of view of an airplane. Whatever it is seems to be zooming through the sky pretty fast.
The big rock from the sky that crashed into Earth and proved an extinction level event for our dinosaur pals could also seed life on a far off planet. The meteorites launched into space by the impact carrying the ingredients for life itself have since spread across our solar system and far beyond.
A new table estimating the trajectories of the rocks provides many surprises, according to Ray Kurzweil’s blog. For example, it would take a trillion years for the Earth ejecta to spread the size of the Milky Way.
But most awesomely…
The probability is almost 1 (close to certain) that our solar system is visited by microorganisms that originated outside our solar system.
To tie this together with a post yesterday, this means that our ejecta could bring life to other planets and some point there might be a scientist there warning of our fearsome existence. Yes, my friends, WE ARE THE SUPER GENIUS SPACE DINOSAURS!
We aren’t quite sure how this was the conclusion he reached but Ronald Breslow, Ph.D has a theory. In a new report he tries to shed light on the age-old mystery of why terrestrial amino acids (the very building blocks of life) exist in only one shape.
He posits that the kind of protein brought to earth millions of years ago could be evidence that another forms exists on other planets. The kind of proteins that create…
SUPER GENIUS SPACE DINOSAURS!
Quote Doctor Breslow:
An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.
That is, unless you’re really in the mood to get devoured by a SUPER GENIUS SPACE DINOSAUR. In that case, meet away.
In front of security cameras, a tourist vanishes from the top of the Empire State Building and mysteriously falls to her death moments later in Times Square.
A young girl dies crawling out of her own grave after having been declared dead a year earlier.
On a Fort Lauderdale beach, a missing World War II airman and his aircraft show up as if he died only hours before.
They call the mysterious man behind these unnatural events the Warlock. To some he’s the messenger of a modern age of miracles.
To Jessica Blackwood, FBI agent and daughter of a legendary magic family, the Warlock is a trickster and a murderer and she’s the only one who can see through his deceptions.
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Andrew Mayne, the author of Public Enemy Zero and The Chronological Man series brings you an edge-of-your-seat ebook triller that only he could write.
The stars at night are big and bright CLICK HERE deep in the heart of Texas. So where better to launch vehicles to get closer to them.
SpaceX has begun preliminary paperwork to establish a launching facility in South Texas, near the Mexican border. The move accomplishes several goals for the ambitious private spaceflight firm.
Price: the facility is closer to the SpaceX testing facility in McGregor, Texas. Also, a launch space they don’t have to share (which will never be the case in Cape Canaveral) would mean they could have more flexibility with schedule and could continue to bring launch prices down to the ultimate goal of $1000 per pound.
Politics: Texas is home of the largest congressional opponents to commercial spaceflight. By putting a massive facility right in their backyard, it could stem some of the animosity.
Innovation: launching the rockets from west of Florida means they could possibly keep their Sunshine State facilities as landing areas for the rockets. This is a key part of founder Elon Musk’s dream of legitimate rocket reusability.
Read the full notice below, or check out what Ars Technica makes of the news.
You just got pelted with dark matter. Don’t worry, it’ll happen again in a couple of seconds. Should you be worried? Probably not, it’s been happening your whole life, at least according to a new study by a few theoretical physicists.
A dark matter particle smacks into an average person’s body about once a minute, and careens off oxygen and hydrogen nuclei in your cells, according to theoretical physicists. Dark matter is streaming through you as you read this, most of it unimpeded.
If you’d like to read up on this mysterious (nefariously named) substance the is estimated to comprise 83% of all matter in the universe, check out Wikipedia. I know I had to.
There are just some videos that you watch and realize, the future is not coming, it’s here. This is was one of those videos to me. Please, take a look at the Hover Bike. The full model an provide life of up to 10,000 feet.
A prototype will cost you just over $82,000 US dollars.
The video below features an RC Scale Model. It’s absolutely insane.
The best part of the website is that on the right sidebar it lists “applications” for the Hover Bike. They include Aerial Cattle mustering, Search and Rescue, Aerial Survey, Wildlife and Parks and other mundane tasks. As if you need a reason to have a Hover Bike. IT’S A FLIPPIN’ HOVER BIKE! The only applications they should list are: Being Awesome and Amazing Entrance To Random First Dates, Family Reunions & Proms.
Something strange is going on in the schools and nurses of a small village, can Justin and Brian deduce the romping menace? Bonnie joins the show to discuss the horrendous actions of the wild child Brushwood daughter who may or may not have committed an oceanic atrocity. Andrew offers the services of off-shore behavioral specialist Olaf.
Also, we reveal the new plan to do the show weekly and record live!
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Angel Killer just click on the image below.
In front of security cameras, a tourist vanishes from the top of the Empire State Building and mysteriously falls to her death moments later in Times Square.
