So This Happened

TRAPPIST - 1 by Guillem H. Pongiluppi

Mars is finally emerging from an ice age that ended 400,000 years ago

Winter is ending.

Mars has many similarities to Earth. There are volcanoes, canyons, craters and - most importantly - water. Oh, and now NASA researchers have added another similarity to the list: ice ages.

Yup, thanks to radargrams taken from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists now have physical measurements that suggest Mars is actually just now emerging from an ice age that ended some 400,000 years ago. That’s quite the cold spell!

According to the team, researchers have previously predicted that the Red Planet experienced ice ages in the past using complex computer models, but they lacked actual measurements to back them up.

That looks pretty damn cool.

(via The World’s First ‘Marschitect’ Is Laying the Groundwork for Architecture in Space — How We Get To Next)

NASA’s retro guide to future living over on CNN

Lockheed Martin joins the space race to Mars

From China to NASA to Elon Musk, it seems everyone has their sights set on Mars exploration. But before we land on the Red Planet, we’ll probably orbit it. At this week’s Humans to Mars summit, Lockheed Martin unveiled its Mars Base Camp concept — an ambitious plan to send a manned space laboratory to orbit Mars by 2028.

Ice is no match for CSU-developed coating

Anyone who’s ever chipped ice off a windshield or nervously watched a plane get de-iced, take note: Colorado State University researchers have invented an ice-repellent coating that out-performs today’s best de-icing products.

Researchers led by Arun Kota, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, have created an environmentally friendly, inexpensive, long-lasting coating that could keep everything from cars and ships to planes and power lines ice-free.

Their innovation, described in the Journal of Materials Chemistry, is a gel-based, soft coating made out of PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane), a silicone polymer gel with already widespread industrial use. Their experiments were supported by careful analysis of ice adhesion mechanics.

The performance measure of de-icing coatings is called ice adhesion strength - the shear stress necessary to remove ice from a surface - and is measured in kilopascals (kPa). Kota’s group demonstrated ice adhesion strength for their coating of about 5 kPa. By contrast, soft coatings available on the market have ice adhesion strength of about 40 kPa (lower is better). Other types of de-icing coatings made of rigid materials like Teflon typically perform at around 100 kPa.

Read more.

Two very alarming changes have already been made on the White House website. Reason, empathy and progress must be fought for. I hope this isn’t indicative of upcoming policies but fear it obviously is.

Also I just edited this post to add my own screenshot: the White House’s website for combating antibiotic resistant bacteria is gone too.

I want to note that most of the great steps of social progress in American history were *not* made by presidents or politicians acting of their own accord. America thrives in a state of constant *peaceful* revolt. Protest, political dissent and civil disobedience are what change things.

Voting is great and we need more to do it, but the women’s suffrage movement didn’t get voted into victory. Republican President Nixon (Nixon!) didn’t create the Environmental Protection Agency because he had an environmentalist’s stance on the Earth.

It’s important to always remember that when people wield their concerns and press power to answer for itself, they change the world.

(Images courtesy of screenshots from a friend and from myself)

Everyone knows that, in space, no one can hear you scream. Sound is a wave that requires a medium to travel through, and if space is empty, there’s no medium to carry that sound. Except, as Mike from The Point Studios explains, empty is a relative term. Space is full of dust and gas and plasma, just not as full of that matter as we’re used to. Thus, the question of whether sound can travel through space turns into a matter of scale. If the scale–the wavelength–of a sound is much larger than the distance between molecules, then the sound can propagate. So there CAN be sound in space – it just has to have a very long wavelength and, thus, a very low frequency. Check out the video for the full story! (Video credit: The Point Studios)

Save Science

Not sure what to say. I’m actually legitimately nervous the Cheeto-in-Chief will demand a hold on the National Science Foundation grants like he did the EPA (disclaimer, the NSF is where my job comes from).

I feel so terrible for all the scientists and students who are now out of the job 

ExoMars Orbiter’s First Images

(Image credit: ESA/Roscosmos/ExoMars/CaSSIS/UniBE)