I imagine being able to breathe underwater or on a planet without oxygen tanks. The Aquaman Crystal Have you ever wanted to be just like a mermaid? Or be able to breathe underwater in general because, hey, that’s so cool. Well, look no further, because scientists are developing an oxygen-storing crystal that could be used to breathe underwater in the near future. A team of scientists at the University of Denmark are working on a certain crystalline material known as {(bpbp)Co2II(NO3)}2(NH2bdc)](NO3)2 * 2H2O) that has the ability to store oxygen 160 times more efficiently than air. According to professor Christine McKenzie, it only takes a few grains to supply enough oxygen for one breath. In the case of divers, the material would also be able to gather oxygen from the surrounding water to give the diver, allowing him or her to only need a few grains along. The material is so strong that it would only take about ten liters to entirely suck the oxygen out of a room. The way this works is very similar to the way hemoglobin functions in the blood stream. While hemoglobin uses iron, the crystal uses cobalt, and similarly in both processes, oxygen is picked up and carried to where it needs to go, and pressure is applied. The metal in both cases helps to trap oxygen gas so that it can be bound, stored, and transported. Therefore, there is a molecular and electronic structure in place that allows the materials to absorb oxygen from nearby sources. The parallels in function give hope that the crystals will become a highly effective material in relation to human benefits. There are many positive cases that would come along with a successful development of the “aqua man crystal,” such as: help in the creation of artificial photosynthesis and new types of fuel cells. It would also be very efficient in the diving industry, allowing researches to explore under the sea in much more depth and detail. Additionally, the material would be very helpful in terms of medical necessities, for it would allow people who need oxygen to have less of a burden from carrying around tanks. Although the developments look promising, there are some factors that scientists must take into consideration. In the case of divers, pressure changes may become an issue once the crystals are submerged deeper and deeper underwater, for much of its structure is dependent on pressure. Another implication is that humans don’t breathe pure oxygen in from the air. We are recurrently breathing oxygen as well as other natural gases, so scientists would have to perform tests on the outcome of inhaling straight oxygen before the material can be declared safe to use.

Milankovitch Cycle Milankovitch cycles. Source: UCAR A Milankovitch cycle is a cyclical movement related to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. There are three of them: eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession. According to the Milankovitch Theory, these three cycles combine to affect the amount of solar heat that’s incident on the Earth’s surface and subsequently influence climatic patterns. Eccentricity The path of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle, but an ellipse. This elliptical shape changes from less elliptical (nearly a perfect circle) to more elliptical and back, and is due to the gravitational fields of neighboring planets (particularly the large ones – Jupiter and Saturn). The measure of the shape’s deviation from being a circle is called its eccentricity. That is, the larger the eccentricity, the greater is its deviation from a circle. Thus, in terms of eccentricity, the Earth’s orbit undergoes a cyclical change from less eccentric to more eccentric and back. One complete cycle for this kind of variation lasts for about 100,000 years. Axial Tilt We know the earth is spinning around its own axis, which is the reason why we have night and day. However, this axis is not upright. Rather, it tilts at angles between 22.1-degrees and 24.5 degrees and back. These angles are measured between the angle of the axis to an imaginary line normal (perpendicular) to the Earth’s plane of orbit. A complete cycle for the axial tilt lasts for about 41,000 years. Greater tilts mean that the hemispheres closer to the Sun, i.e., during summer, will experience a larger amount of heat than when the tilt is less. In other words, regions in the extreme upper and lower hemispheres will experience the hottest summers and the coldest winters during a maximum tilt. Precession Aside from the tilt, the axis also wobbles like a top. A complete wobble cycle is more or less 26,000 years. This motion is caused by tidal forces from the Sun and Moon. Precession as well as tilting are the reasons why regions near and at the poles experience very long nights and very long days at certain times of the year. For example, in Norway, the Sun never completely descends beneath the horizon between late May to late July. The Milankovitch Cycles are among the arguments fielded by detractors of the Global Warming concept. According to them, the Earth’s current warming is just a part of a series of cyclical events that take thousands of years to complete, and hence cannot be prevented.

Microsoft has recently found a way to store human DNA on a hard drive in order to send it anywhere desired. It once was thought to be impossible to teleport humans due to the sheer volume and potential compromise of the genetic DNA during the process. Now, with Microsoft new DNA hard drive, they are able to store the information of human DNA and teleported to anywhere to then be reanimated. This now solves the problem that they have been searching for for so long. This is the type of thing we had only heard of in seine fiction, but now we are on the way to the future.

Colonizing the inner solar system. We have been told this is what we should be doing so, how are we going to get there? What is our civilizations goal to take the next evolutional leap to evolve to a space generation? Let’s take a journey and see the concepts of what it would take to get us there. Part 1.

Colonizing the inner solar system. We have been told this is what we should be doing so, how are we going to get there? What is our civilizations goal to take the next evolutional leap to evolve to a space generation? Let’s take a journey and see the concepts of what it would take to get us there. Part 1.

By Phil Shannon The announcement of the world's first sustained nuclear fusion reaction in England on November 10 was greeted with silence on the left, but it is worth asking whether it deserves our plaudits or placards. Nuclear fission rightly has no admirers on the left, but the same can not be said for nuclear fusion, where the old refrain about nuclear energy being cheap, clean and inexhaustible is still heard. The Democratic Socialist Party's Socialism and Human Survival, for example, contains a breathless account of how nuclear fusion could be a "long term solution to the world's energy needs" because there is a "practically limitless" supply of the fuel (deuterium — an isotope of hydrogen) in the world's oceans "to maintain the current annual global energy consumption for 35 billion years!". If there are any technical, social or political problems with nuclear fusion, they are not mentioned in this document. Earlier this century, Leon Trotsky praised nuclear fission, but he can be partially excused for uncritically accepting the claims of the nuclear scientists because the problems of radioactivity, waste disposal and meltdown were not all apparent. Marxists today can not afford to be so trusting of the nuclear fusion claims because there is a steep downside to fusion energy. The researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) plant in Oxfordshire produced a fusion reaction using deuterium and tritium (DT fusion), in which the nuclei of these two isotopes of hydrogen are forced together under extreme heat (100 million degrees), releasing neutrons whose energy is converted to heat. The $1 billion machine, attended by its 500 scientists, produced 1 Mw of power for 2 seconds, with a peak of 2 Mw (about the same as a windmill in a moderate breeze). This is well below the 15 Mw break-even point, where the energy produced exceeds that required to produce and maintain the deuterium/tritium mix. Radioactive There are other problems with DT fusion which were not heard above the popping of champagne corks. DT fusion produces radioactivity because tritium is radioactive. The JET researchers had avoided using tritium for the eight years of their project because of this (it will now take three months for the radioactivity to dissipate sufficiently for the plant to be used again). As some cynics observed, they added the radioactive tritium now because they needed a result to ensure further funds for the design and construction of an experimental reactor core. The cheque, for $5 billion, was duly signed a few days later by the governments of the EEC, the Soviet Union, Japan and the Tritium does not occur naturally and must be derived by bombarding the metal lithium with neutrons. Lithium is also radioactive, and its mining and handling are thus dangerous. A commercial DT fusion plant will produce some 250 tons of radioactive waste per year and will itself become radioactive and a disposal problem after a life span of only 20-25 years. Fusion proponents who acknowledge radioactivity as a problem argue that deuterium-deuterium fusion (DD fusion) will avoid this problem because deuterium is not radioactive. But although deuterium is not radioactive, DD fusion produces not only the harmless elements hydrogen and helium, and energy, but also some tritium. If not completely consumed in the reaction, this tritium will be free to escape and wreak havoc with us. DD fusion also releases neutrons which are a form of ionising radiation, very destructive of human tissue, although with a short range. This neutron discharge (the central element of fusion energy production) will make the reactor and plant radioactive. Although the radioactivity dangers of DD fusion are of a lesser magnitude than DT fusion, other problems are much greater. Whereas DT fusion requires a temperature of (only!) 100 million degrees, DD fusion requires 3 billion degrees (one quarter of the temperature of the sun's core). The difficulties in producing a reactor that can withstand these temperatures are enormous, and the prospects for reaching energy break-even point are much more bleak than even DT fusion, whose supporters are not forecasting a commercial start-up date before 2050. Non-renewable Neither DT nor DD fusion are inexhaustible sources of energy. They both suffer from limitations imposed by their requirement for the use of non-renewable, scarce or rapidly depleting resources. Lithium is non-renewable, and the isotope of lithium suitable for production of tritium constitutes less than 10% of all lithium reserves. The lithium isotope is almost as scarce as uranium, and although it can be extracted from the ocean, no-one is saying how easily. Niobium, necessary to contain the corrosive lithium, is also relatively scarce (as well as being radioactive). Vanadium and molybdenum are also essential to fusion and also scarce. In addition, each fusion plant requires about three million tons of copper (a rapidly depleting resource). Fusion proponents who concede these limiting resource constraints point (with more hope than certainty) to laser fusion, in which laser beams are fired onto pellets of deuterium/tritium and in which no supporting cast of non-renewable resources is required. However, this method is less advanced than hot fusion because it is even more difficult. The earnest proselytes of nuclear fusion treat it as a clean, perpetual motion machine. It isn't. It is the hard technology path involving complex technology to provide energy that is available from cheaper, cleaner, safer processes such as photovoltaic cells and other renewable energy sources. As Amory Lovins has put it, nuclear fusion is like using a chain saw to cut butter. It is also an undemocratic technology, the domain of a scientific elite. People can much more easily have control over renewable energy technology — you only need know how to tell one end of a hammer from another to be able to maintain a windmill, but mastering the theory and practice of fusion requires a lifetime of nuclear physics and engineering. Yet nuclear fusion continues to be the Holy Grail of the technological optimists, those who search for a technological fix to the problems of energy use under capitalism (pollution, resource depletion etc). The right wing are Grail-seekers because they do not want to challenge the underlying economic structures of capitalism, with its imperative to keep the production and consumption curves forever rising. Those on the left are attracted to fusion because of the orthodox, 19th century Marxist goal of the conquest of nature (a tradition from which only a few Marxists, like William Morris, have stood aside). Technological optimism involves a faith that science can solve all our environmental ills because of the "ultimate resource" of human creativity (to use the phrase of the right-wing Herman Kahn/Julian Simon school). Doubters are reminded of the sceptics who dismissed robots, rockets and airplanes as science fiction. No-one, however, is saying that fusion is science fiction. It has been achieved (if briefly) as JET showed in November, more human and financial resources could speed up its development and overcome some of its design problems, the radioactivity problems of DD fusion might be safely contained, laser techniques may solve the problem of natural resource limitations, socialist citizens might perhaps all become experts at sub-atomic physics. 'Soft' technology All this is possible but there are a lot of mights, mays and perhapses. Why choose something risky and uncertain when the soft technology path is simpler and safer? More fundamentally, the question goes to the heart of the sort of society, and relationship to nature, we want. Do we want, or need, an abundance of energy powering an abundance of gadgets for an abundance of people, driven by nuclear fusion and a destructively exploitative attitude to nature? Whilst we should be taking the political path of Marxists like Trotsky, can we or the Earth afford his attitude towards the exploitation of nature in a classless society: "The proper goal of communism is the domination of nature by ination of technology by planning so that the raw materials of nature will yield up to mankind all that we need and more besides." That Trotsky, so intelligent and keen minded in his analysis of political and human affairs, could express such an uncritically "religious" faith when it comes to our relationship to nature, is indicative of a problem with this particular aspect of classical Marxism, one which is overdue for reappraisal in the light of the new scientific and ecological knowledge which we possess but which Marxists like Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels did not have. They were rarely ones to let dogma rule reality. We have the same responsibility. Rather than conquering nature, turning it into a super-factory powered by nuclear fusion, would it not be better to have a more human-scale world where we use but don't abuse nature? Adopting the concept of "enough" rather than "more" doesn't mean becoming a supporter of an ideological front for capitalist austerity in our present societies. It does mean taking environmentalism seriously in the socialist project. There is one valuable nuclear fusion reactor operating today, and that's a safe 150 million km away, supplying us with clean, inexhaustible, renewable energy. We should get the placards ready if they try to conquer the sun and set up a human-made one in our backyards.

It’s not impossible for the first child to be born in space. But it really depends on who you talk to. With the new advancements in XNA(artificial DNA), we are now able to create life without human to human intervention. For many this has posed a moral and ethical question for year. But with the bonding of human DNA strands along with newly discovered strands, we could technically be creating new generation of children as we speak. For many this is hard to wrap your head around but, scientists have been working on this discovery for quite some time. It is being used for many things such as treating and preventing disease. Researchers have even been using the CRISPR technique to cut out DNA that’s mutated and replacing it with healthy DNA strands. So next time we think this is a far fetch, think twice.