11 Nov Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster has sailed beyond Mars

The electric car, which was launched on the Falcon Heavy rocket in February, is reportedly 179 million miles away from Earth.

Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster has made its way past Mars’ orbit, according to a tweet from SpaceX on November 2, 2018. The Roadster, along with a dummy driver named "Starman" in the driver’s seat, was launched into space on the Falcon Heavy rocket in February. The website WhereIsRoadster.com calculated that the electric car is now about 179 million miles away from Earth and is moving at a speed of roughly 35,000 mph. It’s set to swing back into its planned 557-day orbit around the sun.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.businessinsider.com

11 Nov Rare Blue Asteroid Reveals Itself During Fly-By

Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: uanews.arizona.edu

05 Nov New material, manufacturing process use sun’s heat for cheaper renewable electricity – News – Purdue University

Solar power accounts for less than 2 percent of U.S. electricity but could make up more than that if the cost of electricity generation and energy storage for use on cloudy days and at nighttime were cheaper.

A Purdue University-led team developed a new material and manufacturing process that would make one way to use solar power – as heat energy – more efficient in generating electricity.

The innovation is an important step for putting solar heat-to-electricity generation in direct cost competition with fossil fuels, which generate more than 60 percent of electricity in the U.S.

“Storing solar energy as heat can already be cheaper than storing energy via batteries, so the next step is reducing the cost of generating electricity from the sun’s heat with the added benefit of zero greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kenneth Sandhage, Purdue’s Reilly Professor of Materials Engineering.

The research, which was done at Purdue in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published in the journal Nature.

A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/PMC3EE19ouw.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.purdue.edu

05 Nov NASA’s Kepler space telescope ends its planet-hunting mission

Astronomers are building instruments that can characterize the many alien worlds the Kepler spacecraft revealed—and look for signs of life.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nationalgeographic.com

05 Nov Scientists have finally confirmed the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center

Scientists have finally confirmed that the massive object at the heart of our galaxy is, in fact, a supermassive black hole.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s sensitive GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe infrared radiation flares coming from the accretion disc around Sagittarius A* — the massive object at the center of our galaxy. Scientists think that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they’d never before had the data and observations to prove it.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.astronomy.com

29 Oct The Dire Warnings of the United Nations’ Latest Climate-Change Report

Carolyn Kormann on a new report from the I.P.C.C., which states that global climate change will have catastrophic consequences once the planet surpasses 1.5 degrees of warming, which could happen in just a few years.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.newyorker.com

29 Oct Microplastics discovered in human stools across the globe in a ‘first of its kind’ study

Researchers monitored a group of participants from 8 countries across the world with results showing that every single stool sample tested positive for the presence of microplastic and up to 9 different plastic types were identified.

Microplastics have been found in the human food chain as particles made of polypropylene (PP), polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) and others were detected in human stools, research presented today at the 26th UEG Week in Vienna reveals.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.eurekalert.org