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3 technologies that have the potential to create trillion dollar markets over the next decade.

BEAUMONT-SUR-OISE, France (AP) — Master Yoda, dust off his French, he must.

It’s now easier than ever in France to act out “Star Wars” fantasies, because its fencing federation has borrowed from a galaxy far, far away and officially recognized lightsaber dueling as a competitive sport, granting the iconic weapon from George Lucas’ saga the same status as the foil, epee and sabre, the traditional blades used at the Olympics.

Of course, the LED-lit, rigid polycarbonate lightsaber replicas can’t slice a Sith lord in half. But they look and, with the more expensive sabers equipped with a chip in their hilt that emits a throaty electric rumble, even sound remarkably like the silver screen blades that Yoda and other characters wield in the blockbuster movies.

Stargazers will get a close-up look at Earth’s natural satellite this week thanks to the brightest supermoon event of the year.

A supermoon phenomenon occurs when a full moon, on its oval-shaped orbit, is at its closest to us, known as perigee, which is about 356,000 kilometres as measured from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the moon.

It takes place when the moon’s orbit brings it to the closest point to Earth while at the same time bathed in sunlight, giving the moon its bright appearance.

Continue reading “Biggest supermoon of the year is here this week” »

Uh oh…

(Via Mirror Tech)

The space rock, dubbed 2013 MD8 will make a ‘close approach’ to our planet tomorrow afternoon.

Continue reading “Asteroid the size of Big Ben is hurtling towards Earth, NASA warns” »

Electric cars could be charged at any time and any place.

It could reliably supply energy 99 per cent of the time, at six-times the intensity of solar farms on earth, he said.

Chinese scientists first plan to build and launch small to medium-sized solar power stations to be launched into the stratosphere to generate electricity, between 2021 and 2025.

Continue reading “Plans for first Chinese solar power station in space revealed” »

An international team of researchers, from Imperial College London and the University of Melbourne in Australia, has demonstrated a new AI system that can effectively predict survival rates from ovarian cancer better than any current conventional method available to doctors.

RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) — A nonprofit Israeli consortium said Monday that it hopes to make history this week by launching the first private aircraft to land on the moon.

SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries told a news conference that the landing craft — dubbed “Beresheet,” or Genesis — will take off from Florida, propelled by a SpaceX Falcon rocket on its weekslong voyage to the moon.

The launch is scheduled late Thursday in the United States, early Friday in Israel. It had been originally slated for last December.

It is the first such research to be undertaken at the university.

IBRO is the global federation of neuroscience organizations that aims to promote and support neuroscience around the world through training, teaching, collaborative research, outreach and advocacy.

The research will be carried out at Sahu’s Cell Biology and Molecular metabolism lab at the Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, which is headed by Professor Sarita Gupta.

Continue reading “Ahmedabad: MSU researcher gets global grant for vesicular trafficking study” »

When a star is born, a chaotic light show ensues.

NASA’s long-lived Hubble Space Telescope captured vivid bright clumps moving through the cosmos at some 1,000 light years from Earth. The space agency called these objects clear “smoking gun” evidence of a newly formed star — as new stars blast colossal amounts of energy-rich matter into space, known as plasma.

Seen as the vivid blue, ephemeral clumps in the top center of the new image below, these are telltale signs of an energy-rich gas, or plasma, colliding with a huge collection of dust and gas in deep space.