News 07/22/21 A company named Orbital Assembly wants to build hotels in space and do it not with humans, but with robots. The company is working on creating an autonomous robot which is capable of doing the job. Orbital wants to develop the robot and then demonstrate it on the ground to help convince people this is not just a pipe dream. Their plan is to build the space hotel in such a way the spinning of the hotel will create gravity. They hope to build the first one by 2027. Interestingly the Germans in World War II also had similar plans for a rotating space station which would create its own gravity. A diamond about the size of the hand of a 6 year old was found. It was found in Botswana and registered a hard to believe 1,098 carats. This would make it the third largest diamond ever to be discovered. The largest diamond is the Cullinan at 3,106 carats. The second biggest diamond ever found was also found in Botswana and is 1,758 carats. When diamonds like this are found it sometimes starts a stampede to find more. Scientists have found they can control nerve cells with light. This has led to new ways to study the brain. It turns out some cells contain a chemical which makes them sensitive to the light. The light can turn neurons on and off. The method for doing this is called optogenetics. I guess this makes sense. When used on mice some were made to remember a room they had never been in. All I can say is I hope this will be used only for good, but I know better. I have to say I just don’t get it. A former NASA scientist was found to have spied for the Chinese. He did it for many years. He has visited a Chinese University for years and was involved with nanotechnology. When asked by Federal agents if he ever worked for a Chinese research university, he said no. Now you know one of the reasons the Chinese are doing so well in space. Anyway, he went to court and was convicted and guess what the penalty is for all those years of spying? If you would have said 30 days in jail you would be correct. What a disgrace. What was this judge thinking? The Chinese had paid him 1.4 million dollars. We stopped punishing criminals and now we don’t even punish spies anymore. Scientists keep making predictions about extraterrestrials when they really know nothing about them. I have heard so many different ones, I am tired of hearing them from the so called experts. The latest one is from Seth Shostak from SETI, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a research center which has been looking for alien signals for decades. He has decided that living beings will not be visiting our planet and if aliens do visit, they will be sort of artificial intelligence robots, androids or something else similar. He bases this idea on the it is hard to travel in space. He absolutely doesn’t consider the fact it may not be hard for some alien races who might have technology where they just pop through a wormhole or for other reasons. Their technology might make coming here as simple as us taking a flight to Europe. When we talk about secret weapons, I think the ancient Greeks hold the record for keeping their fiercest weapon secret the longest. That weapon was called Greek fire and once it started burning not even water could put it out. Believe it or not, the formula is still a mystery to us today. This weapon was especially deadly when used against the wooden ships of the day. The invention was credited to chemist Callinicus of Heliopolis. Since I am talking about fire, an interesting discovery has been made about people from the Paleolithic period. Archaeologists believe they have discovered the people from that period used different sources for fires to light their caves and such. These sources were torches made from different kinds of wood, stone lamps which used animal fat, and small fireplaces which used oak and juniper wood. The typical torch would last about 40 minutes before burning out. The lamps would supply light for a longer period of time. The fireplace was said to put out a lot of smoke and only lasted for 30 minutes before restocking the wood. Every once in a while, you hear about something similar to what I am about to tell you. I have heard about similar incidents about four or five times in about 20 years. A man noticed the second story of his house had a window but when he went to the second story and looked around there was no sign of the window. He decided to climb out on the roof. Then the video gets fishy. He gets to the window and then knocks on it and someone knocks back. Give me a break. I think this guy was just trolling for hits. The government is known for using ancient computers in some of its agencies and when you think about it, the Hubble telescope has been in space since April 24, 1990. The computer is said to be a 1980s era computer controlling it. Recently the telescope experienced computer problems and failed to operate. While NASA doesn’t know the exact computer problem, they are guessing it is degraded memory. Luckily there are backup memory modules and NASA has switched to one of them to solve the problem. A NASA representative said before it was fixed, "Assuming that this problem is corrected via one of the many options available to the operations team, Hubble is expected to continue yielding amazing discoveries into the late 2020s or beyond." Current solar cells for space may someday be a thing of the past. A hybrid organic-inorganic compound is much lighter than what is now currently used and very high in efficiency. The compound is called perovskite and will make it easier to fabricate solar panels in space and more cost efficient to launch from earth since they will be much lighter. We have all heard about clones. Scientists usually create clones in labs which are copies of other life forms. It turns out nature can also create a clone and much more efficiently than scientists. South African bees can reproduce asexually and make near perfect clones of themselves. The workers are able to do this and they just about have perfected the technique. Maybe there is something scientists can learn from this?
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