Transport is just one challenge the scientists at NASA have to manage before the agency’s planned manned mission to Mars in the 2030s. Ensuring that the first astronauts survive the Red Planet’s extreme environment is a whole other hurdle to overcome.
But researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center have settled on a valuable material — ice — which they they think will support the first habitats on Mars.
Mars is packed with water ice. In September 2015, NASA found evidence of running water on the Red Planet. Then, in November of last year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter helped researchers determine that the planet holds enough ice deposits to fill Lake Superior.
Due to the immense cost of shipping materials over 30 million miles through the Solar System, it’s important for astronauts to carry as little as possible and extract what they can from the planet when they land. So, the “Mars Ice Home” concept begins with this approach: use raw materials that are already on Mars.
The Ice Home is an inflatable shelter that can double as a habitat for astronauts and a storage tank for rocket fuel, which departing astronauts can refill for the incoming crew. Its lightweight, 3D-printed design enables it to be transported ahead of time and deployed by robotics, before the astronauts arrive and fill the outer layer with water ice.
Water might not seem like the best shelter against Martian environmental extremes, but the hydrogen-rich material is actually stellar at shielding from galactic cosmic rays, with the added bonus that it’s translucent, allowing natural light to pass through. The Ice Home will also include a layer of carbon dioxide gas — also available on Mars — to help insulate the living space from the thick layer of ice.
Although the Ice Home is innovative, the team still has a few constraints to address, including the development of an efficient extracting method. With current methods, experts expect the shelter to fill in about 400 days.
The project is a joint effort between designers and architects from industry and academia, including the teams at Space Exploration Architecture and the Cloud Architecture Office who won first prize in NASA’s 3D Printed Habitat Challenge.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.