The World’s Water Crisis In Pictures
Mustafah Abdulaziz, a Berlin-based photographer spent four years traveling the world and capturing people’s relationships with water. Now, a display of his work is on exhibit at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City. Each image, like this one above of a man shrimp fishing in Lake Hong in China, tells a unique story of our use and misuse of natural resources.
Saturn’s Tiny Moon
Can you see Saturn’s moon Pan? Its that tiny white dot left of center, within Saturn’s rings. Despite its size in comparison to the planet, the moon actually plays a key role in shaping Saturn’s changing rings. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this image on July 2 of this year from a distance of about 840,000 miles away.
Pool Practice
After a test flight in 2018, the Orion Spacecraft will splash into the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, at which point Navy Divers and Coast Guard and Air Force rescue workers will need to recover the uncrewed spacecraft. The mission will be a practice run in preparation for an eventual trip to Mars. Here, workers practice their rescue techniques inside the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston this week.
New Pet-Sized Dino
In a new study out this week in Current Biology, researchers used fossil remains to figure out the color patterns of the skin on a Psittacosaurus’ body. The dog-sized dinosaur had a lighter underside, called countershading, which is also seen today in penguins and other animals.
Space Microbiome
Over the next 10 years, NASA scientists will be studying not only how space travel effects astronauts, but also how it affects the collection of microbes that live on and within them. Understanding how the microbiome changes during stints on the space station will help researchers better understand how to create a controlled microbial environment in future spacecraft.
Wildfire At Vandenberg Air Force Base
This past week, firefighters worked to control and eliminate the wildfire that burned through the forests in Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The fire got close, but ended up not reaching the Space Launch Complex 4, where SpaceX’s Falcon 9 awaits its next launch.
Is A DIY EpiPen Safe?
The EpiPen, a life saving medication that injects epinephrine through an easy-to-administer injector, is crucial for people with severe allergies. But when it made news this month for having its price raised to over $600, a group of DIY medical activists showed the internet how they created their own cheaper, DIY version called an “EpiPencil.” However, the medicine it injects, epinephrine, should be taken with caution, as one medical ethicist suggests.
Mercedes-Benz’s Concept Vision Van
The delivery system of the future may be a combination of vans and drones. Mercedes-Benz, working with drone delivery company Matternet, created the Vision Van concept. It comes equipped with two drones on its roof. Here’s to a future of easier and swifter deliveries.
Futuristic Views
Navy divers need to be able to easily navigate through murky waters–a challenge that may soon become a lot easier to overcome. Navy helmets may soon have smart eyewear that uses augmented reality to adds real-time sonar, text messages, schematics, photographs, and videos to the diver’s field of view. Read more about it here.
How Zuckerberg’s $3 Billion Compares To The U.S.’s Yearly Medical Research Spending
This week, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced that they would pledge $3 billion over the next 10 years to ‘cure all diseases.’ That funding will begin with an initial investment of $600 million into BioHub, a new partnership with UCSF and other research institutions in the Bay Area. Is $3 billion enough money to ‘cure all diseases’ though? Here we compare that number to how much is already spent yearly on medical research in the U.S. It turns out that in comparison, $3 billion is a very small amount of money.
