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ICYMI: The ESA's mission to Mars launches next week
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The European Space Agency and Russia are joining up to launch their ExoMars project next week, which will look for traces of extraterrestrial life on the red planet. Meanwhile, a newer kind of wind energy harvester is being installed in Paris, where leaves on a fake tree can capture energy in breezy conditions.
ICYMI: Barely hoverbiking, new hair dryer tech and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-698312{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-698312, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-698312{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-698312").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: YouTuber Colin Furze teamed up with Ford to build a working hoverbike within just a few weeks, from his shed. It runs off of two diesel engines so granted, it's probably not the most mass-production friendly item, but does beg the question: What's holding everyone back, then?
My Favorite Martian
If The Martian DS looks a little rough on the edges, it's because the title was originally created by a team of three for a 72-hour game development competition four years ago. The resulting project is actually quite impressive, considering, and we're happy to see that one of the original developers took the time to create a homebrew port of it for the DS. Short but sweet, The Martian DS is a side-scrolling shooter in the vein of Alien Hominid. Players roam the city picking up weapons and power-ups while dodging constant gunfire from the local law enforcement. The game really suffers from the lack of a soundtrack, but the original character sprites, especially the donut-heaving boss, makes up for it. %Gallery-4955% [Via GBATemp]
North Dakota students show off Mars spacesuit prototype
We had assumed that with all the robots being developed for deployment to Mars, the human astronauts would mostly be lounging around inside the comfort of their robot-built habitats and ordering drinks from their robot bartenders, but yesterday's unveiling of a prototype spacesuit for navigating the Martian terrain proves that manned missions might not be as cushy as we anticipated. The 50-pound suit (which they somehow got The Office's Steve Carell to model) was designed by students from five North Dakota colleges in a collaborative project funded by a $100,000 NASA grant, and includes at least three innovative technologies for which patents have been filed. Among the slew of sensors and communications gear designed for the harsh, low-gravity environment are oxygen and carbon dioxide detectors, GPS system, full suite of health monitors, shoulder mounted CCD cam, Bluetooth server to coordinate all the data, and a high-power transmitter for beaming info back to the mothership -- though curiously, there's no mention of an onboard weapons system that would be crucial for encounters with the occasional hostile Martian. Also, as the AP helpfully notes, even with all the research and design that went into this project, the forty-odd students seemed to neglect a key feature of any good full-body suit, which is an "escape hatch" for when the astronauts need to "jettison their waste."[Via futurismic and abc]
