The commercial space race hit a pretty big milestone! Yesterday’s SpaceX launch put the first commercial spacecraft with plans to dock with the space station into orbit: I’m convinced that space travel, like the kind Virgin Galactic is planning, will become “reasonably” affordable over the next two decades. You can now book a space flight right on the Virgin site for $200,000. The form is actually quite funny: “Book Directly with Virgin Galactic” or “Book with your Local Accredited Space Agent.” I love it. It’s an outrageous sum of money, but not nearly as outrageous as the $20-$35 million per trip paid to the Russian government by “tourists” over the past 11 years. And now there’s talk of $13,000 trips in the
Category: Technology
CineSquid
From my Imaging Ventures course yesterday, former MIT student Justin Jensen developed a suction cup tripod-based camera mount:
Pune: A (Nearly) Waste-Free City
Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the tenth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 26, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Until now, we’ve spent the majority of our time exploring upstream agricultural supply chains – learning about what happens to food between farms and markets, before it reaches end consumers. Unlike many western countries, Indian
The Japanese Doing Crazy Things With Quantum Levitation
Really crazy: One of the early quantum levitation experiments came out of Israel earlier this year. The video and website are worth checking out as well if you’re into this sort of thing.
Innovation Strategy and the Technology S-Curve
Two of my classmates, Matt Lieber and Michael Shafrir, put together a promo video for the Innovation Strategy course that will be taught by Professor Pierre Azoulay this spring at MIT Sloan: The technology s-curve. There you have it. “Cameras, diapers, and pretty much any other kind of technology…” Matt and Michael don’t normally spend their time making promo videos for MBA courses. They’ll be the TAs this semester.
Japanese Baseball in Space
From the ISS, via Popular Science:
Creepy Video of the Day
“Meet Ant-Roach, an inflatable clackety six-legged robot with a protruding proboscis”: The name was chosen “because it reminds its creators of a cross between an anteater and a cockroach.” Some people take a ride: More here.
Missions to Mars
This is just a nice infographic: And this was just a weird movie.
Eric-Schmidt Backed “Slice”
Via Techcrunch, Eric Schmidt is backing a new start-up, Slice, that aims to organize and track your online purchases by querying purchase data from your inbox. I gave it a shot earlier this week, and found it to be surprisingly accurate and useful. I generally don’t use online life organization tools (e.g., Mint), but I found this to be a bit different. Instead of simply helping you to analyze your own purchasing behavior, it helps you anticipate and track outstanding items that are either en route or have been held up for some reason. So rather than log onto various sites to track your orders, you can just log into Slice, which has already identified the tracking numbers for shipped
Creepy Things From Japan
The Japanese have designed a robotic polar bear to “gently smack snorers in the face.” I’m not sure how this is supposed to work in practice, but the video makes it look even creepier than it sounds: