SpaceX's Falcon 9 performed correctly. Zuma Either failed to reach orbit, is in orbit with the second stage attached to it, is in orbit and functioning properly and the government can't say, because it is classified, or is openly denying it so that no one tracks it.

SpaceX Says Falcon 9 Rocket Performed as Expected During Zuma Launch

As media reports swirl around the ultimate fate of the U.S. government's secret Zuma mission, which launched atop a SpaceX rocket Sunday (Jan. 7), the private spaceflight company says its Falcon 9 booster performed as expected during the launch.

 From article, (As media reports swirl around the ultimate fate of the U.S. government's secret Zuma mission, which launched atop a SpaceX rocket Sunday (Jan. 7), the private spaceflight company says its Falcon 9 booster performed as expected during the launch.  

"For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night," SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement. "If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately. 

"Information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false," Shotwell continued. "Due to the classified nature of the payload, no further comment is possible." [See amazing photos of SpaceX's Zuma launch]

Shotwell's comments come amid media speculation, including from The Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica, suggesting that the top-secret payload may have fallen back to Earth. The Wall Street Journal reported that lawmakers and congressional staffers had been briefed on the alleged mission failure, according to government and industry officials, and indicated that there might have been a failed separation between the payload and the rocket's second stage. That type of failure could potentially have occurred after a successful Falcon 9 launch.

According to Eric Berger of Ars Technica, Zuma was assigned a number in the satellite catalog Space-Track.org, which implies it was able to make at least one orbit of Earth — but it could have still been attached to the second stage and failed to detach after that point. Berger noted that the payload adapter connecting the stage to the payload and fairing was provided by Northrop Grumman, so a potential separation problem could track back to that company's failure. A Northrop Grumman representative told Space.com the company cannot comment on classified missions.

Because the Falcon 9 functioned correctly, Shotwell said, future SpaceX launches should not be delayed, including the highly anticipated first launch of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket.)

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Me, "SpaceX's Falcon 9 performed correctly. Zuma Either failed to reach orbit, is in orbit with the second stage attached to it, or Its in orbit and functioning properly. The government can't say either way because it is classified or is openly denying it so that no one tracks it. Can anyone say conspiracy theory?"

What to do if your in a car that does not have a steering wheel or pedals? Don't panic. Its probably a GM Driverless Concept Car, For now...

General Motors Will Unveil A Driverless Concept Car Tomorrow With No Steering Wheel Or Pedals

General Motors will unveil a new driverless concept car as early as Friday that doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals, the latest salvo in the company's efforts to deploy autonomous vehicles onto public roads. The debut was confirmed by sources familiar with the matter and documents seen by Jalopnik.

 From article, (General Motors will unveil a new driverless concept car as early as Friday that doesn’t have a steering wheel or pedals, the latest salvo in the company’s efforts to deploy autonomous vehicles onto public roads.

 

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The debut was confirmed by sources familiar with the matter and documents seen by Jalopnik.

As part of the announcement, sources said, GM and its autonomous car unit, Cruise Automation, will submit a report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on how it plans to safely equip cars with self-driving technology and deploy them on the road. To date, Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo is the only company to submit such a report to NHTSA.

It’s not clear if GM’s showing off a working prototype or just a concept. If the automaker tries to deploy the car for testing purposes, it’d be one of the most futuristic vehicles on the road to date. Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo launched a pilot program late last year that involves cars without a driver at the steering wheel.

GM and Cruise are currently building autonomous Chevrolet Bolts at an assembly plant in Michigan. The company has built 180 self-driving Bolts so far, and by early 2018, it expects its autonomous fleet to accumulate 1 million miles per month during test drives.)

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Thinking about what you could do in an Autonomous car Instead of Driving.

Autonomous vehicles could help millions of people catch up on sleep, TV and work

What would you do if you could magically reclaim all the time you spend behind the wheel of a car? Ultimately that's what a future filled with autonomous vehicles is promising. There are many questions about what autonomous vehicles will be able to do, how reliable they'll be and how much they'll cost.

From article, (What would you do if you could magically reclaim all the time you spend behind the wheel of a car? Ultimately that’s what a future filled with autonomous vehicles is promising.

There are many questions about what autonomous vehicles will be able to do, how reliable they’ll be and how much they’ll cost. But development is far enough along for people to start thinking about what drivers would do with all that free time were it available. Some people imagine sending their cars to pick up milk from the store, having the family car drive little Emily to her soccer practice, or getting into pajamas and curling up to sleep during an overnight long-distance drive.

It’s hard to know, though, what people will really do once self-driving cars are common. Part of the problem, of course, is that we don’t yet know what the technology will be capable of and how much it will cost. But even if we did know this, it is still hard to predict what people will do with a new technology: The Bell Labs engineers who in 1947 invented the semiconductor transistor could not have foreseen their device leading to online shopping, unprecedented globalization and emojis.)

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What do you do when you have too much astronomy data to go thru? You call on the public to help. In this case, it was to find Exoplanets.

Citizen scientists discover five tightly packed exoplanets

Five new planets have been discovered outside our solar system, all orbiting a sun-like star located within the constellation Aquarius, nearly 620 light years from Earth. The alien worlds are considered super-Earths, sizing in at two to three times larger than our own blue planet.

From article, (In 2017, Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics at MIT, who at the time was a Sagan Fellow at the University of California at Santa Cruz, worked with fellow astronomer Jesse Christiansen at Caltech to make the K2 data public and enlist as many volunteers as they could in the search for exoplanets.

The team used a popular citizen-scientist platform called Zooniverse to create its own project, dubbed Exoplanet Explorers. The project was inspired by a similar effort via Zooniverse called Planet Hunters, which has enabled users to sift through and classify both Kepler and K2 data.

For the Exoplanet Explorers project, Crossfield and Christiansen first ran a signal-detection algorithm to identify potential transit signals in the K2 data, then made those signals available on the Zooniverse platform. They designed a training program to first teach users what to look for in determining whether a signal is a planetary transit. Users could then sift through actual light curves from the K2 mission and click “yes” or “no,” depending on whether they thought the curve looked like a transit.

At least 10 users would have to look at a potential signal, and 90 percent of these users would have to vote “yes,” for Crossfield and Christiansen to consider the signal for further analysis.

“We put all this data online and said to the public, ‘Help us find some planets,’” Crossfield says. “It’s exciting, because we’re getting the public excited about science, and it’s really leveraging the power of the human cloud.”

Several months into working with Zooniverse to get Exoplanet Explorers up and running, the researchers got a call from an Australian television program that was offering to feature the project on live television. The team scrambled to launch the effort, and over two days in April, as the program was broadcast live, Exoplanet Explorers drew 10,000 users who started sifting through the K2 data. Over 48 hours, the users made nearly 2 million classifications from the available light curves.

Crossfield and Christiansen, along with NASA astronomer Geert Barentsen, looked more closely at the classifications flagged by the public and determined that many of them were indeed objects of interest. In particular, the effort identified 44 Jupiter-sized, 72 Neptune-sized, and 44 Earth-sized planets, as well as 53 so-called super Earths, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.)

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Is there a way to enrich farmland soil, grow better crops, and at the same time sequester Carbon Dioxide? It could be as simple as using Compost and Manure.

Soil power! The dirty way to a green planet

Jacques Leslie is a Los Angeles Times contributing opinion writer and the author of "Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the ...

From article. (carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation is an effective way to pull carbon from the atmosphere that in some ways is the opposite of geoengineering. Instead of overcoming nature, it reinforces it, promoting the propagation of plant life to return carbon to the soil that was there in the first place — until destructive agricultural practices prompted its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That process started with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and accelerated over the past century as industrial farming and ranching rapidly expanded.

“Putting the carbon back in soil is not only mitigating climate change, but also improving human health, productivity, food security, nutrition security, water quality, air quality — everything,” Mr. Lal told me over the phone. “It’s a win-win-win option.”

The techniques that regenerative farmers use vary with soil, climate and crop. They start from the understanding that healthy soil teems with more than a billion microorganisms per teaspoon and the behavior of those organisms facilitates hardy plant life.

To fertilize their fields, regenerative farmers use nutrient-rich manure or compost, avoiding as much as possible chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can kill huge quantities of organic matter and reduce plants’ resilience. They don’t like to till the soil, since tillage increases carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

California began in 2015 to incorporate soil health into the state’s farm and ranch operations. Some of the pioneering studies showing regenerative agriculture’s benefits have been carried out at the Marin Carbon Project on a self-proclaimed carbon-farming ranch in the pastoral reaches of Marin County, 30 miles northwest of San Francisco. A four-year study there showed that a one-time application of compost caused an increase in plant productivity that has continued ever since, and that the soil’s carbon content grew year after year, at a rate equivalent to the removal from the atmosphere of 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per acre annually.

Whendee Silver, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of California at Berkeley who is the project’s lead scientist, calculated along with a colleague that if as little as 5 percent of California’s grangelands was coated with one-quarter to one-half inch of compost, the resulting carbon sequestration would be the equivalent of the annual greenhouse emissions of nine million cars. The diversion of green waste from the state’s overcrowded landfills would also prevent it from generating methane, another potent greenhouse gas.)

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How Eating your Broccoli and a specially created Probiotic Gut Bacteria can lead to Colorectal Cancer Prevention.

Engineered Gut Bacteria Provide Enzyme That Helps Green Vegetables Fight Cancer | GEN

Scientists in Singapore have developed engineered probiotic gut bacteria that can transform a substance found naturally in broccoli and Brussels sprouts into a powerful cancer-preventing chemical.

 From article, (Scientists in Singapore have developed engineered probiotic gut bacteria that can transform a substance found naturally in broccoli and Brussels sprouts into a powerful cancer-preventing chemical. The National University of Singapore (NUS) team, led by Chun-Loong Ho, Ph.D., and associate professor Matthew Chang, Ph.D., engineered the harmless gut bacterium to attach specifically to the surface of colorectal cancer (CRC) cells and secrete an enzyme that converts the glucosinolate compounds in cruciferous vegetables into sulforaphane, an organic small molecule that has anticancer properties.

When tested in vitro, a combination of the engineered bacteria and broccoli extract almost completely prevented the growth of mouse and human CRC cells, without affecting any other type of cell. And when fed to a mouse model of CRC, the probiotic–vegetable combination reduced tumor numbers by 75% and stunted the growth of tumors that did develop.)

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Tampa Bay wants a BRT option that is like Light Rail but with Rubber wheels instead of physical rail.

Tampa Bay's transit future: Light rail's out. Rapid buses are in.

Watch out, Tampa Bay: light rail is out, and buses are in. For now, anyway. Transit leaders appear ready to scrap their dream of building a light rail line connecting Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties in favor of a bus rapid transit system that would run alongside Interstate 275 from Wesley Chapel to Tampa to St.

From article, ("I think the idea is to get vehicles that don’t look like your standard bus, that have more of a rail feel to them, but the technology is still rubber tire," Kriseman said. "So you’re kind of combining the feel of rail with the cost and flexibility of BRT."

That system would ideally be able to accommodate autonomous vehicle technology in the future. However, those details and many others, including the cost to build and maintain such a system, are still being worked out.

Transit leaders appear ready to scrap their dream of building a light rail line connecting Pasco, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties in favor of a bus rapid transit system that would run alongside Interstate 275 from Wesley Chapel to Tampa to St. Petersburg.

Also known as BRT, the plan to bring that form of transit to the bay area is being drawn up by Jacobs Engineering, which was hired to conduct a regional study of premium transit options that can one day become a reality.

But while the specifics are still unknown, it’s becoming more clear that an enhanced bus system, not a rail line, will likely be the first major regional transit project that Tampa Bay leaders pursue.

"The numbers don’t lie," Buckhorn said. "When you look at the cost and the ridership numbers and the likelihood of state and federal matches, I think it made a lot of sense."

Buckhorn has long been a proponent of rail, particularly connecting urban areas, but said he wasn’t interested in waiting any longer while people continued to debate the merits of a light rail line.)

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If SpaceX succeeds in launching and recovery operations of Falcon Heavy, where by 27 rocket engines have to work in unison, it means that The BFR will be easier to create and control with 30 rocket engines.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy completes successful rehearsal, static fire pushed back due to bug in launch pad hardware

More than a decade after its 2005 public conception, SpaceX is closer than ever to the first launch Falcon Heavy, the company's newest rocket. Earlier this afternoon, the vehicle was aiming for its first static fire test, in which all 27 of its engines would be ignited (nearly) simultaneously in order to test procedures and ...

From article, (If SpaceX manages to pull off Falcon Heavy as a successful and reliable launch vehicle on the order of its reasonably successful Falcon 9, BFR may well be an easier vehicle to develop and operate, thanks to its single-core design. As Musk himself has discussed over the last year or so, the problem of safely and reliably distributing the thrust of Heavy’s side cores to the center core was unexpectedly difficult, as were the issues of igniting all 27 Merlin 1Ds and safely separating the side cores while in flight. Ultimately, the payload improvement (while in a fully reusable mode of operation) was quite small, particularly for the geostationary missions that make up essentially all prospective Falcon Heavy customer missions.

The additional complexity of recovery and refurbishing three separate Falcon 9 boosters almost simultaneously likely serves to only worsen the vehicle’s potential payoff, although the upcoming Block 5 iteration of Falcon 9 may partially improve the vehicle’s ease of operation. If Block 5 is indeed as reusable as SpaceX intends to make it, then a handful of Block 5 Falcon Heavy vehicles could presumably maintain a decent launch cadence for the vehicle without requiring costly and time-consuming shipping all over the continental US.

 Nevertheless, the (hopefully successful) experience that will follow the launch and recovery operation of a super heavy-lift launch vehicle (SHLV) with ~30 first stage engines will be invaluable for SpaceX’s interplanetary goals. While BFR will be free of the complexity Falcon Heavy’s triple-core first stage added, it is still a massive vehicle that absolutely dwarfs anything SpaceX has attempted before. BFR in its 2017 iteration would mass around three times that of Falcon Heavy and feature 30 Raptor engines capable of approximately 53,000 kN (12,000,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff, around 2.5x that of Heavy. Many, many other features mean that BFR and particularly BFS will be extraordinarily difficult to realize: BFS alone will be treading into truly unprecedented areas of spaceflight with the scale, longevity, and reusability it is intended to achieve while comfortably ferrying dozens of astronauts to and from Mars and the Moon.

However, the scale of BFR is equivalent to that of the famous Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, while still dumbfoundingly massive and unprecedented in the modern era, rockets at the scale of BFR do in fact have a precedent of success, which lends the effort considerable plausibility, at least at proof-of-concept level. As of September 2017, Elon Musk suggested that SpaceX was aiming to begin construction of the first BFS (Big ____ Spaceship) by the end of Q2 2018, a truly Muskian deadline that probably wont hold. Still, if construction of the first prototype begins at any point in 2018, it will bode well for SpaceX’s aggressive timelines.)

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Me, "If SpaceX succeeds in launching and recovery operations of Falcon Heavy, where by 27 rocket engines have to work in unison, it means that The BFR will be easier to create and control with 30 rocket engines; even though, the BFR will be larger and taller."

Oil Companies are changing with the times. They see Offshore Wind Power farms as a new way to generate income.

Oil Giants See a Future in Offshore Wind Power. Their Suppliers Are Investing, Too.

Transporting an offshore wind array from the factory floor to the ocean floor is no easy feat. Giant, specialized marine vessels must carry the blades and turbines-which sit atop rigs hundreds of feet tall-out miles from shore. Steel or concrete foundations are built to hold them in place, and underwater cables are laid on the seabed to transfer the power to land.

 From article, (Transporting an offshore wind array from the factory floor to the ocean floor is no easy feat. Giant, specialized marine vessels must carry the blades and turbines—which sit atop rigs hundreds of feet tall—out miles from shore. Steel or concrete foundations are built to hold them in place, and underwater cables are laid on the seabed to transfer the power to land.

One other industry has spent decades constructing and maintaining such massive energy infrastructure that can survive the storms of the open ocean: oil and gas. Now, with global demand for wind power growing, major oil and gas companies like Shell and Statoil are diversifying their portfolios by developing offshore wind, and the companies that provide services to offshore fossil fuel platforms are seeing a new market rising in their wake.

Statoil, which is building the world's first floating wind farm near Scotland, is planning development for its first offshore wind lease in the U.S., an 80,000-acre area off the coast of New York that could generate more than a gigawatt of power. Ørsted (formerly DONG Energy, short for Danish Oil and Natural Gas), has a 1.3 gigawatt wind farm under construction off the UK and is exploring developments off Massachusetts and New Jersey. Shellis leading the development of two wind farms in the Dutch North Sea.  

Globally, 17.6 gigawatts of wind power capacity have been installed offshore, with most of it in Europe, and the industry is growing. Bloomberg New Energy Finance raised its offshore wind forecast this week, with an expectation that it will reach 115 gigawatts worldwide by 2030.)

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Mars has 8 Ice deposits 300 feet thick, under the Surface, at the middle latitudes. This makes a Mars colony, easier to establish.

'A fantastic find': Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surface

The slope rises as high as London's Big Ben tower. Beneath its ruddy layer of dirt is a sheet of ice 300 feet thick that gives the landscape a blue-black hue. If such a scene sounds otherworldly, it is. To visit it, you'll have to travel to Mars.

From article, (The slope rises as high as London's Big Ben tower. Beneath its ruddy layer of dirt is a sheet of ice 300 feet thick that gives the landscape a blue-black hue. If such a scene sounds otherworldly, it is. To visit it, you'll have to travel to Mars.

Planetary scientists located eight of these geological features, called scarps, on the Red Planet. An analysis of the scarps revealed that thick ice hides just below the surface. This ice, the researchers say, could be a tempting target for future exploration — as well as a valuable resource for Earthlings camped out on Mars.

The scarps exist along the planet's middle latitudes, ruling out glaciers that migrated from the poles. The study authors propose that these ice sheets formed when thick snows blanketed Mars. Balme agreed that snowfall probably created the ice over a period of a few thousand years.

And flesh-and-blood explorers might benefit, too (though the middle latitudes of Mars appear to be colder, less welcoming terrain than regions closer to the equator). “If we were to send humans to live on Mars for a substantial period of time, it would be a fantastic source of water,” Balme said. Astronauts living in the pits would have a vital raw material next door. All a thirsty astronaut would have to do would be to go at the scarp with a hammer and, presto, fresh Martian ice chips.)

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While Walmart can Boast that it is increasing its minimum wage to $11 dollars an hour because of President Trump's tax cut. Walmart had already increased its minimum wage to $10 dollars an hour without it. A $1 dollar increase really does not seem so big, considering how much in taxes they will save.

Walmart boosts minimum wage to $11, hands out bonuses up to $1,000 for hourly workers

Walmart is boosting the minimum hourly wage for its U.S. employees to $11 and dishing out bonuses of up to $1,000, crediting President Trump's tax cut for enabling the move. The increase for the nation's largest private employer also comes amid political pressure to bolster minimum wages.

From article, (Walmart is boosting the minimum hourly wage for its U.S. employees to $11 and dishing out bonuses of up to $1,000, crediting President Trump's tax cut for enabling the move.

The increase for the nation's largest private employer also comes amid political pressure to bolster minimum wages and comes amid a hot streak for the retailer.

The big-box store chain, which has more than 1 million U.S. hourly employees, will reap a windfall from the U.S. corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21%.

 "Wal-Mart would have had to go to at least $11 in many markets in order to retain reliable employees," said University of Michigan business professor Erik Gordon. "The tax cut made it easier for the company to swallow."

But, Gordon said, the move indicates that "the corporate tax cut's touted trickle-down effects that were met with skepticism by critics may be happening."
 The minimum wage increase comes about a year after Walmart hiked hourly pay to at least $10 for most workers.
Twelve states already have minimum wages of at least $10, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The wage increase comes as Walmart is on a roll. While many traditional retailers have been struggling to keep up with online behemoth Amazon, Walmart has fared better. Walmart's online business is surging.)

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Me, "While Walmart can Boast that it is increasing its minimum wage to $11 dollars an hour because of President Trump's tax cut. Walmart had already increased its minimum wage to $10 dollars an hour without it. A $1 dollar increase really does not seem so big. Bringing it up to $15 dollars would have impressed me."