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BEIJING China’s Shenzhou 11 space capsule landed safely in the northern region of Inner Mongolia on Friday with two astronauts aboard, state media said, completing the country’s longest manned space mission to date.

China Central Television showed images of the craft — whose name translates as “Divine Vessel” — on the ground flanked by Chinese flags and support teams. State news agency Xinhua said the capsule had touched down “successfully” just after 2 p.m.

The two astronauts, Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong, spent 30 days aboard the Tiangong 2 space laboratory, or “Heavenly Palace 2”, which China is using to carry out experiments ahead of a longer-range plan to have a permanent manned space station around 2022.

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Placed on Earth, it would stretch from Washington DC to New York to Detroit. Larger than the Grand Canyon, wider and deeper than East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, Mercury’s newly-discovered “Great Valley” boggles the imagination. But it’s more than size that makes this geologic feature remarkable. The Great Valley may be our best evidence that Mercury’s entire crust is contracting.

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This is a nice vid but there are two things to note.

1. he does not mention Callisto in place of Europa. Europa gets enough radiation to kill you in a day where on Callisto you would not even get the radiation you get here on Earth.

2. It might be possible to puff up a given asteroid by creating a cylinder within as he points out, but filling it with water and then heating it from outside and once it’s molten the water will expand and blow the asteroid to a larger size. It may be possible to turn a 1 mile wide asteroid into a ten mile wide habitat. I do not know how well it scales up to larger asteroids.


Everyone from astronomers to tech companies wants to know what it would be like to live on Mars.

From growing vegetables in Martian soil, to claims that leaving Earth could save the human species, scientists are constantly making advances in this field.

Now, astronomers from the Royal Observatory in London and Stephen Petranek — author of “How We’ll Live on Mars” — have designed a Martian Show Home to demonstrate what life could be like on the Red Planet.

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If you were to compare yourself to a neutron star, you probably wouldn’t find very many things in common. After all, neutron stars – celestial bodies with super strong magnetic fields – are made from collapsed star cores, lie light-years away from Earth, and don’t even watch Netflix.

But, according to new research, we share at least one similarity: the geometry of the matter that makes us.

Researchers have found that the ‘crust’ (or outer layers) of a neutron star has the same shape as our cellular membranes. This could mean that, despite being fundamentally different, both humans and neutron stars are constrained by the same geometry.

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In Brief:

  • A Type IV civilization is a society that has managed to harness the energy of the entire universe.
  • To get here, we would need to tap into energy sources unknown to us using strange laws of physics (laws that may or may not exist).

To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).

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Here’s something to think about — physicists have proposed that the Universe could have a ‘self destruct’ mechanism, whereby everything in existence could disappear forever at any time, without warning.

Yep, as the video by Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell above explains, if this self-destruct button turns out to be a real thing, it means we could be here one second, and gone the next, and we’d never even see it coming.

To understand this horrifying scenario, we first have to go through two of the fundamental principles of the Universe, the first being energy levels.

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