Nemesis: Retaliation and Firefly board games boost Kickstarter competitor Gamefound to record earnings
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Consumer appetite for crowdfunding appears to be bigger than ever before
Consumer appetite for crowdfunding appears to be bigger than ever before
Private space company Firefly finally reached orbit with its Alpha rocket, joining a short list of U.S. commercial rocket builders that have successfully launched a vehicle to orbit amidst a growing space industry.
Also reaching orbit today was TechEdSat-15 (TES-15), which is owned by NASA in coordination with San Jose State University in California. TES-15 features an “exo-brake” designed to help satellites leave their orbital perches more smoothly when their work is done. “The exo-brake will deploy after the cubesat is ejected from its dispenser to deorbit the cubesat,” Firefly wrote in the mission description. TES-15 also carries an experiment designed to optimize data transfer from the little spacecraft, the company added.
The third payload — the PicoBus deployer, from the nonprofit Libre Space — carries five tiny payloads of its own. Those bantam “picosats” include Genesis-L & Genesis-N, from AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation) Spain. The pair will demonstrate a pulsed-plasma thruster system for spacecraft propulsion and “build heritage for future missions,” according to Firefly. PicoBus is also carrying Libre Space’s Qubik-1 and Qubik-2, which will perform communications experiments, and FossaSat-1B. This latter satellite, from the Spanish company Fossa Systems, will test communications and remote-sensing tech. It also carries a low-resolution Earth-imaging camera.
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So little is known about how fireflies live that it is hard to assess whether they are in danger — and if so, why, said Dr. Owens. But in a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, she and Sara Lewis, a professor of biology at Tufts University, shone some light on how fireflies respond to artificial illumination. Experiments in forests and fields as well as the lab showed that while some North American fireflies would mate with wild abandon, regardless of illumination, others did not complete a single successful mating under the glare of the lights. Fireflies seem to rely primarily on flashes of light to find each other, which means light pollution could threaten their ability to see mates. In the four common species the study examines, the females hide on the ground and observe as males wander the skies. When a female responds to a male’s flashing with her own, the two enter into a dialogue that can end in a meeting, and eventually mating.
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