​​How we will become farmers on the moon ● A new type of battery will allow us to spend months on Venus ● 3500 years! This is the oldest brain surgery in the Middle East

How we will become farmers on the moon

It’s only a matter of time before we grow the first plants on the moon. Given the new space race between China and the US to build a lunar base, the first crop of lunar rapeseed may be only a few decades away. And the good news is that the European Space Agency (ESA) is working to let future farmers get down to business.

The white sphere results from the analysis of samples of regolith (a layer of dust and stones covering the surface of the Moon) brought to Earth. This is because they show that the regolith contains enough minerals for plants to grow. The black ball was formed when the reaction of the regolith in contact with water was observed. More precisely, it became compact, which clearly does not allow the roots to develop.

Hydroponic gardens are an effective solution. That is, gardens where the roots of plants are immersed in a solution based on water and minerals. For this, researchers from the Geotechnical Institute and the Center for Interdisciplinary Space Studies, both from Norway, in cooperation with ESA specialists, proposed to create a device that would process the regolith, extracting only useful substances from it, which would be dissolved in water. Simple, right?

Regolith is there, thank goodness we don’t have to worry about running out of it too quickly. With water, they decide that it also exists on the Moon. We only need the device. And it looks like it will be ready soon, because judging by the tests carried out so far, the prototype really works. In conclusion, get your money off your mattress and invest in a sunny land! This is where the future is.

A new type of battery will allow us to spend months on Venus

So much time will be spent on Venus not by us personally, but by future works. until? Up to 120 days, say NASA and Advanced Thermal Batteries, which are working together on a new type of battery to make long-duration missions to Venus a reality.

Until now, the robots sent by the Russians as part of the Venera missions did not stay on the surface of the planet Venus for more than two hours. Two hours of pleasure. This is because the temperature there rises to 455 degrees Celsius, the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere tends to corrode metal, and the atmospheric pressure is equivalent to the pressure in the ocean at a depth of 1,500 meters.

A positive aspect would be that the atmosphere of the planet Venus is so dense that you don’t need all kinds of expensive devices to allow the rover to reach the surface of the planet. Experts say that it is like immersing a stone in water. And if you say you’re going to solve it with materials resistant to high temperatures and corrosion, there’s still the problem of a battery to power a potential Venus rover. And yes, a battery is the most efficient method if solar panels are out of the question due to high atmospheric pressure.

But don’t worry, say the boys and girls at NASA, they’ve got it all figured out! as? By creating a type of thermal battery that effectively uses the atmospheric conditions on Venus. At least theoretically, it should work for up to 120 Earth days.

The battery will be installed on a 10-kilogram rover called LLISSE (Long-Lived In situ Solar System Explorer), which will contain all kinds of sensors to analyze wind speed, temperature, atmospheric pressure and other interesting data.

When will it be ready? In about 18 months, we should have a prototype, NASA says. Like I said, it’s solved!

3500 years! This is the oldest brain surgery in the Middle East

And no, it wasn’t a success, but intent matters. The discovery was made back in 2016, but further analysis requires a lot of time. Therefore, it took six years for American and Israeli archaeologists working on the case to gather all the information and publish it in the journal PlosONE.

We are talking about the princely tomb, which contained the bones of two brothers, whose age, as I have already said, was estimated at about 3500 years. An interesting case was the oldest of the brothers, one of whom was 20-30 years old, showing clear traces of trepanation, a surgical operation that involves piercing the skull and removing part of it.

In the current situation, the operation was unsuccessful, as the human skull shows no signs of healing. It is also worth noting that this case is the oldest known in the Middle East. And this is in the conditions in which trepanation has been carried out since the Mesolithic in Africa or in central and southern Europe.

Obviously, this practice was very ancient, and the absence of such ancient evidence from the East is all the more striking that this area connected two continents where trepanation had been practiced for thousands of years.

However, it now became clear that the people of the East also knew this. That it did not always end in success is again obvious.

The authors of the study also emphasize that both characters were of high rank, possibly even royalty, but that they suffered from many health problems, possibly even leprosy. The fact that their situation was critical, but people tried to save their lives by any means, some even radical, further testifies to their importance.

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