Victor Tangermann

Going Overboard Microsoft co-founer and philanthropist Bill Gates has a complicated relationship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In an upcoming biography simply titled "Elon Musk," writer Walter Isaacson details how Gates became disillusioned with Musk's ongoing efforts to colonize Mars and leave a doomed Earth behind. An "I’m not a Mars person," Gates told Isaacson, […]

Truck Fire Hydrogen and electric truck maker Nikola Motor is running into some serious issues with developing its battery-powered trucks. As Reuters reports, a second of the company's trucks, a pre-production unit, caught fire near Nikola's headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona last week, the second incident involving the company's trucks within a matter of days. That […]

Chihuahuas on Mars NASA's Perseverance rover has spent the last two years, roaming the desolate surface of Mars, collecting samples, and probing the area for signs of ancient microbial life. And thanks to one of its onboard scientific instruments called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), it even generated some breathable oxygen from the […]

Living Tissue Over Endoskeleton An international team of researchers have created a living skin made of fungus that was inspired by the 1984 film "The Terminator." The goal is to develop a skin that can act as a biodegradable and multifunctional sensor for electronics, as New Scientist reports. Conventional electronic sensors made of silicone tend […]

What if NASA's groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope was pointed straight back at Earth, roughly 1 million miles away, would it recognize our civilization? What if it were to spot an exoplanet in another system exactly like the Earth? It's a fascinating question that has a short and long answer. In a recent, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper […]

Burning Trash This year's Burning Man in a remote part of the Nevada desert was marked by an extremely rare torrential rain, turning the drug-fuelled event into a mud-covered mess. The mud — technically rehydrated desert dust — proved to be a major hindrance for the around 80,000 attendees, forcing them to shelter in place […]

During a recent mission mapping a previously unexplored habitat off of the coast of Alaska, a submersible remotely operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came across something strange and unexpected. A smooth "golden egg" appeared during the mission's live stream last month, mystifying scientists. "It’s definitely got a big old hole in […]

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has officially admitted to thwarting a Ukrainian attack on Russia's naval fleet near the Crimean coast by cutting off Starlink internet access to Ukrainian soldiers. "There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol," the mercurial CEO tweeted. "The obvious intent being to sink […]

Model $ Tesla CEO Elon Musk had to be convinced to renew his EV maker's efforts of building a $25,000 car. Despite being a lot more enthusiastic about a robotaxi, things started looking up when designers showed him a car that had a futuristic design like the long-awaited Cybertruck, as Walter Isaacson, whose biography about […]

Crypto mining company Riot Platforms has revealed that it got $31.7 million in energy credits in August alone from Texas power grid operator ERCOT, CNBC reports — simply by cutting down on its massive energy consumption during a massive heatwave. In other words, the state's largest and independent power supplier, which accounts for roughly 90 […]