CuriouTech

Opportunity, the intrepid NASA rover that spent 15 years on Mars climbing in and out of craters to gather evidence of the planet's watery past, has been brought down by tiny particles of dust. After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again. It's a humble ending for a machine that survived a 300-million-mile journey through space, executed a hole-in-one landing, and set a record by driving more than 28 extraterrestrial miles. Opportunity's last transmission to Earth occurred on June 10 amid an epic Martian dust storm. Still, NASA engineers remained hopeful that when the dust settled, the rover would recharge its solar-powered batteries and resume its superlative mission. Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for a mission that was supposed to last 90 Martian days. Its twin rover, Spirit, had landed three weeks earlier on the other side of the planet. "Wit

A totally new insulation material has been developed that is totally weightless but can still withstand high temperature, that would not be tolerated by other materials and destroy it. The porous aerogel is at least 99 percent open space , with the rest made up of an atomically thin ceramic called hexagonal boron nitride. The design proves extremely durable under high temperatures and rapid temperature shifts of over 1,000 degrees Celsius.  “It’s notoriously hard to make materials that are not just lightweight, but can also be heavily heat resistant,” says Deep Jariwala, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania.  The new ultralight insulator may be especially well suited to shielding components on spacecraft , which must endure extreme temperature swings when turning toward or away from the sun or re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, he says.  The aerogel comprises a network of tiny air pockets, with each pocket separated by two atomically thin layers of hexagonal b

Medical techniques for looking inside our bodies have come a long way, but in the future it looks like doctors may be able to see absolutely everything going on under our skin. Researchers have invented a new kind of camera that can actually see through structures inside the human body, detecting light sources behind as much as 20 centimetres (7.9 inches) of bodily tissue. The current prototype, developed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, is designed to work in conjunction with endoscopes – long, slender instruments that are often equipped with cameras, sensors and lights to peer inside hollow cavities inside the human body. Endoscopes are valuable tools for all sorts of medical procedures, but up until now it's been difficult to externally confirm exactly where in the body the instrument is looking, without resorting to things like X-ray scans. Now that's no longer a problem, due to the new camera's capability to detect sources of light inside

Smacc , which uses AI to automate accounting, has secured a 3.5 million Series A round from Cherry Ventures, Rocket Internet, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Grazia Equity and business angels. Smacc offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to digitize and automate accounting and financial processes. The founding trio Uli Erxleben, Janosch Novak and Stefan Korsch came up with the idea after find accounting to be the most painful part of their own startup. Erxleben managed Rocket Internet’s US ventures in New York and San Francisco, and is also the founder of Berliner Berg , a craft beer startup. Customers submit their receipts to Smacc, which are turned into a machine-readable format, encrypted, then allocated to an account. The platform gradually also self-learns, tracking invoices, sales and costs, as well as their liquidity. The system checks against some 64 data points, verifies the invoice, checking, for example, that the math adds up, and even if the VAT

Last year saw record worldwide investment and implementation of clean energy such as wind, solar and hydropower. Some 147 Gigawatts of renewable electricity came online in 2015 - the largest annual increase ever and as much as Africa’s entire power generating capacity. Clean energy investment increased to $286bn (£198bn), with solar energy accounting for 56% of the total and wind power for 38%. Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status reportfound. Christine Lins, REN21’s chief, said: “What is truly remarkable about these results is that they were achieved at a time when fossil fuel prices were at historic lows, and renewables remained at a significant disadvantage in terms of government subsidies. For every dollar spent boosting renewables, nearly four dollars were spent to maintain our dependence on fossil fuels.” For the first time, emerging economies outspent rich

SpaceX chief Elon Musk shed light on his new plan to send an unmanned spaceship to Mars as early as 2018, as part of his quest to some day colonize the Red Planet. He appeared to be referring to an upgraded version of the California-based company's Dragon cargo capsule, which is currently used as an unmanned spacecraft to shuttle food and supplies to and from the International Space Station. In a new exclusive this week with The Washington Post, the entrepeneur drew parallels between people crossing the oceans in centuries past to unknown worlds. The months-long journey is sure to be "hard, risky, dangerous, difficult," Musk told the Post, but he was confident people would sign up to go because "just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers." Before that can happen, however, unmanned travel and a supply chain must be developed successfully. "Essentially what we're saying is we&

Elon Musk claims that humans are at risk of becoming the dumb "house pets" of artificial intelligence, unless we implant technology into our brains to help us compete with machine learning of the future. Musk announced that a 'neural lace' - which is basically a brain implant that can augment natural intelligence by hooking us up to computers - will be the key to maintaining our authority as a species. Musk is one of the biggest supporters of AI, but he hasn't been shy in the past about his concerns over the future of machine learning, with the tech entrepreneur last year penning an open letter - along with Stephen Hawking and dozens of other researchers - on the need to investigate the societal impacts of AI. His biggest worry is that AI will one day become smarter than humans - which could be a good thing when it comes to using them to help us cure diseases and solve global problems - but it also means that machines could one day come to think of us as lit