Virtual reality. There are a number of immersive VR devices due this year.

I guess centrifuges on the Moon would be possible, but it seems like they’d be easier to do in space. Especially for pregnancy, where you would surely want 24/7 rather then 2 hours a day. You’d need a huge one. I suspect humans will be returning to Earth to reproduce for a long time, much as sea turtles return to land…

In general, yes. For this specific vehicle, no. It has a lot of value for research; so much so, that what they learn from it will probably make it obsolete immediately. It’ll also have value in its historicity.

I’m rather a fan of future manned Moon missions, and having gravity (albeit weak) is one of the things I see as making a Moon mission easier than a Mars mission. However, if they can get a space station spinning, that could reverse the advantage because you’d have 1 g rather than 1/6th g.

What happens to your body if you live on the Moon for 6 months?

They seem to be claiming that 2 hours/day at 1g would be enough for at least the several years needed for a Mars mission. The size was based on experiments done a few years ago; I don’t know what the 2h/d @1g was based on.

I was going to say something about how none of our police have guns. I suspect similar scenes would be darker in the USA.

According to this winter’s Royal Institution lectures, a centrifuge will work even if you are only in it for two 1-hour sessions a day. It needs to be as big as the London Eye, and rotate 4 times a minute. Apparently that’s large enough and slow enough that no-one will get nausea.

If you’re lost, trying to find your way out is likely to make you even more lost, and the further you travel the harder for search and rescue teams to find you. Staying put can be the right thing to do. Building a shelter may be necessary, and the saw might help with that. The awl and sewing needles could be useful…

That’s kinda irrelevant if he wasn’t reading the card. If the teleprompter was wrong, then whoever put the text on the teleprompter deserves a lot of the blame. Harvey’s mistake would be reading the teleprompter rather than the card, but why would he expect them to be different? If the teleprompter couldn’t have the…

“A young woman should be able to contact a man about a job without getting sexually explicit messages in response.”

So everyone in the country decides to party at the same time, and you have a problem with this because...? It doesn’t really matter how they decide on the night. It’s just more fun if sometimes they all decide on the same night.

Here in the UK they’ve been banned for 180 years, since 1835.

I don’t think anyone expects this one restaurant to “cause parity”. If all it achieves is letting some women do sushi, isn’t that worthwhile? It would be great if they could manage that without using positive discrimination, but it seems they can’t. They are being faced with a hard problem in an imperfect world. I…

It’s not a “long run” solution. Positive discrimination is a short-term hack to partially redress the balance. It will/should be dropped when women have parity.

A lot of people seem to think it will be the driving niche. As far as I can tell, VR porn can’t yet compete with normal porn. It’s either shot with real human models and a VR camera, in which case you can’t really control your PoV (and who wants to turn around and look at the film crew?), or else its computer-rendered…

that had, to that point, given itself the option to take the “easy” way out of seemingly impossible situations - for me it passed that long ago. About when a few hundred people commited suicide by asphixiation so the others could have more air, when the audience knew this was unnecessary because the Earth is quite…

Diamonds are also hard to value. You need to be an expert to judge their clarity, colour and other characteristics. Same with other gemstones.

The UK government effectively stopped paying for civil space back in the Thatcher years. They started to get involved again a few years ago, and this is a fruit of that.

That Watch Live post wasn’t cross-posted to io9 like this one was. At least some of us won’t have seen it.