Links 10/05/13

Downer: Toxic perchlorate and gypsum dust may prevent human settlement of Mars.

Meanwhile, here are some moths driving a tiny robot car.


"He concedes that the freezing of his grandfather was ‘a bit of an experiment.'" Very good longform piece on the practical problems of cryonics, and its historical precedents.

Electric sails, a new form of interplanetary (and possibly interstellar) propulsion.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.

Finally, in 1968 the Howard Johnsons restaurant chain presented its interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.