Colonising Mars is no easy task. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has estimated that the current cost of sending someone to Mars is “around $10bn per person”. And there are all sorts of other logistical hurdles involved. But, if we want to expand into the Solar System, we’ll need to find out how to…
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When we think about the value of the space travel industry, we have to think beyond space missions. One of the most important and burgeoning activities of the space travel industry – that is often underappreciated – is the development of green technologies that could revolutionise many industries on Earth, including energy, food, and materials. When…
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We may all conjure up different images when we try to think what cities in the future will look like, say 20, 50, or 100 years from now. For the optimistically minded, these cities may be idyllic, clean, hi-tech, and utopian, while for the more pessimistic among us, such cities may look bleak, barren, in…
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On Monday the world’s first lab-grown, in vitro burger was cooked and eaten in London. Professor Mark Post from Maastricht University, along with his colleagues, took adult stem cells from a cow and then turned them into strips of muscle, which they combined to make a beef patty. Some have dubbed the patty, the ‘Frankenburger’.…
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The current global population stands at over seven billion people. To put this number into perspective, the global population in 1804 was a billion, with predictions of the number of people increasing to nine billion in 2045 (based on current trends). Clearly then, the number of humans on the planet has been rapidly increasing. When…
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