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cmansley writes
"NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"
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schliz writes
"Scientists have identified nanoscale changes in aging lithium-ion batteries that could be responsible for their degradation over time. By dissecting and examining dead batteries, they found that some lithium was irreversibly lost from the positive to negative electrode of dead batteries, and no longer participated in charging and discharging. They discovered that finely-structured nanomaterials on dead batteries' electrodes had coarsened in size, and theorise that the coarsening of the cathode may be responsible for the loss of lithium."
