Scientists have created bricks from simulated moon dust using the sun's rays in a potential breakthrough for the development of future settlements on the moon - and beyond.

Researchers at the DLR German Aerospace Center facility in Cologne baked the bricks in a solar furnace which harnesses sunlight and exposes them to a high-temperature beam, melting soil grains together. The material - volcanic minerals processed to mimic the look and feel of lunar rock - is then 3D-printed as bricks.

"We took simulated lunar material and cooked it in a solar furnace," said Advenit Makaya, a materials engineer overseeing the project for the European Space Agency (ESA).

"This was done on a 3-D printer table, to bake successive 0.1mm layers of moondust at 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 Fahrenheit). We can complete a 20 x 10 x 3 cm brick for building in around five hours."

The US Navy launched its second America class amphibious assault ship, the USS Tripoli, from its shipyard in Mississippi this week, months ahead of schedule.

Timelapse video from the shipbuilding facility shows the vessel being transported to the dry dock at Huntington Ingalls Industries' (HII) shipyard before launch.

Designed to carry the F-35B fighter jet, the warship was launched some 13 weeks ahead of the original construction schedule, according to the military shipbuilding company.

The USS Tripoli - officially designated Landing Helicopter Assault (LHA) 7 - was transferred from land to the company's floating dry dock in Pascagoula, Mississippi on April 8.

Ever wondered how Mars looks through the eyes of the Curiosity rover? NASA has released a new 360-degree video from the robot's point of view so you can virtually explore the Red Planet's rippled surface without leaving Earth.

The car-sized robot is slowly making its way around Gale crater, examining sand dunes as it attempts to figure out if Mars could ever have supported life.

Between February and April, the rover examined four sites near a linear dune for comparison with crescent-shaped dunes it investigated over a year ago. This is the first close-up study of active dunes on any planet other than Earth.

The impact of ancient meteorites sparked volcanic eruptions, a team led by Trinity College Dublin geochemists says in a report.

The team studied rocks in a massive crater in Sudbury, Ontario, where a deep basin was formed 1.85 billion years ago by a bolide, a meteor which exploded in the atmosphere.

Small volcanic fragments of the crash remain, each shaped like a crab claw. Their shape indicates they were formed when gas bubbles expanded in molten rock and then suddenly exploded.

The researchers findings indicate that the composition of the volcanic fragments changed over time. Immediately after the impact, volcanism, or the phenomenon of eruption of molten rock, is directly related to melting of the earth's crust. Over time, though, it was fed by magma, underground molten rock, coming from deeper levels within the earth.

"This is an important finding, because it means that the magma sourcing the volcanoes was changing with time," Balz Kamber, a professor of geology and mineralogy at Trinity, said in a press release. "The reason for the excitement is that the effect of large impacts on the early earth could be more serious than previously considered. The intense bombardment of the early earth had destructive effects on the planet's surface but it may also have brought up material from the planet's interior, which shaped the overall structure of the planet."

Crystals are among the most fascinating structures in the natural world - not only do they have a unique, highly ordered, and repeating lattice structure, they also have all kinds of inherent, interesting properties, including the ability to self-assemble.

When placed next to each other, tiny crystals will twist, snap into alignment, and slam into each other to form larger crystals, and for the first time, scientists have visualised and measured the force that makes this possible.

By using a new visualisation technique, the team showed that the force that governs crystals is a type of van der Waals force, a quantum attraction that's not reliant on any chemical bonds (such as the covalent bonds that hold molecules together). It's the same type of force that allows geckos' feet to stick to walls and ceilings - and now scientists have shown that it also works to twist and fuse crystals together, allowing them to get larger and larger.

Although many crystal structures are shaped like cubes, they usually have several differently shaped sides, some of which match well together, and some that don't.

When the sides do match up, crystals can fuse together seamlessly. And it's long been suspected that crystals can self-align to facilitate this - but no one had ever been able to visualise or measure how that happened, until now. Knowing how this works is important, because this attractive force is key to crystals self-assembling in nature to form everything from rocks and seashells, to our own bones.

Beijing is developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching 400 kilometers per hour, China Daily reported. The high-speed trains will be part of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative to boost economic ties with other countries.

"We will apply new materials in the research and production of the future high-speed trains, such as carbon fiber and aluminum alloy, which will help to reduce weight and enhance energy efficiency," said Qiao Feng, a senior engineer at the CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, a subsidiary of China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation.

He added the new trains would be able to reduce energy consumption per passenger by ten percent. They are expected to promote regional connectivity and create new businesses for China and overseas economies.

NASA has released an incredible "movie" from Cassini's first Grand Finale dive over Saturn, showing the spacecraft's view as it swooped between the planet and its rings.

The movie comprises of one-hour observations made as the spacecraft passed southward over Saturn on April 26, diving through the narrow gap between Saturn and its rings.

The dive presented scientists with some interesting data - namely that the region appears to be relatively dust-free - and also marked the closest a spacecraft has ever been to Saturn.

The newly released footage shows Cassini's journey, beginning with a swirling vortex at the planet's north pole before moving past the outer boundary of the hexagon-shaped jet stream and beyond.

The first flying prototype of the Ikrut MC-21, a Russian twin-engine short-mid-range jet airliner with a capacity of 150-211 passengers, has left the assembly room floor, Russian media reports, citing sources in the aviation industry.

Speaking to the RIA Novosti news agency on Thursday, an official from Irkut Corporation confirmed that "the first flying model MC-21 has moved from the final assembly shop to the flight testing division to prepare for the first flight."

Details on the plane's expected flight testing schedule remain scarce, with the official telling RIA Novosti that the date for the first flight has yet to be confirmed.

Microsoft has confirmed that its new Windows 10 S operating system will not allow you to change the default browser or search engine. You'll be forced into using Microsoft Edge and Bing, although you can still install alternative software.
Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 S at its Microsoft Education event yesterday. The locked-down operating system has been devised as a school-friendly sandboxed platform to rival Google's Chrome OS.

Windows 10 S is locked to the Windows Store and cannot run desktop programs. Shortly after the event, it emerged the platform has another important limitation: You cannot change the default web browser.

While you are allowed to install Google Chrome, Firefox or another browser, Windows will not let you set it as the default. If you open a link to a webpage from another program, it will always open in Edge. If you search for something, whether in Internet Explorer or in Edge, Windows will always use Bing to complete the query. There is no way to set an alternative provider as the default.

The Amazon rainforest is a treasure trove of biodiversity, containing 10% of the planet's species in its 6.7 million square kilometers. How it got to be that way has been fiercely disputed for decades. Now, a new study suggests that a large section of the forest was twice flooded by the Caribbean Sea more than 10 million years ago, creating a short-lived inland sea that jump-started the evolution of new species. But the new evidence still hasn't convinced scientists on the other side of the debate.

"It's hard to imagine a process that would cover such a large forest with an ocean," says lead author Carlos Jaramillo, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City who has been in both camps.

Researchers generally agree that parts of the Amazon were once under water, but they don't agree on where the water came from. Those in the "river camp" argue that freshwater streaming down from the rising Andes sliced up the land below, dividing plants and animals into isolated groups that later turned into new species. The fast-growing mountains also created microclimates at different elevations, sparking speciation and funneling new plants and animals into the Amazon basin. However, when marine microorganisms were discovered in Amazonian sediments in the 1990s, some scientists hypothesized that the forest was once inundated by an ocean, which created new species as forest dwellers quickly adapted to the flood.

But proving either case—the river view or the ocean view—is tough. Rocks and fossils that could paint a definitive picture are exceedingly rare. So Jaramillo and his colleagues turned to a different kind of data: cores drilled into the jungle floor. Six centimeters wide and 600 meters deep, the cylindrical cores preserve a record of the region's past environments in the form of pollen, fossils, and sediments, going back tens of millions of years. Jaramillo used two cores: one from eastern Colombia, drilled by an oil company, and one from northeastern Brazil, taken by the Brazilian Geology Survey in the 1980s.