The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has released its incredibly cool concept for Martian houses for astronauts who would one day set foot on the Red Planet.

One of the biggest problems being faced by scientists working NASA’s Mars manned mission is to ensure safe dwelling for pioneer astronauts to sleep, live and work in. Now, the scientists have a conceptual ‘ice home’ design for the same.
As per the Ice Home concept, NASA would create inflatable domes covered in ice for pioneer astronauts. The inflatable cool domes would provide them with protection from high temperatures and high-energy radiation.

NASA’s senior systems engineer Kevin Vipavetz said, “After a day dedicated to identifying needs, goals, and constraints we rapidly assessed many crazy, out of the box ideas and finally converged on the current Ice Home design, which provides a sound engineering solution.”

The main aim of the Ice Home concept is to protect astronauts from harmful radiation that can penetrate through Mars’ atmosphere. These harmful rays can damage astronauts’ cells, leading to serious health risks, including acute radiation sickness and cancer.

The Mars Ice Home concept has a number of advantages. For instance, it is lightweight and can be transported and deployed with simple robotics, before the arrival of astronauts.

In an interesting experiment launched on Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted a tweet to the users of the microblogging platform, seeking product feedback from them.

In his Thursday tweet, Dorsey asked his approximately four million followers to send in their suggestions about the changes or improvements that they would want Twitter to incorporate, in order to enhance its platform.

Dorsey’s Tweet has drawn responses from hundreds of Twitter users, who have highlighted their concerns with a number of issues linked to the Twitter site.

The responses of Twitter users to Dorsey’s tweet chiefly included complaints about the basic design of the microblogging service, as well as concerns about abuse on the site and the apparent lack of a mechanism which would enable users to fix errors after they publish tweets.

Acknowledging the input from the users in response to his tweet for feedback about the Twitter service, Dorsey said in a Twitter post on Friday: “We’ll consider everything we heard from you. Not going to ship all of it, but will be more transparent about why and what we learned.”

Children who spend merely an hour each day on social media may actually feel less satisfied with their lives, a new study published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics suggested.

Teenagers can often be seen obsessively checking their feeds on various social media sites on their mobile devices. But, researchers found that behind their smiling selfies, teenagers mightn’t be as happy as they try to show in the photos.

The researchers looked at data on children and teens, ages 10 to 15 years old, in the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2014. The children were all participating in the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study that involved a representative sample of more than 40,000 households across the country.

They also found that girls suffer more adverse effects of spending more than an hour daily on social media than boys.

Sharing their findings, the researchers wrote, “Our results suggest that spending more time on social networks reduces the satisfaction that children feel with all aspects of their lives, except for their friendships … girls suffer more adverse effects than boys.”

This isn’t the first study to point out the adverse effects of increasing use of social media on children. In 2011, a study released by the American Academy of Pediatrics warned parents that so-called “Facebook depression” among teens could make it more difficult for them to handle their kids.

It will remain illegal to sell marijuana in Massachusetts for the coming several months as the state lawmakers have approved a bill to delay the voter-approved measure.

The Massachusetts House and Senate passed the controversial bill on Wednesday, without any public hearing and debate. The passage of the bill means marijuana sales will remain illegal in the state for at least six months.

It has also delayed the licensing of pot shops. However, registered medical marijuana patients can buy and use the drug.

When asked for a comment on the decision, Senate President Stan Rosenberg said, “The Legislature has a responsibility to implement the will of the voters while also protecting public health and public safety.”

The marijuana-legalization measure, which allows adults 21 and over to possess marijuana for recreational purposes and grow up to a dozen pot plants in their home premises, took effect on Dec. 15. The bill will not change that. It just pushed back the opening of retail marijuana stores.

The ballot initiative for legalizing recreational marijuana was approved by 53.7 per cent of state voters on November 8th election. Recreational marijuana is already legal in a number of states in the U.S., including Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington.

On Thursday, a refreshed version of Asus' touch-friendly Chromebook Flip - the Asus Chromebook Flip 2 - showed up on the Best Buy website, hinting at an apparently forthcoming launch of the device.

The Asus Chromebook Flip 2 will be the one of the first Chromebooks to boast support for Android apps via the Google Play Store.

The new Chromebook Flip version appeared on Best Buy a few days after the same device - bearing model number C302CA - first showed up on Newegg. com. However, that listing was quickly taken down.

Going by the indications from the product listing on Best Buy, the new Asus Chromebook Flip 2 will seemingly be a convertible laptop. The device, as per a 9to5Google report, will likely be shipped by Asus on January 5, 2017.

According to the real product description stored in Google's cache, the key features of Asus Chromebook Flip 2 include a 12.5-inch full HD touchscreen; Intel Pentium 4405Y chip; Intel HD Graphics 515 integrated GPU; 4GB RAM;
32GB eMMC solid state drive (SSD); microSD card slot; high-definition webcam and microphone; backlit keyboard; Bluetooth 4.0; and two USB-C ports.

Officers from the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control reportedly took a man under arrest for driving under the influence of caffeine.

Joseph Schwab was allegedly driving erratically while returning home from office in Solano County. When an agent from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control pulled him over and gave him a breathalyzer test, the result turned up as 0.00 per cent.

In spite of, Schwab was arrested and taken to jail where they decided to conduct a blood test to determine if he was under the influence of anything else. He was not found under the influence of alcohol or any banned substance, but it showed that the man had some caffeine.

Nevertheless, police charged him with DUI, triggering a wave of criticism from many. Stacey Barrett, Schwab’s attorney, also said that he was just as perplexed.

When asked for a comment on the case, Barrett said, “I’ve never seen this before; I’ve never even heard of it. I have not been provided with any evidence to support a theory of prosecution for a substance other than caffeine at this time.”

Schwab grumbled that no officer believed him that he only had caffeine in his system until, lab results showed them. He urged authorities to dismiss all charges filed against him.

No study has thus far suggested that caffeine can impair driving. In fact, caffeine is a drink of choice for many individuals, including police officers, who look for an additional boost of energy during driving.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday met with leaders of the nation’s top nonprofit hospital systems to discuss plans to overhaul healthcare system for veterans.

After the meeting, a senior transition official told reporters that they discussed a range of options, including public-private partnerships and allowing veterans to more readily visit hospitals outside the existing Veterans Affairs system.

However, some veteran advocacy groups have warned that any move to expand access to health care outside the government-run hospitals may weaken the system through privatization.

As the VA system spends nearly $70 billion annually on medical care, allowing veterans to more readily visit hospitals outside the system would potentially be a windfall to private hospitals.

The list attendees include John Noseworthy, CEO of the Mayo Clinic; David Torchiana, CEO of Partners HealthCare; and Toby Cosgrove, CEO of the Cleveland Clinic; and Paul Rothman, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Mr. Rothman said the meeting with Mr. Trump reflected his recognition of the decisive value of healthcare and biomedical research to the U.S.

Hopkins said in a statement, “Johns Hopkins Medicine remains committed to improving health outcomes for patients, families and communities across the country.

The President-elect and Republican leaders of U.S. Congress have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is commonly known as Obamacare. However, it wasn’t immediately clear whether this issue was discussed during the meeting.

In its Wednesday issued annual report, research firm Flurry Analytics has revealed that bigwig smartphone vendors Apple and Samsung apparently missed smartphone sales opportunities in the 2016 holiday season.

According to the report, the missed 2016 holiday smartphone sales opportunities by Apple and Samsung is evident from the fact that neither of the two companies recorded any dramatic increase or decline in their smartphone sales this holiday season.

The data shared by Flurry in its latest report shows that Apple's iPhone and iPad accounted for nearly 44 percent of all mobile activations during the critical holiday shopping period spanning from December 19 to December 25, 2016; while the smartphones and tablets manufactured by Samsung accounted for 21 percent of the mobile activations in the same period.

In comparison, during the same ‘week leading up to Christmas’ period in 2015, Apple’s mobile devices had accounted for 49.1 percent of all mobile activations; whereas Samsung’s mobile devices had accounted for 19.8 percent of the activations.

Along with revealing that the 2016 holiday season did not provide much joy for either Apple or Samsung, the latest Flurry data also shows that the activation of Apple and Samsung mobile devices during this year’s holiday shopping season was notably more than the activation of mobile devices manufactured by rivals, like LG, Huawei, Motorola, and Amazon.

Dairy farmers in Australia have expressed anger over decision by Murray Goulburn and Fonterra to cut prices paid by them for raw milk.

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Prestigious rating agency Canstar has announced that it is awarding a 5-star rating to Warehouse Money Purple Visa Card, which was launched just six months earlier.

The data provider released its latest Canstar Credit Card Rewards star ratings report today. It awarded the 5 star rating to the Warehouse Money Purple Visa Card in the annual ratings for Rewards cards in the New Zealand market. The card won the rating for the $12k and under annual spend category.

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With portal service contracts from AT&T, shares of Buffalo, N. Y. based Synacor climbed more than 119 percent on Wednesday during the afterhours trading.

The companies said the revenues expected from the contract will be approximately $100 million a year following the full product operation in 2017. The early products will get be launched in the second quarter of 2016 and further products will come by the last quarter of 2016.

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Bigger the note better it is for money launderers and other criminals and keeping that in mind the European Central Bank decided to phase out 500-euro notes. On Wednesday, the European Central Bank announced that it will discontinue with _500 note which is worth roughly $575. The larger denominations are easier to carry and suitcase full could value a lot more than the smaller denominations. A study by Harvard University shows, that equivalent of $1 million in _500 notes only would weigh approximately five pounds.

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Concerns regarding the health of global economic growth and low commodity prices are reason behind the set back in the Australian stock market. On Wednesday, it opened significantly lower after an unenthusiastic guidance from Wall Street.

The S&P ASX 200 index opened 1.1 percent down at 5,298.1 points. The benchmark lost 60.60 points or 1.13 percent in the late-morning trading.

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Australian entrepreneur Craig Steven Wright has announced on Monday that he created the popular bitcoin, which is world first somewhat accepted digital currency.

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Australia's largest milk processor Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co trimmed the long-held milk price which it planned to pay farmers, by about fifteen percent. This was the first cut to milk price in a mid-season after the financial crisis hit the globe. The move angered the farmers.

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