Eddy's Good News: Solar space farms and the legendary Thylacine

Virgin Radio

25 Sep 2023, 09:02

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!

Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Monday 25th September 2023

I’ve reported on the first test that sent solar energy to earth wirelessly, now the very real future of solar space farms is getting even closer to reality as the cost of sending rockets into space is falling off a proverbial cliff.

Famous British astronaut Tim Peake backed the idea in a talk at the Energy Tech Summit this week. “It boils down to hard numbers at the end of the day,” said Tim. “Launching thousands of tonnes of hardware into low Earth orbit is becoming absolutely viable.”

Major Peake explained that rockets built by Elon Musk’s aerospace outfit SpaceX had almost halved the per-kilo cost of sending cargo into orbit from a little over £2,000 to a little over £1000. 

Musk’s ‘Starship’ rocket, still in development, would bring that down to £242 per kilo. The European Space Agency estimates that solar power from space becomes viable when cargo can be launched for £808 per kilo or less, so solar farms that charge all day, all night, and are never affected by weather and which could generate the electricity of nuclear power stations are now on the horizon!

Via: positive.news

Mind Blowing news from Sweden where they’ve found the living RNA of the legendary Tasmanian Tiger. Say hello to Tasmania’s ultimate apex predator, the Thylacine, a big, predatory marsupial who became extinct 130 years ago. This fearsome, huge mouthed creature with tiger-like stripes would have been king of the forests that are largely still there and whose ecosystems are suffering from the loss of their apex predator.

Now thanks to Scandinavian scientists, they have RNA from the skin of this magnificent beast which survived at room temperature. The difference between DNA and RNA, put simply, is that DNA contains the information and RNA acts on it. This opens up the possibility not to clone, but to adapt its nearest living relative, like The Tasmanian Devil or The Fat Tailed Dunnert at embryo stage, in vitro, to make what would be pretty close to the original Tasmanian Tiger and would then provide a much better solution that the potentially disastrous introduction of a non native species.

It’s a Jurassic Park scenario that is now very real, and I hope they do it! Imagine an extinct animal coming back!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org