Elon Musk’s idea of Hyperloop transportation might be one step closer to being actualized: a team from MIT has won the first stage of his company SpaceX’s Hyperloop design competition.

According to Space.com, the team of MIT grad students beat out more than 100 competitors in a contest which asked participants to present their design for a passenger-carrying Hyperloop “pod.” A small-scale prototype will be developed and tested this summer next to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

The Hyperloop itself is Musk’s invention. In 2013, he outlined an idea for a system of travel based on frictionless, levitating pods traveling in a near-vacuum which could move people between big cities that are relatively close to one another — like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Musk originally intended to use air as the levitation mechanism, but the MIT students had different ideas. In order to achieve levitation, the MIT team used in their design magnets above a conducting plate.

The test track being built at SpaceX headquarters will be made out of a aluminum, therefore being able to serve as the pod’s conducting plate.

“MIT has been involved in so many technological breakthroughs in the past century,” said team captain Philippe Kirschen, a master’s student in the school’s aeronautics and astronautics program. “It just makes sense we would help advance what might be the future of transportation.”

The winning MIT team will have to finish its final assembly of its pod by mid-May in order for SpaceX to test it in the summer. The students intend the pod to achieve a speed of at least 225 mph during its 20-second inaugural run, which, for safety’s sake, will not include any passengers.

Dog owners have long suspected that their pets can tell what they are thinking just by the look on their face. Now a new study has verified that dogs do indeed read facial expressions just like people do.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is from the University of Helsinki in Finland. It leads to the first evidence of emotion-related gaze patterns in a non-primate animal.

The researchers analyzed 31 dogs from 13 different breads. All were trained to stay still in front of a monitor without restraint. The team then used eye gaze tracking to determine how the dogs viewed emotions of humans and their fellow dogs.

The dogs were found to look first at the eyes, lingering in that area longer than mouth or nose, although the dogs based their full perception on scanning the whole face. Researchers say that this suggests that dogs piece together emotions from all facial features, not just one.

Results were consistent as dogs viewed a human subject, looking the person in the eye before examining the whole face. However, a change would occur if the dog viewed a picture of a human who had an angry face. In this case, all 31 dogs averted their eyes.

Researcher Sanni Somppi said that domestication may have allowed dogs to develop a sensitivity to threat signals of humans, which they respond to with signals of submission. They also found that the dogs had different responses based on whether the threatening expression was coming from a human or from another dog. They found that dogs looked away from threatening human faces, but looked longer at threatening dog faces.

In a recent study, scientists discovered that the various phases of the moon determine the amount of rainfall, according to a report published in The Economic Times. When the moon is at its crest, a phenomenon of atmospheric bulges are created controlling the amount of rainfall, although only a slight difference in precipitation between the phases.

A University of Washington doctoral student, Tsubasa Kohyama, believes that this is the first significant account supporting the moon’s affect on the tidal force. This evidence follows an earlier study where scientists utilized a global grid of data affirming that air pressure shifts with the moon’s phases.

“When the Moon is overhead or underfoot, the air pressure is higher,” Kohyama said. The moon’s gravity on the earth has more impact at steeper heights, which causes the Earth’s atmosphere to bend towards it, creating a vacuum of intense pressure. And the increased pressure raises the air temperature below, as more moisture is retained. “It’s like the container becomes larger at higher pressure,” Kohyama said. And, of course, the lower the humidity, the less influence on precipitation.

“It’s like the container becomes larger at higher pressure,” he added in a statement, noting that the differences are so slight that “No one should carry an umbrella just because the moon is rising.”

Previous data was sourced from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2012. The difference results in only about 1 per cent of accumulated rainfall, a difficult observation to make for the common observer.

This information could also be applied as a model to other climates to determine how the Moon’s physics affects expected rainfall measures.

During Earth’s development, it collided with a Mars-sized planet named Theia — the resulting debris formed not only Earth as we know it today, but the moon as well.

According to Discovery, Earth’s collision with Theia is something that scientists have posited before. The collision of the two planets would have taken place about 4.5 billion years ago and is believed to have occurred at an angle of about 45 degrees or more.

However, new research indicates that Earth might have crashed into Theia head on.

This changes what was once thought: research conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles has yielded data that suggests that, should Earth have collided with Theia at a 45 degree angle, Earth and the moon would have ended up with wildly different oxygen isotopes.

“We don’t see any difference between the Earth’s and the moon’s oxygen isotopes,” said Cosmochemistry and Geochemistry Professor Edward Young, lead author of the study. “They’re indistinguishable.”

Despite all this new data coming to light, the true nature of the planet Theia still eludes scientists. It is agreed that had Theia not crashed into Earth, it would have become an entire planet itself.

Disagreements arise, however, concerning the size of Theia. Some scientists contend that Theia would have been nearly the same size as Earth, while others insist that it was something more in line with the size of Mars.

While Theia itself is no longer a planet all on its own, large chunks of it now exist in the geological make-up of both the Earth and the Moon.

“Theia was thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and the moon,” said Young, saying the Theia’s “planetary embryo” was evenly divided between the Earth and the moon.

Until now, scientists have thought that the origin of Earth’s moon was a glancing blow between Earth and a rock the size of Mars named Theia that occurred 100 million years after the formation of the solar system. New evidence is leading scientists to the theory that “the collision that formed the moon was a high-energy impact,” according to cosmochemist Edward Young, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead study author. This means a head-on collision that thoroughly mixed together the rocks that went on to form to the two bodies prior to their separation.

Young said in a story in Forbes that a comparison of rocks found here on earth and those found on the moon show they both contain identical oxygen isotopes, meaning they were well-mixed, indicative of a giant impact. The samples used in the study were collected during Apollo 12, 15 and 17 moon missions. Young said the oxygen isotopes from the two sources are “indistinguishable.”

The head-on collision would have occurred about 4.5 billion years ago. If it were a glancing blow, or merely a sideswipe of planet earth, scientists would expect to find isotopes thatt were not identical.

The researchers say that at the time the impact occurred, the newly-formed Earth would have had a large amount of volcanic activity and a thin outer crust. They think that the impacting planet was probably incorporated into the Earth and moon after the collision. Young said, “Theia was thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and moon, and evenly dispersed between them. This explains why we don’t see a different signature of Theia in the moon versus the Earth.”

Although previous researchers in Germany found slight differences in oxygen isotope ratios between the moon and Earth, suggesting that less mixing occurred before the split than the new theory, Young and his colleagues say their analysis is more precise. The new analysis was able to identify and overcome potential major causes of error, such as water contamination. The findings suggest that both Theia and the newborn Earth contained a substantial amount of water bearing oxygen-17, which may have come in the form of water- or ice-laden minerals.

The new theory as to the moon’s origin is detailed in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science.