Month: September 2022

The Waldorf Astoria resort on Seychelles’ Platte Island is expected to open by October 2023, two months ahead of schedule, said a top official.

Glenny Savy, the chief executive of the state-owned Islands Development Company (IDC) that manages Platte Island, gave an update on the hotel development.

Initially, the opening of the hotel was planned for December 2023, but Savy said that since they are ahead of schedule, this might bring the date forward to October next year.

Work restarted on the luxury hotel early last year and Savy said that “over the last six months it has been difficult to get our orders on time due to shipping problems.”

He said that despite the delays, work is ahead of target and IDC expects to hand over the keys to the Hilton group by the end of July next year.

The Waldorf Astoria Platte Island, a $100 million development due to be managed by the Hilton Hotels & Resorts group, will be the first six-star resort in Seychelles, an archipelago in the western Indian Ocean.

Once completed the resort will offer 42 seafront villas all equipped with private pools. Guests will have access to six restaurants and bars, a spa, kids’ club, outdoor observatory, tennis courts and a marine conservation discovery centre.

The primary developer of this project is a group of investors from Abu Dhabi.

The island itself lies just over 130 km south of Mahe, the main island, and is renowned as a nature lover’s paradise, covered with palm forest and surrounded by a coral reef and lagoon.

Platte Island has always been used for tourism and IDC used to run a small guest house there. The island can be accessed by plane and boasts a rich ecosystem with breeding grounds for a variety of seabirds: the brown noddy, white-tailed tropicbird, lesser noddy, bridled tern and Madagascar fody. The island is also a popular nesting area for hawksbill turtles.

The Waldorf Astoria resort will be the fifth tourism establishment run by the Hilton group in Seychelles.

The group already has Hilton Seychelles Labriz Resort & Spa, Hilton Seychelles Northolme Resort & Spa, DoubleTree by Hilton Seychelles, Allamanda Resort and Spa and Mango House Seychelles.

Source: Seychelles News Agency

An instrument on the U.S. space agency NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, has been reliably producing oxygen from the planet’s thin atmosphere for more than a year, a finding that bodes well for extended future missions to the planet.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the work of the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, known as MOXIE.

The study shows that since it was activated in April 2021 — two months after Perseverance landed on Mars — MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons. In each run, the instrument reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour — about the rate of a modest tree on Earth.

The researchers, along with NASA scientists and planners, envision that a scaled-up version of MOXIE could be sent to Mars ahead of a human mission to continuously produce oxygen at the rate equal to several hundred trees. The system should generate enough oxygen to both sustain humans once they arrive and fuel a rocket for returning astronauts back to Earth.

The principal investigator for the study, MIT’s Dr. Michael Hecht, said in a press release the steady output that MOXIE has demonstrated is a promising first step toward those goals.

Hecht said the instrument’s performance producing oxygen on Mars also represents the first demonstration of in-situ, or on-site “resource utilization,” which is the process of using a planet’s existing materials [in this case, carbon dioxide] to make resources [such as oxygen] that would otherwise have to be transported from Earth.

Hect and his MIT co-authors were among researchers from several institutions, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which helped develop and manage MOXIE.

Source: Voice of America

Twitter is internally testing a widely requested edit button, a feature that will be rolled out to paid subscribers in the coming weeks, the social media company said Thursday.

For years, Twitter users have demanded the ability to edit their tweets after publishing in order to fix errors like typos. Those requests have led to jokes online that Twitter would rather introduce any other product, such as newsletters, before giving users their top-requested feature.

Soon, those demands will be met. Users will be able to edit their tweets “a few times” within 30 minutes of publication, Twitter said in a blog post.

Edited tweets will have an icon and timestamp to display when the post was last edited. Users will be able to click on the label of an edited tweet to view the edit history and previous versions of the post.

Twitter has experimented with versions of an edit button. Subscribers of Twitter Blue, the company’s paid subscription product, currently have access to a feature that holds tweets for up to one minute, allowing users to review the tweet and “undo” it before the post is published.

Source: Voice of America