Courtesy of Red Bull Stratos

Earlier this year, Astounde speculated that space skydiving could be the next frontier in extreme sports. If that’s going to be the case, then today represents the biggest hurdle and largest milestone towards that end.

Today, in an event sponsored by Red Bull (who else?), Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner is set to hurdle himself towards the earth from over 20 miles up, breaking the speed of sound in the process.

Peter Thiel is a 45 year old German-American technology entrepreneur, philanthropist and investor. You may know him as the co-founder of PayPal, but Thiel’s accomplishments are legitimately too many to mention.

Thiel is one of the most interesting people on the planet, but a lot remains unknown about the influential gentleman. So without further adieu, here are ten facts you probably didn’t know about Peter Thiel.

Courtesy of First Warning Systems

October is breast cancer awareness month. Each year, over one million women worldwide are diagnosed with breast cancer. Within that same time frame, 400,000 women will die from this disease. This doesn’t have to be the case. With early enough detection, it can be halted nearly 100% of the time.

The main issue is that cancerous tumors are extremely small and often undetectable for nearly a decade via current methods! Not only that, the options available today have a surprising number of negatives including radiation exposure, discomfort and false positives at an alarming rate of over 40%!

Courtesy of Discovery News

Skin grafts are effective at treating serious wounds such as ulcers, but are inconvenient, time consuming and costly. Similarly, compression bandages can take an extraordinarily long time to heal and are only effective 70% of the time.

U.S. and Canadian researchers have found that by coating wounds with a layer of skin cells, they can treat severe gashes such as ulcers more quickly and effectively than anything we have today.

Courtesy of Motor Trend

“It’s like an adrenaline shot for your battery”

Tesla Motors, manufacturers of some of the most stylish and eco-friendly vehicles on the road, are changing the way we think about fueling stations forever.

Courtesy of Ghost Pixel Visuals

Musicians Big Gigantic and Light Artists Ghost Pixel Visuals have teamed up to transform Red Rocks into Rowdytown, an unparalleled adventure in audio visual production that the Rowdytown crew promises will be “a visual experience like you’ve NEVER SEEN BEFORE!!”

Creating fire is still one of man’s greatest achievements. The problem arises when you have to control it or put it out.

This summer, the state of Colorado was helpless as hundreds of thousands of acres went up in flames. Homes and lives are lost worldwide at the hand of this merciless element everyday.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been tinkering with a way of using physics instead of chemistry to combat our half friend, half foe.

Courtesy of Hitachi

“The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven’t necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones. The possibility of losing information may actually have increased.” -Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii

To combat this problem, Hitachi is looking towards an unlikely source: slivers of quartz glass.

Courtesy of NASA

Want to watch live video feeds of distant planets? It’s not too far away.

Radio communication throughout space has served us well, but with increasing demands on the quantity and promptness of data sent, something new is overdue. That’s where Laser Communication Relay Demonstration (LCRD or LaserCom) comes into play.

LCRD is a new technology that will revolutionize the way we connect throughout the Milky Way. With LaserCom, pretty much any type of data you can think of can be encoded into an invisible, short wavelength laser beam, and transmitted at speeds up to 100 times faster than traditional radio waves.

Courtesy of Peugeot.com

Peugeot engineers wanted to make a futuristic green concept car that rewrote the way we thought about designing an automobile. With their Onyx supercar, Peugeot’s goal was a success.

A few of the most notable features of the Peugeot Onyx include an uncoated raw copper exterior, a one piece carbon fiber interior coated in felt, and a sleek dashboard comprised solely of recycled newspaper sheets known as “newspaper wood”.