Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 1

NASA has dropped a very cool video on its Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter page that shows a close-up of the surface of Mars.

NASA has taken to the personal Twitter page for Perseverance, the most recent rover to land on Mars. The Twitter account for Perseverance tweets from the first-person perspective, which is a neat and kind of comical personification that I believe NASA does to also include children in space exploration - not just adults.

According to the tweet, Perseverance blasted the rock with its laser and then used its robotic arm to get a nice close-up of it. A Twitter user asked Perseverance 'what's the scale of images', Perseverance replied by saying, "The main rock in the wider shot is around 20 in / 50 cm wide; the darker section I focused in on is about the size of a thumbprint." If you were wondering if the laser makes a cool sound when it blasted the rock, you can actually listen to it on the NASA website, check out this link here.

According to reports, on Friday, May 14, China will be attempting to successfully land on Mars with a lander and rover.

Back in July 2020, China launched a spacecraft carrying the Tianwen-1 lander and rover towards Mars. If China can pull this off, it will be the first nation to successfully send a spacecraft into Mars' orbit, drop a lander down, followed by a rover all in the same mission. The orbiting spacecraft is currently preparing for the capsule's release that will carry both the lander and the rover.

Once preparation is complete, it will drop the capsule that will fall through the atmosphere and deploy a parachute to carry it safely to the Red Planet's surface. The lander will fire its thrusters downwards to gently lower itself to the surface. From there, the lander will deploy a ramp for China's rover to exit onto the Martian ground.

The United States Customs and Border Protection agency made a very surprising announcement on Monday regarding cow poo and traveling.

According to the announcement Customs agents located cow dung in a travelers luggage, and now the agency is publicly telling all travelers to stop packing cow dung into luggage because of the health risks that come with it. Just last month Customs agents found two cow dung patties in a suitcase that was accidentally left behind by a Air India flight traveler. So, why cow dung?

There is a seemingly growing belief that cow dung offers some health benefits, and some of those beliefs stretch as far as cow dung offering protection against COVID-19, hence the the dung being placed in the travel luggage. It should be noted that Customs has prohibited cow dung transportation from India to the US because of the risk it poses to transmitting Foot and Mouth Disease to livestock. Foot and Mouth Disease has been wiped out of the US since 1929.

It won't be long now until the famous Hubble Space Telescope is replaced with the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched back in 1990, and the development for its replacement began in 1996. Since then, the JWST has gone through multiple delays caused by cost overruns and major redesigns, but now we are finally nearing the end of its development. The JWST opened its primary mirror for the last time on Earth before its launch scheduled for October 31, 2021.

So, how much better is the JWST going to be compared to Hubble? Well, the JWST has a far larger mirror than Hubble and also sports a sun shield the size of a tennis court that basically acts as a beach umbrella to keep it cool. Astrophysicist Blake Bullock, who is a director at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, the contractor on the project, said, "It is the biggest, most powerful telescope ever to be put in space. There are big telescopes on the ground but nothing of this nature and complexity in space. Hands down, it's the most powerful thing out there."

Located in the Republic of Tuva is an archaeological site of ancient nomadic warriors buried with their horses.

The burial site is of Scythians, who were a nomadic people that built a very impactful empire in Eurasia between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Now, the Defence Minister of Russia, and a very close ally to President Vladamir Putin, has hinted towards using the DNA samples gathered from the 3,000-year-old corpses to build human clones.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, "Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter. I believe you understand what would follow that. It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep." For those that don't know, Dolly the Sheep is the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, or more simply put a clone. Shoigu is clearly hinting at attempting to clone these ancient warriors using DNA samples.

Brand new images have been posted online by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of Jupiter. The new images showcase the planet in three different types of light.

The images, which can be found above, are detailed on the NOIRLab website, where it's stated that Jupiter has been captured in the three following types of light; infrared, visible, and ultraviolet. These three separate views allow researchers to have a different perspective of the planet's atmospheric features, such as the "Great Red Spot, superstorms, and gargantuan cyclones".

Not only does Hubble take incredible images of space by itself, it also works with on-ground satellites such as Gemini North in Hawaii. The visible and ultraviolet images of Jupiter were captured with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, and the infrared image was captured using Gemini North's Near-InfraRed Imager (NIRI) instrument. If you are interested in reading more about this story or would like to learn more about Jupiter and its atmosphere, check out this link here.

Los Angeles and Las Vegas residents have taken to social media to report a very odd string of lights appearing in the night sky.

It was only last week when similar reports came from residents in Washington. Some of those residents deemed the lights to be UFO "sightings". However, the lights that were seen over Los Angeles and Las Vegas weren't UFOs but actually were SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The launch of sixty SpaceX Starlink satellites coincides with these "strange light sightings" posted all over social media.

The Starlink satellites take several weeks to spread out and form a line. Once they are position in the atmosphere, SpaceX proceeds to spread them out further so they can eventually synchronize and link up with the larger Starlink grid. Onlookers of the night sky that aren't aware of SpaceX's Starlink satellites are understandably confused at what they are witnessing unfold above them. However, it isn't UFOs of any kind, but just man-made magic.

NASA is smashing out "very first" achievements with its Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover that are currently exploring Mars.

It wasn't long ago that the small helicopter Ingenuity successfully took off from the Red Planet's surface, marking the very first flight of a spacecraft on another planet. Since then, Ingenuity has continued to push the boundaries of its distance and time in flight records. On April 30, Ingenuity commenced an 872-foot round trip. Audio and video was captured by Perseverance's SuperCam microphone.

NASA has since released the audio of Ingenuity's first flight, marking the first time the sound of another spacecraft hovering on Mars has been heard. At the start of the above video, you can hear the quiet hum of the helicopter's propellers as it prepares to take off. The video has been released on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory YouTube Channel and states that "sound adds a new dimension to space exploration". For more information on this story, check out this link here.

A new report has surfaced that has revealed that the infamous Chernobyl nuclear facility has seen a steady increase in neutron emissions, concerned scientists gravely.

Back in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear facility went into meltdown, causing one of the world's greatest disasters that has ever occurred. The meltdown was caused by a flawed reactor design combined with personal that weren't fully trained, as well as human incompetence. If you are interested in learning more about how and why Chernobyl happened, I highly recommend you watch the series "Chernobyl" on HBO.

Now, a new report in New Scientist details that sub-reactor room 305/2, which is thought to have large amounts of radioactive material, is increasingly producing more neutron emissions. Researchers recorded that room 305/2 has increased its neutron emissions by 40% since early 2016. Researchers are currently evaluating if the surge in the rooms production in neutron emissions will eventually decrease, or if human intervention is required.

A new report has shown the extent of Facebook's user data collection can lead pharmaceutical firms to be able to target directly to people that have health conditions.

The results come from The Markup's Citizen Browser project, a non-profit organization that is exploring how technology is affecting society. The researchers found from looking at 1,200 Facebook user's ad data that many ads for prescription drugs were targeted to users because they expressed "interests" in other topics such as "bourbon" and "oxygen". It was also discovered that Big Pharma companies used the keyword "awareness" to target ads to users that expressed interest in certain illnesses.

An example of this would be Zejula, which is a GlaxoSmithKline drug that is commonly used to treat ovarian cancer was discovered to be targeted to users who were interested in "cancer awareness". Additionally, The Markup estimated that the potential sales could be very large considering that Facebook's ad system states that nearly 203 million people have shown interest in "cancer awareness".