Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 106

Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research announced last week that all science and research cooperation with Russia would be stopped immediately.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) similarly announced that its partnerships with Russia would be paused. One such cooperation between the two countries involves the German eROSITA black hole telescope aboard the Russian Spektr-RG satellite. The space telescope is making the largest-ever map of black holes in the universe and has been placed in safe mode to protest Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

eROSITA was originally launched in 2019 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan, aboard Russia's Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma satellite. The mission was jointly funded by DLR and Roscosmos, Russia's space agency. eROSITA is operated by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, who were responsible for disabling the telescope on February 26th following the Federal Ministry of Education and Research's announcement the day before.

Melinda French Gates has recently opened up about her divorce from Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, revealing some reasons why the divorce was necessary.

Melinda Gates sat down for an interview with CBS where she described her divorce with Bill Gates as an accumulation of "many things", and one of those was Bill Gates' meetings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Melinda Gates said during the interview, "It was many things, but I did not like that he'd had meeting with Jeffrey Epstein". French Gates goes on to explain that had only met with Epstein once and that she regretted it, describing Epstein as "abhorrent".

"I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. So my heart breaks for these young women," said French Gates. While French Gates has given new details about the lead-up to the divorce, the exact relationship between Bill Gates remains quite unclear, with many of the details of their dealings yet to be disclosed. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

Russian military is currently battling Ukrainians around Europe's largest nuclear power plant located in the city of Enerhodar.

Reports from numerous sources indicate that Russian forces are currently fighting for control over the city, as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant provides Ukraine with about one-third of its energy. ABC reports that Dmitri Orlov, the Mayor of Enerhodar, has taken to social media within the last couple of hours to announce that Russian troops have approached the power plant, and "as a result of continuous enemy shelling of building and units of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant is on fire!"

Additionally, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has warned that the situation was "critical", and urged military forces around the power plant to be cautious of the site. Above is a livestream of the nuclear power plant where you can see smoke billowing from buildings around the site. Scrubbing through the livestream I was able to find a close-up of a building that was on fire.

Russian forces are continuing their advance into Ukraine, and now reports indicate that military forces are currently battling around Europe's largest nuclear reactor.

A Russian military convoy was spotted heading towards the city of Enerhodar, located on the Dnieper River in Ukraine's south, and now reports indicate that a battle has broken out for control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the biggest nuclear plant in Europe.

Read more: Russia bombs Europe's largest nuclear power plant, fire breaks out

The remarkable artificial arm, known as the Atom Touch, was made by Atom Limbs.

Atom Limbs is making what they call "the first artificial human arm" in the form of the Atom Touch. It will have near-full human range of motion, restore a basic sense of touch and be non-invasively mind-controlled, according to the Atom Limbs website. It is slated for 2023 availability, and you can sign up for updates or apply for the Atom Preview Program on the website.

Tyler Hayes, the CEO of Atom Limbs, explained to Interesting Engineering that the inspiration for the device came from learning about how the healthcare system has failed people with limb loss. Only one in five people choose to wear prosthetics due to the poor quality and usability of the available options. Atom Limbs was thus born to "revolutionize the $800B+ physical disability industry" and make high-quality prosthetics for the more than 65-million limb-different individuals.

The World Health Organization (WHO) report is the latest in its weekly installments regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

On March 1st, 2022, the WHO reported that the reported number of new COVID-19 cases globally dropped by 16 percent in the previous week, following a month-long decline in new infections. The number of deaths has also fallen by 10 percent, following a decrease seen in the week prior. There have been more than 10 million new cases and about 60,000 deaths worldwide in the last week.

According to the WHO, the omicron variant is the overwhelmingly dominant variant, accounting for 99.5% of the virus sequences in the world's largest publicly accessible database, with only 0.3% from the delta variant. Other variants such as beta, gamma, lambda, and mu have not been reported in the last month, although the WHO notes there are surveillance challenges in many countries.

Many publicly-available images of the Russian invasion into Ukraine are already live from various satellite operators.

Max Polyakov, the founder and CEO of Earth Observatory System Data Analytics (EOSDA), has recently appealed to satellite operators and space agencies worldwide to share their real-time satellite imagery with EOSDA to assist military and humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

The EOSDA requests Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Capella Space, Iceye, QPS & Synspective, Spacety, Airbus, COSMO SkyMed, Sar-Lupe, and Umbra. Additionally, they request optical data from Planet, MAXAR, Airbus, SIIS, Spaceview, Blacksky, and other companies. Any companies with data are directed to contact ukraine@eos.com.

The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) has begun negotiating the historic treaty.

Almost 200 nations at the UNEA in Nairobi unanimously agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding treaty regarding plastics by 2024. The treaty has been mandated to target plastic waste in all forms, including microplastics that insidiously work their way in the food chain and more.

The treaty has yet to have the particulars worked out, but its scope will include the entire life cycle of plastic, such as design and production and recycling and disposal. It will mandate legally binding and voluntary measures and targets for nations to follow and seek to assist poorer countries financially in dealing with plastic.

A study on the association titled "Emotion-based Modeling of Mental Disorders on Social Media" has been submitted to arXiv.

Researchers from Dartmouth College have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that analyzes Reddit conversations to detect users' mental disorders. Their model focuses on emotions instead of the specific content of the text analyzed. The researchers say this is a more reliable approach to assessing mental disorders irrespective of the topics being discussed in the posts.

Their research focuses on emotional disorders such as major depressive, anxiety, and bipolar disorders, each characterized by distinct emotional patterns. Using publicly available data from Reddit, the researchers trained their AI model to map emotional transitions between different posts to create a map of how likely a user was to transition from a certain emotional state to another.

The head of Russia's space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, gave stark warnings during a recent interview against hacking any Russian satellites.

Dmitry Rogozin has been very vocal since Russia began its invasion into Ukraine, and as Western sanctions tightened Russia, Rogozin threatened to have the ISS deorbited. Now, Rogozin, the head of the Russian Roscosmos State Space Corporation, is responding to claims that Roscosmos' control center was hacked by a group affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous. According to Rogozin, "The information of these scammers and petty swindlers is not true," adding, "All our space activity control centers are operating normally."

Read more: Russia threatens to crash the ISS into US, top NASA official answers

The 19-year-old that was ushered into fame by creating a bot that tracks Elon Musk's jet has now created a bot that tracks Russian VIPs.

In early February, 19-year-old college student and aviation enthusiast Jack Sweeney landed himself in the limelight as Elon Musk offered to pay $5,000 to delete the Twitter account bot created by Sweeney. The Twitter account is ElonJet, and was created to track the take-off and landing locations of Elon Musk's private jet. The account is now nearing 400,000 followers, and now Sweeney has announced a new account called "PutinJet", which tracks the movements of Russian VIP jets and any Putin may use.

Read more: Elon Musk offers teen $5,000 to kill the Twitter bot tracking his jet

In 2020 a team of astronomers reported locating the closest black hole system at 1,000 light-years from Earth, but fellow researchers contested the results of the study and teamed up to produce a new study together.

The international team of astronomy researchers has published a new paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics that details the HR 6818 system with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. According to the paper, the HR 6818 system isn't a triple system that consists of one star orbiting a black hole every 40 days and a second star orbiting much wider as it was originally thought. It is actually a system that features two stars orbiting each other with no black hole.

The team used two of the VLT's instruments called GRAVITY and the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), and with the results, were able to conclude that HR 6819 is a binary system that features two stars and no black hole. The reasoning for the miscategorization is that astronomers originally observed the system when one of the stars was ripping the atmosphere off of its companion star, which is described as being much like a vampire drawing blood from its victim.

An employee that was working at a local electricity company has photographed a rare phenomenon described as "light pillars".

The photograph was taken by Mark Matwick, who is employed at the Keewatinohk Converter Station in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Matwick works at Manitoba Hydro, the operator of the electricity company, posted the photograph to its Linkedin account explaining the phenomenon. According to Manitoba Hydro, these mysterious beams of light are called "light pillars" and aren't "aliens descending", but occur "on a cold night without wind, the ice crystals that form in the atmosphere can act as a mirror and reflect the light source below."

In response to the photograph being posted on LinkedIn, Justin Anderson, an adept northern lights photographer and also one of the founders of the Manitoba Aurora and Astronomy Facebook page, spoke to CTV News Winnipeg and said that Matwick's image was "probably one of the best photos of light pillars I've ever seen." The full-time northern lights photographer backed up the explanation from Manitoba Hydro, saying, "It will reflect that light upwards into the atmosphere and it'll go hundreds of feet," he said. "It looks like hundreds of feet for us, but really it's going miles in the air and it looks incredible."

Russia recently began its invasion into Ukraine, and now Putin has decided to move more military into the country.

The U.S Earth Observatory company Maxar Technologies have released a collection of images snapped by satellites flying over the region. The images showcase a massive convoy of Russian troops and military vehicles that stretches 40 miles. The convoy of troops is moving near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, stretching from the town of Prybirsk, located in the north of the region near the border of Belarus, to the Antonov International Airport close to the capital.

Russia continues to push its military forces into Ukraine despite taking heavy losses at the hands of Ukrainian troops, and these recently released satellite images confirm the nation's intentions of furthering the attack. Reports also indicate that more troops and ground attack helicopters were spotted in southern Belarus, which is only 20 miles away from Ukraine's border.

China may not be willing to help Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, circumvent its sanctions.

Roscosmos Director-General Dmitry Rogozin expressed in recent tweets that its space industry would be continue in spite of recent sanctions banning exports of "sensitive technologies" by "spinning up fabrication of the necessary components and instruments ourselves." However, it seems they are unable to produce everything within Russian borders.

Rogozin said that Roscosmos would look to "buy from China spare parts for satellites whose supplies will be restricted under sanctions," however an unnamed Chinese official has made it apparent that China likely will not help, as they may suffer their own economic sanctions and paint themselves in a bad light by helping Russia in the wake of its invasion into Ukraine. According to a Reuters report, helping Russia in this way would be a "tacit or explicit accommodation to Russia's invasion of a sovereign country in the heart of Europe."

The Artemis program has already faced numerous delays, such as to its uncrewed Artemis 1 flight due early this year.

Following NASA's uncrewed Artemis 1 flight will eventually be a crewed Artemis flight that will see astronauts landing on the moon once again. However, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has delivered an update on the program during a House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing on March 1st, saying the crewed mission likely won't happen any earlier than 2026.

The deadline for the mission was originally 2024, which was then extended to 2025 in November last year. An audit by the NASA Office of Inspector General from the same month estimates that the first four Artemis missions will cost $4.1 billion each. So far, the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) has cost at least $9.1 billion.

The ominously named "doomsday plane" is a modified Boeing 747 called the Boeing E-4B.

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent announcement of Russia's nuclear armament being put on high alert, the plane has taken to the skies for a training mission on February 28th. It took off from a U.S. Air Force base in Nebraska on a 4.5 hour flight to Chicago and back. The plane was also reportedly accompanied by several early-warning jets that are used to track ballistic missiles.

The E-4B plane is part of the United States Air Force, particularly a fleet of Nightwatch aircraft maintained by the U.S. military since the 1970s. It is resistant to nuclear weapons and is designed to serve as a mobile command headquarters for top-ranking military personnel in the event of nuclear war. The plane is equipped with analog equipment instead of digital, allowing it to operate in the event of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nuclear blast.

A paper on the mission titled "Tomographic Muon Imaging of the Great Pyramid of Giza" has been submitted to arXiv.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one that has stood the test of time and still stands today. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the largest of the pyramids at Giza, and it will scientists will study it using cosmic-ray muons to see deep into the pyramid and map its internal structure. The effort is known as the Explore the Great Pyramid (EGP) mission.

Muons are elementary particles, similar to electrons but more massive. They can penetrate structures more deeply than even X-rays and thus are even more useful in tomography. Cosmic rays consist of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei from the sun and elsewhere in the galaxy, which arrive at Earth and collide with the atmosphere. When they do so, they produce various secondary particles, including muons.

The new study on face masks titled "Modelling the direct virus exposure risk associated with respiratory events" has been published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

An international team of researchers from Sweden, Italy, and Austria have developed a model that assesses the risk of spreading a given virus with and without an infected person wearing a face mask. Current recommendations regarding the transmission of infectious respiratory diseases are based on a simplified model developed by American scientist William Firth Wells in 1934.

The researchers incorporated many factors into their model to account for the true complexity of transmission. These include interpersonal distance, temperature, humidity, viral load, type of exhalation, and the use of face masks. They found that without a mask, talking can spread infectious particles up to a meter away, while cough can spread them up to three meters, and sneezing can spread them up to seven meters. However, masks dramatically reduce these figures.

NASA has announced it has awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with three additional transportation missions to the ISS.

The new awards are a part of the NASA Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract, which will allow NASA to continue "uninterrupted US capability for human access to the space station", amid threats from the head of Russia's space agency. While NASA doesn't directly mention Russia and the comments from its space agency head, the announcement is definitely relatable as it shows that NASA is moving to rely on American-based companies to support science on the ISS.

For those who don't know, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, tweeted that "If you block cooperation with us, then who is going to save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent from orbit and then falling onto the territory of the United States or Europe?" In response to the statements from Russia's space agency head, NASA said, "The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space operations. No changes are planned to the agency's support for ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations."