Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 119

A world-first study on the problem has been published in Nature Medicine.

Fourteen astronauts were studied over their six-month space missions, having direct measurements of their red blood cells taken. The study found that the astronauts lost 54% more red blood cells in space than they would otherwise on Earth, about 3 million per second being created and destroyed compared to only 2 million on Earth. The same result was observed for both female and male astronauts.

The sweltering record temperature was recorded in the town of Onslow in Western Australia.

Reaching a temperature of 50.7 degrees Celsius (123.26 degrees Fahrenheit) according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the temperature equals Australia's hottest day on record. It is the hottest recorded temperature for Western Australia.

The temperature was last recorded on January 2nd, 1960, at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia. The country's Climate Council warms these temperatures could become commonplace as global warming continues, with Dr. Martin Rice stating the record cones as "part of a long-term warming trend driven by the burning of coal, oil, and gas."

The new study discussing the threat was published in the journal Biological Reviews.

Five major extinction events have been identified in the history of life on Earth. The five events are the Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction events. Scientists suggest a sixth, Holocene extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is now underway, threatening global biodiversity.

Biologists from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, extrapolated land snail and slug estimates to determine that between 7.5% and 13% of the two million identified species on Earth could already be extinct. The extinction rates are not equal across all ecosystems, with marine species somewhat less affected despite their own significant threats.

LG has just announced that its launched the world's first commercial service robot, with the introduction of its CLOi ServeBot robot for the US market. The video below is from CES 2021, check it out:

The new semi-autonomous robot will be perfect for restaurants, retail stores, hotels, and more with LG building it for "complex commercial environments". LG's new CLOi ServeBot robot stands at 53 inches tall, has 11 hours of operation on a single charge, and handles up to 66-pound loads. It won't be chasing you down because your credit card was declined, as the CLOi ServeBot has a top speed of just 2.2 mph.

LG's new CLOi ServeBot robot can be tweaked to work on a number of floors, with LG saying "enabling precise multi-point deliveries ranging from densely packed restaurants to sprawling office complexes". There are a bunch of sensors and cameras on the CLOi ServeBot that stops the robot from hitting walls, staff, and customers.

As a resident of South Australia and a big fan of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, the news that they're building a black box just south of me in Tasmania is both awesome, and alarming.

What we will know as Earth's Black Box will be a huge 10m x 4m x 3m steel monolith that Kubrick would be proud of, and will be built on a remote outcrop on the west coast of Tasmania. Earth's Black Box will be made from 7.5cm thick steel, cantilevered off granite, according to co-founder of artistic collective the Glue Society, Jonathan Kneebone.

As for what data it will be collecting: "It will collect measurements of land and sea temperatures, ocean acidification, atmospheric CO2, species extinction, land-use changes, as well as things like human population, military spending and energy consumption. And it will collect contextual data such as newspaper headlines, social media posts, and news from key events like Conference of the Parties (COP) climate change meetings".

The mystery arose from lunar rock samples collected by NASA's Apollo program and brought back to Earth.

Analysis of the rocks brought back between 1968 and 1972 as part of the program indicate they were formed in the presence of a magnetic field of equivalent strength to that of Earth's. Researchers from Brown University have now proposed an explanation for how an object the size of the Moon could generate such a strong magnetic field.

The Moon has no magnetic field presently, but the researchers suggest in the first few billion years of the Moon's history, while its surface was more molten, large rock formations sinking through the Moon's mantle could create a kind of interior convection capable of generating strong, intermittent magnetic fields. Typically, a planetary body produces magnetic fields with strength proportional to its size via a core dynamo, the convection of molten metals in its core.

A new paper published in Physical Review Letters explains the theoretical model.

Scientists from CERN have proposed a theory that explains the small mass of the Higgs boson and solves a problem with the theory of the strong force. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle with a mass of ~125 GeV and has prompted scientists to theorize why it is so light. The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature and binds quarks together to form subatomic particles like protons and neutrons.

The theory uses a multiverse model to propose many different universes, each with a Higgs boson of a different mass. At the birth of these universes, those with more massive Higgs bosons would collapse quickly, and the surviving universes would have a light Higgs boson, of which our universe would be one.

A paper on the discovery was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, led by David Kipping and his Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University.

The second exomoon candidate to ever be identified was found orbiting the planet Kepler 1708b. The discovery comes four years after the same team discovered the first exomoon candidate, found orbiting Kepler 1625b, which has yet to be officially confirmed. Kepler 1708b is an exoplanet found 5,500 light-years from Earth, and its candidate exomoon is about two-thirds the size of the roughly Neptune-sized candidate exomoon orbiting Kepler 1625b.

NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has begun to observe the first target of its mission.

The IXPE has been in space for over a month after launching on December 9th aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It was launched into an orbit 370 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth's equator and has since had its X-ray detectors deployed, telescopes calibrated and undergone other procedures by the IXPE team to make the observatory operational up to this point.

The first official target for the IXPE to observe is Cassiopeia A (Cas A), a supernova remnant (SNR) in the Milky Way galaxy, left behind after a once-massive star exploded, with the light of the Cas A estimated to have first reached us around 350 years ago. Starting January 11th, IXPE will observe Cas A over about three weeks, using X-ray polarization to examine its magnetic field structure.

A new analysis of the meteorite has been published in the journal Science.

The meteorite that landed on Earth from Mars is Allan Hills 84001 (ALH84001), and was discovered in the Antarctic in 1984. The new analysis by Andrew Steele from the Carnegie Institution for Science determined that organic molecules found within the meteorite were synthesized from interactions between water and rocks on the surface of Mars around four billion years ago.

A research article on the making of the chip was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

A team of researchers led by the University of Melbourne used a technique to implant singular phosphorus atoms onto a silicon wafer. Previously, embedding atoms in silicon has involved showering a wafer with phosphorus, becoming implanted randomly across it.

The temperature was achieved in China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor.

The reactor recently achieved a sustained temperature of 70 million degrees Celsius (126 million degrees Fahrenheit), maintaining it for 1,056 seconds, a record-breaking length to maintain superheated plasma. France's Tore Supra tokamak set the previous record in 2003, which contained plasma at similar temperatures for 390 seconds.

In May 2021, the EAST reactor set another record by achieving a temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit), holding this temperature for 101 seconds. For comparison, the sun's core reaches temperatures of around 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit), making the reactor's peak temperature achieved so far eight times hotter than the sun.

The new study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled the "The rise and fall of rationality in language."

Researchers from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Indiana University analyzed the language from millions of books. They identified trends in using words associated with rationality and intuition. They found words associated with reasoning such as "determine" and "conclusion" rose in relative frequency from the 1850s, while the use of more experiential terms such as "feel" and "believe" fell.

They also found that this trend has reversed in the last forty years and has been accompanied by a shift from collectivist language to individualist, shown through the ratio of singular to plural pronouns used, such as "I" and "we."

The study was published in the journal Nature on January 12th, 2022.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany sequenced and studied the genome of hundreds of Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress plant. Thale cress is commonly used for genetic experiments because of its relatively small, 120 million base pair genome, compared to the roughly 3 billion base pairs found in the human genome.

Growing hundreds of Arabidopsis thaliana plants at the Max Planck Institute allowed the researchers to cultivate plants that may not have survived in the wild after DNA mutations. From the DNA sequenced, the researchers identified over a million mutations, where a non-random pattern had also arisen.

The size of NASA's astronaut corps is its smallest since the 1970s.

As NASA expands its space endeavors beyond the International Space Station (ISS), NASA could need more astronauts to fulfill those missions. At present, all of its astronauts only fly to the ISS, aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsules and Russia's Soyuz vehicles. With the Artemis program set to take humanity back to the moon, NASA needs astronauts trained for that mission and other new ones on the horizon.

On Tuesday, an asteroid that is approximately the size of a house safely flew past Earth, and while it was passing by, it was photographed.

On January 11 at 12:19 am ET, an asteroid dubbed 2022 AC4 that measures anywhere between 14 and 31 feet in diameter cruised past Earth at 18,700 mph. NASA's database that tracks all Near-Earth-Objects (NEO), the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) indicates that the asteroid came within 58,000 miles from Earth, and while this sounds like a large distance, the moon is 221,500 miles away from Earth.

Additionally, NASA's database states that 2022 AC4 was the closest asteroid to approach Earth in the last two months. During its fly-by, Gianluca Masi, the manager of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, tracked the asteroid in the sky and took a 120-second-long exposure shot that can be seen above. While asteroid 2022 AC4 was quite close to Earth, NASA doesn't classify the object as a "potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA)" as the agency only considers asteroids PHA's if they come within 4.6 million miles of Earth and are greater than 500 feet in diameter.

There are numerous asteroids floating about in space, and one in particular that is reasonably large will be making its approach with Earth soon.

All Near-Earth-Objects (NEO) are tracked by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory located in California. According to the database, an asteroid named 7482 (1994 PC1) will be making its closest approach with Earth next week on January 18 2022 at 4.51 p.m ET. The 3,400-foot-wide object will safely pass by Earth at five times the distance between Earth and the Moon (1.2 million miles).

1994 PC1 will be passing Earth at a ridiculous speed of 47,000 mph, and according to EarthSky, this safe passing of the asteroid will be its closest approach for the next 200 years. It should be noted that NASA considers any asteroid or comet that comes within 120.9 million miles as a Near-Earth-Object, per a mandate from Congress that required the agency to locate all NEOs 460 feet and larger by the end of 2020.

A restaurant chain has announced that it's the world's first "member's only private dining club", where members are required to own an NFT from the chains collection.

VRC Group, founded by media mogul Gary Vaynerchuck has announced "Flyfish Club", a new take on the restaurant industry that focuses on a private dining experience for Flyfish Club members who have purchased an NFT. The announcement states that Flyfish Club is the world's first member's only private dining club where membership is purchased on the blockchain.

So, how does it work? There are two tokens at Flyfish Club, a "Flyfish token" and a "Flyfish omakase token", the former will grant members access to the cocktail room, restaurant, and an outdoor space that features "iconic views of New York City." The Flyfish omakase token grants individuals access to everything that the Flyfish token gives access to, plus an omakase experience that is conducted by one of the best sushi masters in the United States.

The new study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

All galaxies contain a black hole at their center, including Milky Way. Stars will orbit around these black orbits, but on occasion, they can stray too close and will be pulled into the black hole and consumed, undergoing a process known as spaghettification. The consumption of the star by the black hole is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE).

The new study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on December 30th, 2021.

The researchers suggest that the rings of dust that may have existed around the sun, similar to those around Saturn, would have prevented Earth from becoming a "super-Earth." A super-Earth, according to NASA, is a type of planet about twice the size of Earth but up to ten times the mass, many of which have been found orbiting around thirty percent of the sun-like stars elsewhere in our galaxy.

To determine why our solar system doesn't have one, given their relatively common occurrence, the research team from Rice University in Houston, Texas, created simulated the formation of our solar system with computers. The simulations showed there were likely high-pressure regions of gas and dust, dubbed pressure "bumps," that would have surrounded the sun, creating three distinct zones where matter could accumulate.