Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 119

Human DNA contains the genetic code for what makes up a human, and now it's being used to create an "easy-to-use" antenna.

The team of chemists behind the world's smallest antenna comes from the University of Montreal, and according to the researchers, the nanoantenna will be used to assist scientists in identifying new drugs. The nanoantenna will do this by monitoring the motions of proteins and observing the structural changes that take place over a period of time.

The researchers explain that this "device" is outfitted with a five-nanometer-long antenna that has fluorescent molecules located at the end. The fluorescent molecules aren't just for show, as study author Scott Harroun explained that the nanoantenna signals a change in the structure of a protein by changing the color of light that it's emitting.

A new study details the discovery of water vapor being present in the atmosphere of a planet that's a little bigger than Neptune.

The study comes from a team of astronomers at the University of Kansas, and according to the researchers, the exoplanet that has become of high interest to researchers is a gas giant called TOI-674 b. This exoplanet is believed to be 1.3 times the size of Neptune and has a close orbit with its host star. Due to the planet's orbit being so close to its star, completing a full circle of the star in just two days, researchers don't believe the planet is harboring any life.

However, researchers believe that analyzing the chemical makeup of an exoplanet's atmosphere can assist astronomers and fellow researchers in figuring out how planets form and how distant planets compare to planets located closer to home. Notably, this isn't the first time that water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of another planet, as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered water vapor on a faraway planet called K2-18b in 2019.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may have a new competitor when it comes to who holds the crown for the world's richest individual.

Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, the co-founder and CEO of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance has just jumped some places on the world's wealthiest individuals list. According to a report from Bloomberg, Zhao's latest net worth valuation is $96 billion, which places him under some prominent figures such as Oracle founder Larry Ellison at $109 billion and Steve Ballmer, LA Clippers owner, and former Microsoft CEO, at $112 billion.

Notably, Bloomberg writes that Zhao's $96 billion net worth is likely far higher as the valuation didn't include the earnings or Zhao's current cryptocurrency holdings. Binance gave a statement to Bloomberg that explained that due to the constantly changing dynamic in the cryptocurrency space, it's difficult to give an accurate estimation. Anyone involved in the cryptocurrency space understands this volatility that Binance is mentioning.

Reports out of China indicate that the nation is looking towards creating its own base on the moon that will rival plans set out by the United States.

A new report from the South China Morning Post states that the nation is moving towards building its own "artificial moon" that will simulate a low-gravity environment. According to the report, the artificial moon will be built in just a few months and will be used by researchers to test out any equipment or tools that may perform differently in a low-gravity environment.

Notably, the artificial moon will measure in at just 60 centimeters in diameter, and while that is very small compared to the actual moon, it will still provide researchers and engineers a suitable testing environment. The artificial moon and the low gravity on it are slated to be created by placing the moon in a vacuum chamber that simulates space. The gravity will be simulated with a strong magnetic field.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is responsible for the new map.

DESI was installed on the Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Sonoran Desert and aims to achieve a better understanding of dark energy, the force hypothesized to drive the universe's expansion. Using a two-dimensional map of the universe released in January 2021, the DESI team prepared DESI to conduct its three-dimensional survey of the universe.

DESI's survey has created a map that contains over 7.5 million galaxies, far exceeding the approximately 930,000 galaxies comprising the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from 2008. DESI will expand this map, and the team expects the survey to be completed by 2026 after observing an estimated 35 million galaxies.

The World Economic Forum has released The Global Risks Report 2022 , with one of its seven chapters dedicated to space, entitled "Crowding and Competition in Space."

The report cites concerns such as Kessler Syndrome, which could arise from ever-increasing satellite numbers in orbit around Earth. The situation could get dramatically worse a lot sooner as military or defense-oriented presence increases. Another potential issue is how the governments and private companies may violate the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty, as some are concerned the Artemis Accords will.

The report also addresses the lack of effective governance tools for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), the governing body for space-based activity, to manage the evolving reality of space affairs. It states the pressing need for an authority that governs satellite launches and servicing and can control space traffic, enforcing various aspects of space travel.

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.

Of the fourteen returning astronauts, thirteen had their blood drawn and tested, and five of those thirteen were considered clinically anemic. Within three to four months, space-related anemia was reversed as red blood cells returned to normal levels.

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.

Both exomoon candidates are found far from their host star, where its gravity is weaker and less able to pull moons away from planets occupying larger orbits. The team sought out cold, giant gas planets on wide orbits in the hopes of finding exomoons; given in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn occupy a similar role and have over a hundred moons between them.

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.

Production of these organic compounds, commonly associated with life by non-biological means, is referred to as abiotic organic chemistry. The geochemical processes likely to have led to these organic compounds being present in the meteorite are the same as ones found on Earth; serpentinization and carbonization.

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 team's vision is for the technique to be scaled up to produce significantly larger-scale quantum devices. Their technique involves a precise atomic force microscope, able to position itself with the accuracy of only half a nanometer.

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.