Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 135

New research has been published in Nature Communications, describing how a team of scientists from the University of Manchester used gene editing to manufacture new antibiotics.

The team used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to create new non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) enzymes, critical in the natural production of antibiotics like penicillin. Previously, manipulating these enzymes to create more potent antibiotics that are less susceptible to growing microbial antibiotic resistance has been a challenge.

The UK government has estimated that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will lead to 700,000 deaths each year globally and predict this will climb to 10 million by 2050, costing the global economy ~$100 trillion.

Black Friday is around the corner and to lead into the sales madness Amazon has slashed prices across a select range of microphones.

A good quality microphone is a staple part of any streaming setup, and while you can take a cheaper microphone and tweak it to sound like a higher-end microphone, sometimes it's just better to pick up a reputable brand of microphone that you know is going to be acceptable quality.

Blue Microphones certainly comes to mind when the topic of high-quality microphones is brought up and Amazon has discounted a large range of its microphone solutions by up to 25%. Amazon's early Black Friday deals feature discounts for popular Blue products such as the Blue Yeti, Blue Yeti X, Blue Yeti Nano, and Blue Snowball iCE. In the entirety of this article you will find the best deals for Blue's range of on sale products.

A team of researchers has stumbled across a mammoth tusk deep beneath the ocean surface, which is perfect for preserving fossils.

A team of researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute was exploring an underwater mountain off the coast of California back in 2019 when they discovered what looks like a wood log. 10,000 feet below the surface, the research team found a 3-foot mammoth tusk fossil that had been preserved by the cold temperatures of the deep sea, much like how food is preserved by being frozen.

Researchers suspect that the tusk was from a large Columbian mammoth that was likely a creature that came from crossbreeding a woolly mammoth and another species of mammoth. As for the exact age of the creature, researchers are working on analyzing the radioisotopes, which can be indicators for finding out an approximation of how old a specimen is. ScienceAlert reports that the mammoth tusk is "much more than 100,000 years old."

NASA's highly anticipated next-generation space telescope titled the James Webb Space Telescope is getting extremely close to launching.

Earlier this week, NASA announced that the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had to be delayed due to a "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band - which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter - caused a vibration throughout the observatory". NASA explained in its announcement that engineers were working on testing if the telescope was damaged, and now the agency has given an update.

"Engineering teams have completed additional testing confirming NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is ready for flight", writes NASA. The space agency explains that JWST underwent "additional testing" and that a "NASA-led anomaly review board concluded no observatory components were damaged in the incident." Additionally, the update states that NASA has given approval for the fueling of the observatory to begin. Fueling operations will begin on Thursday, November 25, and take about 10 days to complete. NASA is targeting December 22 for the launch of the JWST.

The Sun has released a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, and Earth will get impacted by a small portion of it.

Spaceweather.com reports that one of the plasma filaments located on the Sun's southern hemisphere snapped and collapsed, pushing a large amount of particles out at a wide-angle. The majority of the burst is expected to head south past Earth, but a small portion will still impact our magnetic field, which has resulted in forecasters predicting minor G1-class geomagnetic storms for November 27.

When the plasma filament snapped, a "canyon of fire" was carved into the surface of the Sun that was visible for more than 6 hours after the event. Additionally, the blast that is headed our way may be powerful enough to cause Arctic auroras, which always makes for an incredible photography opportunity. In other Sun-related news, a satellite is going to perform its riskiest fly-by of Earth yet on its way to the Sun, check out that story here.

Five astronauts aboard the International Space Station have discussed what Thanksgiving means to them and what they will be doing to celebrate.

Five of the seven NASA astronaut crew gathered around a camera to let the world know that they will be celebrating Thanksgiving while traveling aboard a floating laboratory that is currently orbiting the Earth at around 17,150 miles per hour. NASA astronaut Raja Chari explained that even though it's Thanksgiving, the astronauts are still required to perform their 90 minutes to two hours of daily exercise in order to maintain health during their six-month stay aboard the station, but there is something good to look forward to when it comes to dinner.

As with most Thanksgiving celebrations, the food is an important part, and the International Space Station is no different. The astronaut's joke about how they won't be doing any cooking as all of the food aboard the station just needs to be reheated. The crew will be enjoying a wonderful meal of crab bisque, candied yams, and cherry blueberry cobbler, as well as turkey. Additionally, the crew will be performing their Thanksgiving treadmill sessions which are referred to as the "turkey trot".

The very first fully-scaled mission to test a specific technology that would be used to defend Earth in the event of an asteroid or comet hazard has been launched by NASA.

NASA dubbed the mission the "Double Asteroid Redirection Test," and it involves sending a vending-machine-sized spacecraft to collide with a Great Pyramid of Giza-sized asteroid in an attempt to change the asteroid's orbit around its larger companion asteroid. NASA's spacecraft will be traveling at 15,000 mph, or 4 miles per second, when it collides with the asteroid named Dimorphos.

The results from this test will then be used to prepare for an asteroid threat, and if one ever presents itself, which it currently hasn't, researchers will have a much better idea of to handle the situation by taking already tested methods. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said, "At its core, DART is a mission of preparedness, and it is also a mission of unity. This international collaboration involves DART, ASI's LICIACube, and ESA's Hera investigations and science teams, which will follow up on this groundbreaking space mission."

NASA's next-generation space telescope that is pinned as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is teed up to unlock the secrets of the universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been in development for many years now and has experienced many delays for numerous reasons. The delays have driven up the cost of the space telescope, but now it's finally nearing the end of the road to completion as it's scheduled to launch next month.

In a video posted to the Interesting Engineering YouTube channel, it's explained how important space telescopes are to developing our understanding of the universe and how the James Webb Space Telescope is "currently the most advanced piece of observational equipment ever built." With the JWST, astronomers will be able to observe what the universe was like as far as 250 million years after the Big Bang, which may be further back enough to unlock some secrets of the universe.

Brown dwarfs are massive stellar objects that fit in between planets and stars, and one has been identified with a large amount of lithium.

Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to burn hydrogen, which other stars burn, allowing them to shine in the night sky. For this reason, astronomers did not detect brown dwarfs until 1995. Since then, they have been identified in binary systems, and their masses have been determined using Kepler's laws.

The laws are formulae that describe the movement of astronomical bodies subjected to each other's gravity. Some bodies in these systems have been calculated to be massive enough to burn lithium, while their counterparts have been too small to do so.

Using signals broadcasted by SpaceX's Starlink satellites, researchers have developed a way to locate a position on Earth, similar to GPS.

With signals from six satellites, the researchers pinpointed a location within 8 meters of accuracy here on Earth. The researchers did not require any assistance from SpaceX, nor did they have any access to the data any satellites were transmitting, only information relating to the location and trajectory of the satellites. The research team was based out of the University of California-Irvine (UCI) in partnership with the Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal Assured Navigation (CARMEN), a multi-institution transportation center housed at The Ohio State University.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers have synthesized a new form of ultrahard carbon glass.

This new form of glass is the hardest known and has the highest thermal conductivity of all glass materials. The properties of a material are a consequence of its arrangement at an atomic level. Carbon atoms can combine in many configurations, separated into two categories: crystalline, forming ordered and repeating lattice structures, or amorphous, which are seemingly more random and disorganized.

The chemical bonds holding the atoms together determine the hardness of any given carbon material, with two-dimensional bonds leading to softer materials like graphite and three-dimensional bonds leading to harder materials like a diamond.

On November 21st, 2021 (Sol 268 of the Perseverance rover mission), Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, made its 16th successful flight across the planet's surface, titled "Short Hop to the North."

Flight 16 was a 109-second flight, where Ingenuity climbed to 33 feet (10 meters), flew over the "Raised Ridges" at 3 miles per hour (almost 5 kilometers per hour), and landed near the edge of "South Seitah." This journey spanned 380 feet (116 meters) as the craft flew northeast.

Using a Return-to-Earth (RTE) camera oriented southwest, opposite to the flight path, NASA aimed to capture nine color images evenly spaced throughout the flight. Only four black and white photos have currently been posted, with color versions due to come in a later downlink.

NGC 2024, or the Flame Nebula, is a large star-forming region that makes up part of the Orion constellation and resides roughly 1,400 light-years away from Earth.

Besides the Flame Nebula, the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex houses other famous nebulae, including the Horsehead Nebula and Orion Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) studied the Flame Nebula, looking for protoplanetary disks, or "proplyds." These disks are masses of gas and dust surrounding stars that could eventually grow into a new solar system.

Hubble has confirmed four proplyds within the nebula and four potential proplyds. However, these proplyds are being steadily worn away due to intense radiation from nearby stars. Consequently, these proplyds may never form planets.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has been orbiting the Sun since its launch on August 12th, 2018, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Now, it's broken records for the fastest human-made object and the closest distance a spacecraft has come to the Sun. On November 21st, 2021, the probe reached speeds of 364,660 miles per hour (586,864 kilometers per hour), shattering its previous record of 330,000 miles per hour (531,083 kilometers per hour) on April 29th, 2021.

On both occasions, the probe was at the perihelion, the point where it comes closest to the Sun along its orbiting path. The latest close approach is part of the probe's tenth orbit, and it reached the perihelion at 4:25 a.m. EST (8:25 UTC). The distance from the solar surface at this point was 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers), breaking the record for the closest a spacecraft has come to the Sun.

NASA has taken to the official Twitter account for its newest Mars rover to announce that Perseverance has sealed its fifth sample tube.

On November 17, the Perseverance Twitter account revealed that NASA's Mars rover captured its third sample of Martian soil that was loaded with the "greenish mineral olivine". While NASA scientists are able to identify which mineral Perseverance has collected, it's still a mystery how it got there in the first place, as the Tweet reads, "there are several ideas among my science team about how it got there. Hypotheses are flying!".

Now, Perseverance has collected another sample from the same rock, "A rock so nice, I sampled it twice! Just capped and sealed my fifth sample tube, with another piece from this interesting rock". The Perseverance team explains that the rover is doubling up on samples on "high priority targets", which suggests that this rock and others like it are deemed high-priority targets. We will have to wait for an update from NASA about how the greenish mineral got there.

NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope has photographed "The Running Man" and shock waves of colliding gases.

NASA has taken to its blog to explain how the Hubble Space Telescope witnesses a shock wave of colliding gases in a nebula. Hubble snapped the above image of the Running Man Nebula, that's located 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion. This image is of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH 45, and according to NASA, "Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a newborn star collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves".

NASA continues to explain that the blue color seen throughout the image represents ionized oxygen (O II), and purple indicates ionized magnesium (Mg II). The nebula seen in the image is called NGC 1977 and is one of three that comprise The Running Man. NGC 1977 is a reflection nebula, which means it doesn't emit its own light and only reflects light from neighboring stars, much like a "streetlight illuminating fog", according to NASA. If you are interested in learning more about The Running Man, check out this link here.

NASA has taken to its YouTube channel to post a video answering the question, "What's the Difference Between Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors?".

Space can be quite confusing to those that aren't knowledgeable in the terminology used and what names define certain celestial objects. To make it easier for everyone to understand, NASA created an awesome series called "We Asked A NASA Expert", and this series includes answering some of the most popular questions about space in short, quick videos. In this week's episode, NASA scientist Ryan Park explains the differences between asteroids, comets, and meteors.

According to Ryan Park, a NASA near-Earth asteroid expert, an asteroid is primarily rocky, and most of them can be found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids come in a variety of sizes and shapes, and when observing an asteroid through a telescope, it appears as a point of light. Park explains that comets, like asteroids, orbit the Sun but are composed of ice and dust. When a comet gets close to the Sun, its ice and dust contents begin to vaporize, which gives off that iconic "tail" when viewing one through a telescope.

NASA recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission on the back of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

For those not updated with the goal of the mission, NASA is attempting to redirect an asteroid by colliding a vending machine-sized spacecraft into a Great Pyramid of Giza-sized asteroid. The space agency is aiming the spacecraft at an asteroid that is orbiting a larger companion asteroid. As previously stated, the goal of the mission is to see if the spacecraft can change the orbit of the asteroid, and with the results, NASA will be able to know if this form of redirection is a possible solution if an asteroid that's on a trajectory with Earth is found.

DART launched on the back of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, and overall the launch was a success. SpaceX has taken to its official Twitter account to post three images of the launch, and while the images posted to the Twitter account are low-resolution, the company has uploaded HD versions to its Flickr account. If you are interested in learning more about the DART mission, check out some of the links below.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is primarily used to take images of the Moon has been used to spy on Saturn from an extreme distance.

On October 13, 2021 the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) snapped the above image of Saturn, and while the image could be somewhat disappointing to the eye, it's a representation of a significant technological achievement. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) are line scan cameras, which means that instead of viewing the image as a whole it reviews it precisely line by line.

The LROC cameras have very short exposure times and are designed to take advantage of the speed of the spacecraft as it travels 1 mile per second. So, how did it take an image of Saturn? The orbiters cameras were pointed towards one side of Saturn and then to the planet's other side. The image that was taken showcases Saturn's iconic rings which appear to be above the equator. For those that don't know, Saturn's rings are only 10 to 100 million years old and mostly consist of water ice.

NASA's Mars rover has been climbing a mountain since 2014 and has sent back an incredible image of the progress it has made.

NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars back in 2012, and in 2014 it began its journey up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall mountain. In a new press release on the NASA JPL website, the space agency explains that Curiosity is equipped with two navigation cameras that capture a 360-degree view of the rover's location after it completes a drive. The team saw the image that Curiosity snapped from its recent perch on the mountain and decided it was too stunning of a spot not to capture the scenery in the highest possible quality.

The team ordered the rover to snap two images with its Mastcam instrument; one at 8:30 a.m. and again at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time. NASA explains that the two times of day revealed different details in the landscape, so they were combined together to include elements from both the morning and the afternoon. The artists added in the blue and orange colors to the image to represent what the scene would look like at different times of day, not what the human eye would see if an individual was standing next to Curiosity.