Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 152

The space industry is just starting to heat up with billionaires such as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos bringing a lot of attention to a new form of tourism - space tourism.

While the overall impacts of privatizing space have positives for everyone on a long enough timeline, some individuals aren't too thrilled about seeing humans start to explore the last frontier and leave Earth behind. During an interview with CBS' James Corden, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates were asked his thoughts on the emerging industry.

Gates said that he has become obsessed with diseases such as Malaria and HIV over space. "I don't know - I've become obsessed with things like Malaria and HIV and getting rid of those diseases, and I probably bore people at cocktail parties talking about diseases. Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth." James Corden responded quickly after Gates finished and said that was the "classiest burn" he'd ever heard. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A team of researchers has found a new mechanism that can impact the rate of human-induced global warming.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change by a team of researchers from Princeton University and the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. The new paper explores the effects of global warming and the intensification of the global hydrological cycle as a result of the warming.

As the planet warms, ocean heat uptake is increased, which has been found to also influence the salt levels in the water. Global warming results in salinity levels in the ocean being increased in salty regions, which causes denser seawater and an increase in ocean heat uptake. An increase in ocean heat uptake reduces the temperature of surfaces and influences the rate of global warming.

It was only a few months ago that reports from astronauts aboard the International Space Station raised concerns about the floating laboratory's longevity or lifespan.

The reports from a few months ago revealed that the International Space Station is cracking, or at least there are new cracks being found. Now, former NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd who has been aboard the ISS, has warned Congressional representatives that the cracks on the floating laboratory are a "serious issue" and that there are "probably other cracks we haven't found yet".

Additionally, the former astronaut also said that while the cracks are small at the moment, "quite small - they look like scratches on the surface of the aluminum plate, there are probably something like a half dozen of them." Shepard explained that the astronauts or the ISS itself aren't in "any immediate danger," but the cracks could certainly reduce NASA's projected lifespan of the ISS if they continue to spread. Shepard recommended, "before we can clear the station for another so many years of operational use, we should better understand this."

The world of the future is kind of unfathomable at this point when it comes to normalizing 3D-printed food, but the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia Engineering have done it -- 3D-printed chicken with lasers. Check it out:

The video explains it all -- they've used real chicken and grinded it up to be used by a 3D printer in a very, very intricate way. This 3D-printed chicken can be put in any manner of patterns, and then with a combination of 3 lasers it is cooked with what is promised with incredible results.

3D-printed chicken cooked with lasers is twice as moist as conventionally cooked chicken, as well as shrinking half as much as regularly-cooked chicken while retaining its flavors. You can also use the various lasers to do different things to the chicken such as higher surface-level browning, broiling, and more. The laser was even capable of browning the chicken through the packaging... scary (lasers through plastic into chicken) but impressive.

Earth is a beautiful planet, but unfortunately, most people won't be able to see it the same way Hayley Arceneaux has seen it.

The video footage was captured by Inspiration4 crew member and medical officer Hayley Arceneaux when she was aboard SpaceX's Dragon capsule that took her and three other crew members to space for three days. The video has been posted to Hayley's personal Twitter account with the following as the caption; "The 360-degree view of our beautiful planet from the cupola was absolutely life-changing".

The view that Hayley and the other crew members had for three days was out of Dragon's large glass dome or cupola. SpaceX replaced Dragon's docking module commonly used by astronauts arriving/leaving the International Space Station. Since there was no need for a docking module as the Inspiration4 mission didn't include any docking, the space transportation company replaced the docking module with a cupola that allowed the Inspiration4 crew to experience the Overview Effect.

Reports have indicated that the Inspiration4 crew faced some "challenges" when it came to using the Dragon toilet.

The Inspiration4 mission with SpaceX raised $200 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. $50 million was thrown in by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after the crew successfully landed back on Earth off the coast of Florida. While the mission was an overall success, it didn't come without its challenges. According to Musk, the crew experienced some "challenges" with Dragon's toilet system.

Musk tweeted that Dragon will be getting upgraded bathroom facilities for future flights, "Definitely upgraded toilets :) We had some challenges with it this flight," said Musk. Back in July, mission sponsor and crew member Jared Issacman said to Insider that "It's not a ton of privacy. But you do have this kind of privacy curtain that cuts across the top of the spacecraft, so you can kind of separate yourself from everyone else." If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A new video has captured the moment the Inspiration4 crew first saw the Earth through SpaceX's Dragon cupola.

The video has been posted on the Inspiration4 YouTube channel and shows crew members floating around the Dragon capsule. Hayley Arceneaux, the crew's medical officer, is seen center frame smiling at the camera, and in the background, the very famous soundtrack from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is playing.

Hayley is then seen looking out the see-through dome or cupola that SpaceX equipped the Dragon for this specific flight. The video shows Hayley's reaction to the view out the cupola and other crew members vocalizing their amazement. The very last few frames really show how genuine this moment is as Hayley's reaction goes from excited and smiling to blank-faced awe with tears welling up in her eyes. A truly incredible moment to capture on video.

Reports are indicating that a newly released study has added to our timeline of human evolution through carbon dating footprints.

The study has been published in the journal Science, and co-author David Bustos explained that he first heard about "ghost tracks" when he began work as a wildlife scientist at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico back in 2005. The "ghost tracks" got their name from how the footprints would appear on blank Earth if the ground were wet enough during certain times of the year. When the ground became drier, the tracks would disappear.

Inspection of these tracks confirmed in 2016 that humans made them, and according to research published in Science on Thursday, the tracks have been dated and are now some of the earliest known footprints of humans anywhere throughout the Americas. The tracks date back to 21,000 to 23,000 years ago and prove that during that time period, humans were present in the area, which is several thousand years earlier than scientists previously estimated.

Officials have warned that Tropical Storm Sam formed on Thursday in the Atlantic Ocean and has now become the 18th named system of the season.

According to reports and official warnings from the National Hurricane Center, Tropical Storm Sam is strengthening 1,560 miles east-southeast of the northern Leeward Islands and is currently moving west at around 15 mph. Officials are warning that Tropical Storm Sam could gain enough strength over the weekend to have wind speed greater than 110 mph, categorizing it as a major hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center said, "Sam is rapidly intensifying, and maximum sustained winds have increased." Adding, "Rapid intensification is forecast to continue through early Saturday. Sam is likely to become a hurricane very soon and then could be a major hurricane by Friday night or early Saturday." At the moment, it's unclear whether Sam will reach landfall, but officials have said that residents located in Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the US East Coast to remain alert about the situation.

A team of researchers has accidentally found two galaxies that were hidden from view sitting at the edge of space and time.

Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an astronomer at the Research Institute for Science and Engineering at Waseda University, Japan, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), led the team that used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile to make the discovery. ALMA is an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes and is capable of seeing through dusty environments and viewing incredibly large distances.

The team stumbled across the two new galaxies when they were observing two target galaxies named REBELS-12 and REBELS-29. The team noticed that thousands of light-years away from the target galaxies, there were bright emissions. This discovery led the team to pursue with follow-up observations that led to the discovery of two galaxies are named REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2. These galaxies were hidden behind a cloud of cosmic dust and aren't visible in UV and optical light.

On Monday, a volcano erupted on a Spanish island, and now residents are filming the giant rivers of oozing lava flowing down streets.

The Cumbre Vieja ridge is where the eruption occurred, and the 5,500 residents in the nearby area were lucky enough to put some distance between them and the volcano, thanks to early warnings from scientists. The first eruption was heard on Sunday afternoon, and onlookers saw the Cumbre Vieja ridge spewing bright red magma into the air.

According to the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute, the lava measured in at more than 1,800 F and was moving 2,300 feet per hour, headed towards the Atlantic Ocean. As previously mentioned, prompt warnings from officials caused all residents in the area to evacuate, avoiding any casualties. However, officials are saying the lava flow could last for weeks or even months.

Researchers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to spy on six galaxies that appear to have died early in the universe's development.

NASA has announced the news with a press release via its website. According to the post, when the universe was in its early stages of development when it was only around 3 billion years old, it went through the most significant period of star birthing in its history. However, not all galaxies were as lucky as the Milky Way, as some appear to have run out of key components resulting in deaths.

Hubble, in conjunction with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in northern Chile, researchers were able to identify six galaxies that ran out of cold hydrogen gas that is required to create a star. As a result, all six of these galaxies are "dead". So, what caused these galaxies to die? At the moment, the answer remains a puzzle, but Kate Whitaker, assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lead author on the paper, has proposed a few different theories that could have interrupted development.

Using new techniques to observe the constellations of Taurus and Perseus, astronomers have been able to discover something "unprecedented".

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has detailed the discovery of a spherical-shaped void in space between the two star-birthing constellations. When viewing the constellations in 2D images from Earth, astronomers have to consider the illusion of forced perspective. But now, due to observational advancements, astronomers have achieved a breakthrough in terms of analyzing molecular clouds in the interstellar medium.

Researchers, for the first time, are able "to analyze the 3D spatial structure and thicknesses of famous nearby star-forming regions." Allowing an "unprecedented insight into the origins and fates of molecular clouds in the interstellar medium", per this study. From the new mapping strategies, researchers have confirmed what was long theorized and now what is named as the Per-Tau shell.

Officials have observed that the frequency and the intensity of the ash coming from the Semisopochnoi Island volcano.

According to the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) and satellite imagery of the volcanic activity, the ash cloud that the volcano has emitted stretches approximately 15,000 feet above sea level and around 60 miles southeast. The AVO has raised the volcano alert level to "Red/Warning," as the observed increase in sulfur dioxide gas emissions is an indicator of an increase in eruptive activity.

Semisopochnoi is a part of the Aleutian Islands, which are a chain of 14 large volcanic islands and 55 smaller islands. Alaska is the owner of most of the islands, with some of them also belonging to the Russian federal subject of Kamchatka Krai. Natureworldnews reports that the activity of volcanoes such as Semisopochnoi is usually brought on by tectonic plate activity. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

A study that was published in the journal Nature Geoscience back in March details the lifespan of Earth's biosphere and how long it will be until the planet becomes uninhabitable.

Christopher Reinhard, associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kazumi Ozaki, assistant professor at Toho University, used a model that represents Earth's climate and biochemical processes. With this model, the researchers accounted for uncertainties in Earth's atmosphere and tested it over 400,000 times, with each test the parameters of the model being adjusted.

According to the results from the model testing, the researchers found that the oxygen levels will be completely depleted in around one billion years, resulting in Earth not being able to support any life that is dependent on oxygen to survive. Around 2.5 billion years ago, the Great Oxidation Event occurred, bringing forth new forms of life as the atmosphere began to fill with oxygen. Until that moment, Earth was only capable of supporting life that didn't require oxygen to survive, such as anaerobic life forms.

An astronomer has explained why all of the planets in our solar system are roughly sitting on the same orbital plane.

According to Nader Haghighipour, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who spoke to Live Science, the solar system began around 4.5 billion years ago, and at the time, it would have looked like a large cloud that measured 12,000 astronomical units (AU). An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun, which is around 93 million miles. As the cloud of gas and dust increased in size, it began to collapse under its own mass to form a disc.

Live Science uses a fantastic analogy in its article here; "Imagine a pizza maker throwing a spinning slab of dough into the air. As it spins, the dough expands but becomes increasingly thin and flat. That's what happened to the very early solar system." As time went on, the center of the disc began to squeeze together under pressure, which then fused hydrogen and helium atoms, creating what we know today as the Sun. The Sun continued to grow and created space between the flat disc and itself.

The first crew of all-civilians that recently went to space aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule reported an issue with the toilet.

SpaceX recently chiseled its name into the private space industry with another milestone as the first company to take an all-civilian crew to space. The crew took the Dragon capsule to lower-Earth orbit with the Falcon 9 rocket and remained there for three days. Until now, astronauts that have used the Dragon capsule have only been in there for around 24 hours as they were only traveling to the International Space Station where they disembarked.

Since the Inspiration4 crew wasn't disembarking, the docking module was replaced with a large dome of glass, or more accurately named - cupola. Additionally, the cupola was also where the capsules toilet was stationed, which led people to believe that the crew aboard would have one of the best views possible while relieving themselves. However, this wasn't the case.

A team of astronomers has used quite an unconventional way to trace the landing location of a meteorite that entered Earth's atmosphere. But if it isn't broken, don't fix it, right?

The team of astronomers worked on a paper that took all of the footage of a meteorite streaking across the sky over Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Austria, and Hungary back in 2020. Dr. Denis Vida from the University of Western Ontario presented the paper at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 and explained the team used a collection of video footage from several cameras around 62 miles apart.

Vida said, "By combining observations from several cameras around 100 kilometers apart, a fireball's position can be pinpointed to within 50 meters, and it's usually fairly easy to compute its atmospheric trajectory and pre-atmospheric orbit this way." The meteorite was estimated to be around four metric tonnes when it entered Earth's atmosphere, and as it plummeted towards the surface, it split up into at least seventeen individual pieces. Three of the pieces weigh 720 cams.

A former NASA astronaut that has been on the International Space Station and has worked as a project lead for SpaceX has discussed the differences between the space agency and Elon Musk's company.

The former astronaut is Garret Reisman, who has been to the International Space Station twice, the first in 2008 and the second trip in 2010. Reisman also worked as a project lead for SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule that recently took four civilians into lower-Earth orbit for three days. In an interview with Inverse, Reisman described that the main difference between SpaceX and NASA is the amount of time it takes for a decision to be made.

Reisman said, "[At SpaceX] we would make a decision in a single meeting that would take years to reach the same decision point at NASA." According to the interview, Reisman says that SpaceX's strategy is to make decisions quickly and make adjustments on the way towards achieving its goal, while NASA is much more calculated and cautious about making decisions. The former astronaut says that NASA is structured this way because it relies on several contractors for its manufacturing while SpaceX makes its components in-house.

A part of NASA's "We Asked a NASA Professional" series on YouTube, the space agency has answered the following question - "Is there oxygen on Mars?"

The short answer is "yes", but it's hardly the amount that we have here on Earth and definitely not enough for a human to breathe while walking around on the surface. To put it into perspective of how little oxygen Mars' atmosphere contains, NASA says the amount of oxygen present in Mars' atmosphere is 0.13%, compared to 21% in Earth's atmosphere. What Mars' atmosphere is rich in is carbon dioxide, which can be useful.

NASA technologists have created a piece of technology called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. NASA has equipped Perseverance with a MOXIE, and only a few months ago, the rover was able to successfully extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere. The amount of oxygen that was extracted was only small, but the experiment proved the concept works.