Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 162

According to a new paper released by Microsoft's research department, Microsoft has made a move towards adopting cryptocurrencies.

According to the paper, Microsoft and researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University have studied what is described as "a blockchain-based incentive system to bolster anti-piracy campaigns", per Cointelegraph. The new paper explored what this new system would be like on the Ethereum blockchain, with the project's main goal to create a system that ensures privacy but is also fully transparent.

The paper states the following about the research titled "Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns"; "We see this as a distributed system problem. In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency." Detailed in the paper is Argus and a watermark algorithm named "proof of leakage", which enables backtracing of pirated content all the way back to the source. If you are interested in reading more about how this system works, check out this link here.

According to Fox News, a new report regarding UFOs will be released in the coming days, and it will contain the "most compelling" UFO evidence.

This year we saw US Intelligence Officials confirm in a report that they are unable to identify several encounters with UFOs, or as officials refer to them, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Additionally, we also know that several pieces of contents from the report that was given to Congress were classified and not revealed to the public.

Since then, UFOs have been quite the hot topic, and now Fox News' Tucker Carlson will be revealing what is described as the "most compelling UFO evidence from Pentagon". Carlson will sit down with air and space experts as well as witnesses on the coming episode of Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Originals - The UFO Files: Chasing the Truth." The episode will be available to stream on August 19. For more information, check out this link here.

Our solar system features eight planets, and each of these planets is very distinguishable as they are all quite different.

During the time that humans have been exploring our solar system and the space beyond it, NASA has captured some incredible images of our local planets. Most of the images can be attributed to NASA's Voyager 1/2 missions which are still currently traveling through the dark void of interstellar space.

The images that you will find below show off some of the most noticeable aspects of the planets in very high detail. As humans advance and our technology becomes more powerful to view the cosmos, we will develop a deeper understanding of these planets in our solar system, as well as the billions of other planets in our systems. For now, though, let's admire what we have achieved so far.

Two pilots of two separate aircrafts reported spotting a UFO flying through the sky before mysteriously vanishing out of sight.

One of the planes that have reported spotting the UFO was a Canadian military aircraft that was en route towards Cologne, Germany, from Ontario. According to Steffan Watkins, an aviation and shipping researcher who looked at the flight records from the military plane saw that the plane climbed 1,000 feet in altitude during the reported time of the sighting.

The other plane was a commercial plane from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flying from Boston to Amsterdam, and according to the report, the pilot spotted a green UFO flying through the sky before vanishing over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the Atlantic coast of Canada. It should be noted that these sightings by two separate pilots come during the Perseid meteor showering, which could mean the "UFO" was actually a meteor. However, this isn't confirmed.

One satellite has experienced a strange "anomaly" that has caused it to begin plummeting down towards the surface of Earth.

The satellite named Measat-3 has been in orbit for nearly 15 years, but unfortunately, on June 15, it experienced an issue that researchers are yet to understand. The issue has caused the communications satellite to be knocked out of service, and now Measat said, "Further testing and recovery efforts found that the satellite could not re-enter service. The satellite will be de-orbited in the following weeks."

According to ExoAnalytic Solutions, a space tracking company, the satellite began tumbling in its own orbit since July 1, and according to Bill Therien, ExoAnalytic Solutions executive vice president of engineering, "It's rare to see one come back from this stage". It should be noted that when the satellite begins to re-enter Earth's atmosphere, it will burn up before reaching the surface, not endangering any lives. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Astronomers have seen something they have never seen before, two dancing ghosts out in the deep void of space having a boogie.

In an article published in The Conversation, Ray Norris, a Professor of Applied Data Science in Astrophysics at Western Sydney University, explains that the two dancing ghosts were found when a team of researchers were scanning through fresh data from CSIRO's new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

Norris explains that the researchers were able to discover that the data they were interpreting was showing them evidence of two radio galaxies located around a billion light-years away. At the center of each of these galaxies resides a supermassive black hole that is propelling out long jets of electrons that are then bent into strange shapes by intergalactic wind. These two galaxies and their respective black holes are believed to be responsible for the "dancing ghosts". However, this and other aspects of the discovery are yet to be confirmed.

The latest cargo trip to the International Space Station contains a piece of technology that may very well pave the road for future colonists of our moon and other planets.

NASA is currently in preparation of constructing some sort of base on the moon that humans will be able to operate in. However, before construction gets underway, there are many tests that the space agency needs to do to gather the best and most efficient understanding of how to begin. One of the pieces of technology that needs to be tested is a 3D printer on the International Space Station.

This isn't any normal 3D printer, though, as it's designed to print regolith, (loose soil or rock) from the moon or other planets. The idea behind the printer is to reduce the amount of materials that will need to be transported to the moon or another planet. If the printing is successful, we could see colonists on the moon or Mars printing out structures using the loose soil or rock around them. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

Earth's closest neighbor has had its photo taken by NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager telescope.

According to a new post on NASA's website, NASA and ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew past Venus 4,967 miles from the planet's surface. During the days leading up to its approach, the Solar Orbiter snapped several images of it, which can be seen above. Looking at the image, we can see Venus' nightside, which is the large blacked-out semi-circle, and the Sun behind it.

Phillip Hess, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C, said, "Ideally, we would have been able to resolve some features on the nightside of the planet, but there was just too much signal from the dayside. Only a sliver of the dayside appears in the images, but it reflects enough sunlight to cause the bright crescent and the diffracted rays that seem to come from the surface." NASA also mentions that there are two bright stars in the background of the time. The star furthermost to the right is Omicron Tauri, and above it to the left is Xi Tauri.

NASA will be sending a new space probe to a distant moon that is believed to have water in search of ancient signs of life.

NASA plans to launch a rotorcraft named Dragonfly to Saturn's largest and the solar system's second-largest moon, Titan, in 2027. Researchers believe that Titan possibly has liquid water beneath its icy surface and that within that water could be chemical biosignatures that indicate life is/was present. Alex Hayes, associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Dragonfly co-investigator, said, "Titan represents an explorer's utopia."

He continued, "The science questions we have for Titan are very broad because we don't know much about what is actually going on at the surface yet. For every question we answered during the Cassini mission's exploration of Titan from Saturn orbit, we gained 10 new ones." In addition to looking for signs of life, Dragonfly will also be inspecting the moon's methane cycle as well as the chemical make-up of Titan's strange atmosphere.

Humans of the future will be very different from what we are today. They will possess much more advanced technology and will most likely have a deeper understanding of the universe.

However, humans of the future will probably still be interested in the history of our species, which is why NASA is sending a message to us of the future. This isn't the first time NASA has created a time capsule that contains what humans have understood so far and sent it out into the void of space. In the 1970s, NASA's first four spacecrafts to leave our solar system contained time capsules plaques that have messages to alien life.

Now, NASA is doing it again, but this time the space agency isn't planning on sending a message to aliens but to human astro-archeologists of the future. The mission is called "Lucy," named after the fossilized human ancestor discovered in 1974. NASA will launch the Lucy in 2033, and its destination will be six asteroids that are on six separate orbits of the sun. Once Lucy has passed those asteroids, it will reside among the Trojan asteroids for possibly millions of years, or until it's discovered by someone or something.

An individual has claimed that he is a "real-life time traveler from 2714" and that aliens will soon be arriving to begin an intergalactic war.

As you have probably already guessed, the time traveler claims have been posted on TikTok and has gone viral despite its obvious lack of scientific evidence to back up the claims. The time traveler claims that invasion will come with a meteor shower, as "one of the meteors" will look different than the others - this will be a "spaceship landing on Earth starting preparations for the Nozic War".

The time traveler claims that the meteor shower will begin on August 11, 2021, and will continue for two weeks. This isn't the first time the TikTok account has claimed to be a time traveler, only a few weeks ago the user claimed that humans would get superpowers in 2021. These videos going as viral as they do show that even baseless claims without any scientific evidence to back them up can still get traction online. Whether that traction is deserved is another question entirely.

Billionaires such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are paying millions for certain metals, but why?

One word, electric vehicles. A mineral company that is financially backed by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates has agreed in a joint venture with mining firm Bluejay. The mineral mining company KoBold Metals will be spending $15 million to search for nickel, copper, cobalt, and platinum at the Disko-Nuussuaq project in Central West Greenland.

Blujay said in a statement that in return for spending the $15 million, KoBold Metals will have a 51% stake in the project. For those that don't know, KoBold Metals is a privately-owned company that has been "recognized in 2021 as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and as one of the 100 most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world by CB Insights." Additionally, KoBold Metals is the only mining company using artificial intelligence.

Diamonds are renowned as some of the hardest gems people can get their hands-on, but what if glass could be harder than a diamond?

Researchers from Yanshan University have created that glass, and according to test results, the glass is actually twice as hard as a diamond. The team of Chinese researchers only recently published a study in the National Science Review that states the new material is made entirely out of carbon and is a yellow-colored glass called AM-III.

With the material, the team of researchers tested it with the Vickers hardness test, which scores diamonds between 50 and 70 gigapascals. As for the researcher's material, the yellow-tinted glass scored 113 gigapascals, making its strength "comparable in strength to diamond and superior to the other known strongest materials", noted led author Professor Tian Yongjun of Yanshan University in the study.

A new study published in the scientific journal Icarus has found that one of the asteroids that are likely to hit Earth has a higher chance than previously thought.

According to researchers who used data from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, the asteroid named Bennu was found to have a 1-in-750 chance of hitting Earth within the next 300 years. The team of researchers, led by Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that has successfully been able to pinpoint the distance between Bennu and Earth within about seven feet, which proves his estimations for trajectory are ultraprecise.

Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx's principal investigator, and the study's senior author, said, "Bennu is by far the best characterized asteroid in the solar system. We know where it's going to be over 100 years into the future, within meters. No other object in the solar system has that level of fidelity to its orbital solution-even Earth!"

Researchers have been watching an asteroid orbit the some for quite some time, but now new research has pinpointed the date for when that asteroid has the highest chance of colliding with Earth.

According to a new study published in the journal Icarus, researchers used data acquired by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to measure the trajectory of the mile-wide asteroid named Bennu. Bennu has been orbiting the Sun for hundreds of millions of years, but according to researchers' highly accurate estimations, Bennu has a chance of colliding with Earth in the somewhat relative future.

The researchers calculated Bennu's trajectory and found that there is a 1-in-750 chance that the asteroid will collide with Earth over the next 300 years, which was a much higher probability than researchers previously estimated. The scientists also found that all of the closest encounters with Bennu will happen during the late 2200s and the early 2300s. Additionally, the researchers managed to boil the data down to a single date - September 24, 2182. During the afternoon on that day is the single likeliest time for impact as Bennu has a 1-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth.

NASA researchers and engineers have been left in disbelief after the space agency's new rover Perseverance collected its first martian sample, only to discover the sample of rock vanished.

Last week, NASA's Perseverance rover began its long search for signs of ancient martian life in the Jezero Crater as researchers believe the crater was once a large lake that may have hosted life. Perseverance used its instrument to drill into the ground to collect a rock sample from deep beneath the martian surface, but when the sample tube was raised to the surface, nothing was inside of it.

NASA has said that the problem doesn't lay with Perseverance, but actually with the rock that the rover is trying to sample from. According to Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching, "It appears that the rock was not robust enough to produce a core". Essentially, NASA believes that the rock that was drilled into was much too powdery to be collected. "The material from the desired core is likely either in the bottom of the hole, in the cuttings pile, or some combination of both," Jandura said.

Astrophysicists have located what is believed to be the oldest planet in the Milky Way, and it makes Earth look very young.

According to astrophysicist Harvey Richer, who spoke to The Daily Galaxy, back in 2003, researchers gathered data about a planet that is located in the constellation Scorpius and is orbiting a white dwarf star. The planet is located around 5,600 light-years from Earth, and using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers were able to estimate its age, which they found to be twice as old as Earth's.

Richer explains that the planet is around 13 billion years old, twice as old as Earth which is 4.5 billion years old. According to Richer the planet isn't habitable as the ancient M4 cluster where it resides "is poor in metals needed for life. The planet is more like Jupiter than the Earth, with no solid surface, and it might have survived a supernova explosion (the neutron star in the system was likely the end product of this explosion)." If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

NASA launched its Juno mission ten years ago, and since then, the space agency has been monitoring Jupiter and everything around it via its Juno space probe.

Juno has been relaying valuable data back to researchers for quite some time now, and during its last orbit around Jupiter, the space probe was able to capture a stunning infrared image of Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system. The last flyby occurred on July 20 when Juno used its Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument to measure the levels of infrared light, which was then relayed back to researchers who created a new map of infrared map of Ganymede.

Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said on NASA's post, "Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury, but just about everything we explore on this mission to Jupiter is on a monumental scale. The infrared and other data collected by Juno during the flyby contain fundamental clues for understanding the evolution of Jupiter's 79 moons from the time of their formation to today."

In the 1920s humans broke through to the age of the skyscrapers, where skyscrapers were being constructed at an unprecedented rate. Now, a new age is upon us.

One of the most recognizable pictures from this era in time is a team of builders sitting atop a skyscraper in 1932 eating lunch, hence the name "Lunch atop a Skyscraper". The image is quite captivating and reflects the era humans were in back then. On Friday, Elon Musk posted a very similar image, but instead of builders on a skyscraper, it was SpaceX engineers standing beneath Starship, as it was slowly being lowered onto the first-stage rocket for attachment testing.

The image really represents how far humans have come in the last 100 years, highlighting how the era of bleeding-edge construction has changed. ArsTechnica's Eric Berger writes that Musk was sending a clear message to the Federal Aviation Administration with the image, as it represents that regulators must do their part in not holding back the human race from exploring and ultimately progressing as a species. If you are interested in reading more about this interesting image, check out this link here.

A real-life 'Jurassic Park' is going to be constructed despite the warnings from a United Nations organizatioin.

A tourism project that has been titled "Jurassic Park" on social media will be continuing on the island of Rinca, despite warnings from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Last month officials from the UN committee said to a World Heritage Committee conference that the project needed to have an environmental assessment completed as there was a potential risk to the Komodo dragon's natural habitat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

UNESCO said during the meeting last month that it had requested an environmental impact assessment from the Indonesian government but didn't receive any response. Wiratno, a senior official at Indonesia's environment ministry, said to Reuters, "This project will proceed...it's been proven to have no impact", adding that a new assessment could be sent in September. Details of the tourism project have been kept under wraps, but according to the Indonesian government, who was asked last year, it's building a "premium tourism spot" on the island.