Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 186

Japan always feels like it is the country where these types of things from the future should be tested first, with Panasonic testing the public acceptance of delivery robots in a Japanese "smart town".

The first phase of this self-driving robot delivery system on public roads began in November 2020, and continued through the end of 2020. The second phase will begin in February 2021, in just a few weeks -- where the robots will begin delivering goods into residents in the area where Panasonic can "test the acceptability of the new delivery service experience".

Panasonic's new delivery robot will roll through neighborhoods at up to 2.5 miles per hour, or 4 kilometres per hour. They will be monitored remotely by human operators at a control center, who will take over if required -- but without them, the delivery robots are doing it all on their own.

Uh, I can't believe I'm writing this -- but here we are just five days into 2021 and we have something from the future released in a portable Spider-Man style bandage gun that sprays a web onto you, healing you with nanofibers.

Nanomedic Technologies is behind the new Spincare Wound Care System, which is a portable, battery-powered system that has its chamber loaded with the future tech, and shot out of it in a spider-style web that covers wounds and uses nanofibers to super-charge skin regeneration. Incredible stuff.

Chen Barak, CEO of Nanomedic explains: "The Spincare introduces an innovative treatment option into the advanced wound care arena. with inherent characteristics and advantages that outperform any and all traditional wound care methodologies, fit a vast spectrum of wounds and injuries, and allows the patients to live while they heal".

Boston Dynamics is showing off the latest, and quite simply incredible engineering prowess in having its most advanced robot yet dancing -- with fully choreographed moves I might add -- to "Do you love me" by The Contours.

The robots were dancing with incredible precision, doing the twist, mashed potato and other moves that Tesla CEO and AI enthusiast Elon Musk tweeting: "This is not CGI". Looking at the video it's a scary thought, first of how far AI and robotics has come and two that our robotic overlords are better dancers than most of us.

Boston Dynamics was recently acquired by Hyundai earlier this year, in a deal worth almost $900 million.

A new mysterious small marine reptile that dates back 150 million years ago, has been identified as a new species found in a Late Jurassic deep marine deposit along the English Channel coastline in Dorset, England.

Interestingly the new small marine reptile is known as the Thalassodraco etchesi or Etches sea dragon -- with SciTech Daily reporting that this newly-discovered species might have been able to dive to extreme depths. SciTech reports: "The aquatic reptile has been determined to be part of the group known as ichthyosaurs, which were streamlined marine predators from the Late Jurassic period".

Paleontologist Megan L. Jacobs said: "This ichthyosaur has several differences that makes it unique enough to be its own genus and species. New Late Jurassic ichthyosaurs in the United Kingdom are extremely rare, as these creatures have been studied for 200 years. We knew it was new almost instantly, but it took about a year to make thorough comparisons with all other Late Jurassic ichthyosaurs to make certain our instincts were correct. It was very exciting to not be able to find a match".

SpaceX will be testing its new Super Heavy booster in "a few months" from now according to Elon Musk, with the Super Heavy booster being used to fly Starship and its orbital launches and deeper space missions -- it'll also be how SpaceX will land on Mars soon.

Musk said that the company will be testing the Super Heavy booster at its two launch pads down in Boca Chica, Texas with new prototype rockets to be tested on each launch pad. The company recently began setting up its new SN9 prototype of Starship at its Texas testing facility, before this news began to float out.

SpaceX will have an engineering marvel with Super Heavy standing at a large 240 feet tall with 28 Raptor engines in total, with Super Heavy recently seeing a prototype of the next-gen heavy-lift rocket exploding once it landed after a high-altitude test flight in Texas.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) has set a new record, with the superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun blasting away with an ion temperature of 100 million degrees (Celsius) for 20 seconds.

The test was conducted on November 24, 2020 with the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announcing that it was working in a joint research program between the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States.

This is a big first, as no other fusion devices have been able to maintain over 100 million degrees or higher for over 10 seconds -- they've breached the world record to end out 2020, but not been able to maintain it for long. KTAR was able to breach the 20 second mark by improving the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier (ITB) mode.

Humans have been searching the vastness of space for quite some time for any signs of extraterrestrial life, and now we think we have found the first serious candidate for alien communication with Earth.

Astronomers have detected a narrow beam of 980 MHz radio waves back in April and May 2019 at the Parkes telescope in Australia. According to Scientific America, this signal appeared once and was never detected, and is important because that band of radio waves is usually lacking signals from human-made craft and satellites.

Breakthrough Listen is the $100 million effort being made to hunt for radio signals that are not Earthly. As you can probably imagine, Breakthrough Listen detects many radio signals bouncing around space, examples include the Sun's natural radio output. The signal that has astronomers scratching their heads appears to have come directly from Proxima Centauri, the closest star system to the Sun. Additionally, Space.com reports that "The signal reportedly shifted slightly while it was being observed, in a way that resembled the shift caused by the movement of a planet".

It's official: we have Soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen and now... Guardians. The US Space Force will be calling its members Guardians, Vice President Mike Pence announced.

During a recent White House event, VP Pence marked the one-year anniversary of the US Space Force by announcing the news of Guardians. Pence said: "It is my honor, on behalf of the President of the United States, to announce that, henceforth, the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as 'Guardians'.

There are around 4000 Guardians in the US Space Force, all from the Air Force. The Trump administration signed the first US armed force since the Air Force was created in 1947. VP Pence said: "That historic moment was a culmination of an effort that began from the early days of this administration - from almost the first moment that the president and I spoke about space when we were campaigning for these jobs".

SpaceX has just launched a new Falcon 9 rocket carrying a classified payload known as 'NROL-108' for the US government agency that controls spy satellites, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Spaceflight Now reports that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) normally sends payloads into space through the US Space Force's National Security Space Launch Program -- but this time did it on its own and commissioned SpaceX and used the Falcon 9 for its new mysterious payload.

The site explains: "In some cases, the NRO uses alternative methods to procure launch services after making a cumulative assessment of satellite risk tolerance, needed launch dates, available launch capabilities, and cost - all with a purpose of ensuring satellites are safely and securely delivered to orbit in a timely manner".

It looks like the future of space communications could be quantum computing-based for SpaceX, with investment bank Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jones teasing a potential future of quantum-based space comms.

The fresh perspective from Jones comes right on the heels of NASA researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) successfully teleported quantum information over 27 miles (44km). The test was important, as researchers successfully demonstrated that quantum technology worked with existing telecommunications systems.

Jones said: "From a SpaceX perspective, the commercial potential of quantum communications networks and its potential advantages of its rapidly deploying in-space comms architecture may provide significant optionality to the story and its valuation".

Computex returns in 2021, with the event organizers announcing that even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, nothing will stop Computex from being a physical event in 2021.

Not only will there be a physical Computex in Taipei, Taiwan -- but it will be joined by an AI-based virtual tour, which definitely sounds interesting. Nothing can beat the feeling of being in-person in all that insanity, computer hardware, geeking out the entire time in that humidity, but in the beautiful country of Taiwan.

There's over 6 months between now and then, so I think we'll have to wait and see how things go in that time before things start getting locked in. TweakTown has been at every Computex for around 20 years now, and I personally have been to every single one between 2012-2019 and would've been there this year had the COVID-19 pandemic not wreaked havoc.

We all know that the future is going to be space and exploring other planets, with the likes of SpaceX and Elon Musk having lofty goals of settling on Mars. But how do we make that space travel faster? Well, a Solar System "superhighway" network of routes'll do.

Researchers have discovered the new Solar System "superhighway" network of routes that would see future probes and spacecraft getting to their destinations much faster. The scientists found the "superhighway" network of routes by "gathering numerical data about millions of orbits in our Solar System and computing how these orbits fit within already-known space manifolds".

The team continued: "The results need to be studied further, both to determine how they could be used by spacecraft, or how such manifolds behave in the vicinity of the Earth, controlling the asteroid and meteorite encounters, as well as the growing population of artificial man-made objects in the Earth-Moon system".

Astronomers have located a very mysterious object out in space and have found that it's flying towards Earth.

The object, which has been named 2020 SO by astronomers, will come within "just" 31,605 miles of our planet at 3:50 a.m. ET on December 1. Astronomer Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project told Newsweek that this is an "extremely close", but yet safe approach from the object.

As for what the object is, astronomers originally believed it to be an asteroid of some kind, but now scientists at CNEOS aren't exactly sure what it is. Masi said, "We are not sure it is an asteroid-that is, a natural body". The object measures in at 15-33 feet across, and CNEOS director Paul Chodas suggested that it could even be an old rocket booster from NASA's failed Surveyor 2 lunar mission, which launched on September 20, 1966.

It first started with a monolith discovered in the Utah desert -- mysteriously disappearing days after it was discovered, and then a monolith was discovered in Romania... days later it too disappeared. There's now another one that has popped up, this time in California.

A new 10-foot-tall metal structure was discovered at the top of Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California. There's no information on how the monolith got there, but the monolith on Pine Mountain "was welded together at each corner, with rivets attaching the side panels to a likely steel frame inside. The top of the monument did not show any weld marks, and it appears to be hollow at the top, and possibly bottom" reports Atascadero News.

There's a bit difference with the new monolith in California, as it is not cut into the ground itself -- meaning it can be pushed over if someone rammed it hard enough. The Atascadero News estimates the metallic monolith weighs around 200 pounds.

A strange monolith appeared in the Utah desert recently, disappearing after going viral on the internet -- then another appeared in Romania, and now another in the last 12 hours in California.

The new monolith in Romania appeared on November 27, 2020 -- 10 days after the original monolith that appeared in Utah on November 17, 2020. The monolith in Romania appeared the monolith in Utah monolith disappeared,

The monolith that was in Utah was reportedly there for many years, after being discovered on Google Maps between August 2015 and October 2016. It recently disappeared, but the monolith discovered in Romania didn't stick around as long as the one in Utah -- vanishing after just a few days.

Elon Musk has said that he has plans to have SpaceX land a craft on Mars in 2022 -- with humans stepping foot onto the Red Planet in the next 4-6 years.

Musk recently made some new comments during the Axel Springer Award 2020 event, where he talked about SpaceX and its mission to Mars. He said that the journey from Earth to Mars has to wait for a specific time, when the planet's orbit lines up with ours -- which happens about every two years.

Not only that, but Musk himself said he wants to be aboard one of the SpaceX Starship trips, something he'll do in the next 2-3 years. Musk said: "I'd say six years from now, highly confident [that humans will travel to Mars]. If we get lucky, maybe four years, and then we're going to try and send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years".

Remember that tall, metallic monolith that came out of nowhere a few days ago and was discovered by during a sheep-counting expedition over the desert in southeastern Utah? Well, it's gone.

The monolith went viral over the last few days, with people drawn to it for obvious reasons -- but the exact location was still secret. Well, people must have found it -- and it seems someone has taken it, or maybe aliens came down and grabbed it back and it was a giant UFO phone that uses the ground to charge?

Utah Bureau of Land Management said on Saturday "We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith,' has been removed. The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property".

A mysterious monolith has been discovered deep in the Utah desert, discovered by a sheep-counting expedition flying a helicopter over it and seeing the huge structure standing there.

The Utah Department of Public Safety issued a statement on its website, explaining that it discovered the monolith on November 18, 2020 when the Utah Department of Public Safety Aero Bureau was collaborating with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources on counting horn sheep while in a helicopter, in a particular portion of southeastern Utah.

On this mission, the team spotted "an unusual object" and then landed their helicopter nearby. The Utah DPS explain: "The crew members found a metal monolith installed in the ground in a remote area of red rock. The crew said there was no obvious indication of who might have put the monolith there".

It looks like the UK is moving towards putting Terminators onto the battlefield, with UK armed forces head General Sir Nick Carter saying 1/4 of the UK army could be robots by the 2030s.

In a recent interview with Sky News, General Sir Nick Carter explained: "I think you are going to see an armed forces that's designed for the 2030s. You won't get there overnight but that's the direction of travel".

"No, I can't spell that out, not least because decisions haven't been taken, but what I'm hinting at is that we need to be thinking about how we measure effects in a different way. I mean I suspect we can have an army of 120,000 of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows".

A huge new 300-megawatt Tesla battery installation is planned for November 2021 in Victoria Australia, with the State Government pushing towards renewable energy looking forward. The new 300-megawatt Tesla battery farm is twice the size of the one an hour drive from me here in South Australia at Hornsdale, SA.

The new Tesla battery installation will be built by French renewable energy contractor Neoen SA, and will be built at the Moorabool electricity terminal near Geelong, Victoria, Australia. The 300-megawatt battery farm will be capable of powering 500,000 homes in Victoria for around 1 hour.

Neoen SA will pay the construction costs for the battery, coming it at around $61 million ($84 million AUD) which will include operation and maintenance of the 300-megawatt Tesla battery farm.