Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 200

Astronomers around the world have their eyes fixed on one supergiant star at the moment, Betelgeuse. This star is acting really strange and could very well explode into a glorious supernova.

It wasn't too long ago that I reported on Betelgeuse, and how astronomers are witnessing the supergiant star pulsating and dimming. Astronomers estimate that the star has about 100,000 years left in its life, but what they don't know is why it's dimming at unprecedented rates, raising the question of whether or not it's going to explode sooner rather than later.

Veteran Villanova University astronomer Edward Guinan and his team have collated some brand new data, which indicates that Betelgeuse could be in the middle of a 430-day pulsation period. The end of that pulsation period is estimated to be on February 21st and should bring the star to its dimmest state yet. Guinan says, "So something very unusual is going on" as Betelgeuse even now appears to be dimmer than what he and his team expected it to be.

A new report has come out regarding two Russian satellites that are closing in on a billion-dollar U.S spy satellite that is currently orbiting Earth.

According to John W. Raymond, who is the General of the United States Space Force, and serves as the Space Force's first Chief of Space Operations, "It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space". The Russian satellite is only 100 miles from the U.S spy satellite, and other U.S experts have expressed their concerns on what the Russian craft will be able to learn from close-up images.

Fox News reports that the Russian's have said that the satellites are simply conducting experiments. Fox News also says that an amateur satellite tracker used public data to check out the motives of the Russian satellite, and found that it's "clearly designed" to monitor the U.S satellite. Raymond said to Time, " It's clear that Russia is developing on-orbit capabilities that seek to exploit our reliance on space-based systems that fuel our American way of life."

If you are a fan of space, then it's most likely one of your dreams to be able to see Earth from space. You'd imagine that the first moment you gaze out at our blue planet would be incredible, right?

Garret Reisman, a former NASA Astronaut and currently a Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC and a Senior Advisor at SpaceX, sat down with Joe Rogan on his podcast to explain just what that's like. Reisman was asked by Joe, "the first day you actually got up there, was that the first time you have been in space? So your first view of the Earth from above? What is that like?" Reisman then began to describe what that was like, and what kind of experience it was to see everyone's home from space.

Here's what Reisman said, "Wow. Well, I didn't see it right away cause I was in the mid-deck the downstairs of the shuttle, and there's only one window down there, and it's in the corner, ok, so it's in the hatch and it's like the size of a dinner plate. You had a lot of work to do as soon as you get up there, so I'm working like crazy, and after about 30 minutes I see this pale blue glow coming from that window. I was like, "that's the Earth... I should have a look at that". I was super excited for this, ya know? So I wanted to be ready, so I paused, closed my eyes, meditated -- call it whatever you want, I just got ready."

There's no doubt that humans have influenced the world's climate to at least some degree since we have been around, but how much of the now changing climate is our fault?

A new study has been released in the PNAS journal by scientists who have examined the global climate and carbon cycle that occurred millions of years ago. The scientists from Trinity College Dublin looked ancient mudstone deposits in Wales and discovered that the position of Earth's orbit played a major role in carbon-cycle and global climate as a whole throughout the Triassic-Jurassic Mass Extinction period around 201 million years ago.

The scientists found that volcanic activity in these periods of time played a big role in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that were present in both the ocean and atmosphere. This discovery revealed that both the global climate and carbon cycles were constantly changing. Dr. Micha Ruhl, Assistant Professor in Sedimentology at Trinity, said, "Periodic changes in the shape of Earth's orbit around the sun impacted on the amount of energy received by Earth from the sun, which in turn impacted climatic and environmental processes, as well as the carbon-cycle, on local, regional and global scales."

A former NASA and International Space Station astronaut has sat down with Joe Rogan revealing many facts about space travel and the eventuality of humans going to Mars.

On the Joe Rogan Podcast, former NASA astronaut and now Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC and Senior Advisor at SpaceX, Garret Reisman deep-dived into how humans will eventually make it to Mars and the precautions we will need to take. At about an hour into the podcast, Joe asks Reisman how long does he think it will be before humans can go to another planet?

Reisman says, "going to Mars is something we could do in a decade if we really, really wanted to. It's not a question of technology, the big missing piece I think in understanding about what that would be like [travelling to Mars] is the effect of radiation on the human body." Reisman then continues to explain that there are currently solutions to this problem in the works to mitigating against deadly radiation.

At the end of last month, SpaceX successfully completed their escape test of Crew Dragon. Now rumors are flying about when their next demo flight will be.

According to Ars Technica's Senior Space Editor, Eric Berger, who took to Twitter this past Monday and said that SpaceX's Demo-2 mission is scheduled for May 7th. Berger also states in his tweet that Dragon is "in good shape" and that the specific launch date is "fluid" due to a "number of variables not hardware-related". Berger also mentions that the launch date may move into late April or push into early May, hence the May 7th date.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that you can expect that the first crewed mission will take place sometime throughout the second quarter of 2020. This means that it will happen sometime in either April, May or June, which coincides with what Berger is talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX pushes the launch date back into the middle of May, just to make sure everything is right for a successful launch.

The Trump administration is moving full steam ahead with their plan to put Americans back on the Moon and eventually on Mars in the coming years.

In its annual budget request, which was released just this past Monday, the White House has requested that Congress increase NASA's funding to more than $25 billion in the 2021 fiscal year. The report also states that $12.4 billion will be allocated for the coming 'Artemis' Moon landing program that is scheduled to happen in 2024.

It isn't set in stone that Congress will approve the request, but what we do know is that the White House's recent proposal gives Congress a more detailed evaluation of where the money will be spent and when. An example of this is that $3.4 billion is being asked to be laid aside for the construction of a lunar Human Landing System, "the first directed funding for such a system since Apollo". There are critics of the Artemis program, and if you'd like to read up on that, check out this link here.

Who doesn't love a good map? I know I certainly do, and the more detailed the map, the better it is. So how about a map of our solar system?

Don't worry. Biologist Eleanor Lutz has gone out of her way to map out every single known object in our solar system greater than 10km in diameter. How did she do this? Well, the data was taken from NASA's five separate categories; TNO and Centaur Diameters, Small-body Database Search Engine, Planetary Satellite Physical Parameters, Planets, and Pluto Physical Characteristics and Horizons Batch-Interface.

Using this data, Lutz was able to map out all of the orbits of over 18,000 asteroids that are currently present in our solar system. She was also able to map out at least 10,000 asteroids that were bigger than 10km in diameter, and about 8,000 known objects of unknown size/diameter. It should be noted that this map shows the position of asteroids on New Year's Eve 1999.

The European Space Agency is launching a new Sun probe that is estimated to relay back to Earth unprecedented information about our star.

The mission in collaboration with NASA and the European Space Agency was set to launch the Solar Orbiter on February 9th from Florida's Cape Canaveral. The probe is equipped with bleeding edge instruments that will allow researchers and scientists to gain a better understanding of the Sun's polar regions and magnetic environment.

Once the orbiter is launched and it passes Venus and Mercury, it will reach a maximum speed of 150,000 mph before entering the orbit of our Sun. Once it's there, it's titanium heat shield that is designed to withstand temperatures as high as 930 Fahrenheit will protect its vital instruments from particle radiation and any coronal magnetic ejections.

At the end of last month, a new solar telescope produced the highest-resolution images of the Sun's surface ever. Now, we have a video to look at.

The new solar telescope that did the hard work of relaying these images and videos of the Sun's surface is called the NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope. This solar telescope is designed to give scientists and researchers unprecedented information regarding the Sun's surface and magnetic fields. Researchers believe that with this new information, they will be able to predict solar weather much better.

In the above video, we can see small sections that are divided up by black lines -- these are called cells. Each of the cells is about the size of Texas, and the video we are watching is taken at a wavelength of 705nm over a period of 10 minutes. The surface is seen as "boiling" solar material called "plasma". I'd recommend that when watching the video to reduce the sped down to 0.75 speed to really enjoy the movement.

The medical science field is pushing further and further into technology that is going to benefit everyone in the future. New discoveries happen all the time, sometimes they come in the form of vaccines or medical research, but today it's a handheld skin dispenser.

Scientists out of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT) have managed to create a printer that is able to print human skin. The first rendition of this new device was created back in 2017, then in 2018 Canadian scientists built upon the device and created a new device that was able to print sheets of artificial skin directly onto burn victim wounds.

The results, which were recently published in the Biofabrication journal, stated that the bio-printed skin contains healing properties and mesenchymal stromal cells, which assist the body in cellular re-growth of the affected area. The researchers tested this device on pig skin that had severe burns, and the results were very successful. Marc Jeschke, a researcher who worked on the paper, said, "We found the device successfully deposited the 'skin sheets' onto the wounds uniformly, safely and reliably, and the sheets stayed in place with only very minimal movement".

Just this past Thursday, NASA's Christina Koch made a safe return back down to Earth's surface after breaking the spaceflight record for a female astronaut.

Christina Koch was aboard the International Space Station for almost 11 months, she returned back down to Earth and touched down at precisely 0912 GMT. Koch spent a total of 328 days in space, accompanied by Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian Space Agency, who also touched down with her.

Back on December 28th last year, Koch beat the previous record for a single spaceflight by a women of 289 days. This record was set by Peggy Whitson during her stay between 2016 and 2017. Koch is now scheduled to return back to NASA's headquarters for a medical examination. The results will be extremely important as NASA will use them to design future plans for elongated missions to Mars.

There are countless galaxies out there in the infinite vastness of space, and astronomers are constantly looking for new ones to study. Sometimes the ones they find aren't alive anymore and have perished long ago, being deemed 'inactive'.

Unfortunately, this was the case for astronomers out of the University of California who described in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, a galaxy called XMM-2599. XMM-2599 is shockingly old and has unfortunately fallen into the "inactive" category, but during its time alive, the galaxy pumped out an astonishing amount of suns. Lead author on the paper, Benjamin Forrest said, "Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy."

What is even more interesting about XMM-2599 is that most of the suns it made happened in a relatively short amount of time. "More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old" said Forrest. The team of astronomers calculated that during XMM-2599's most active sun producing time, it was pumping out around 1,000 solar masses worth of stars per year.

Las Vegas Sex Dolls Experience is now open for business, offering customers special time alone "interacting" with sex dolls in a private room, at an undisclosed hourly rate.

The new sex doll brothel is licensed in Clark County and operates out of The Studios, which is a "fluid gender social lifestyle club" but residents are not happy. The Studios is under investigation by Clark County code enforcement right now, with the suspicion of operating a business without a license.

The Studios was licensed back in 2016 to operate as an educational institution, but a sex doll brothel is well, quite the opposite of that I'd say. They run under the name Fluid Lifestyles Learning Center, but inside The Studios has beds, couches, TVs, a stripper pole and even bondage equipment -- very educational.

If only North Korea had this new anti-solar panel technology that generates power in the dark when they made their historic trip to land on the Sun... but the country has been beaten to the punch by scientists at the University of California.

ACS Photonics says researchers at the University of California have made something they're calling an "anti-solar panel" which works in the reverse way a normal solar panel does -- it generates power in the dark, versus a normal solar panel generating power from the sun.

The researchers explain: "In order to produce electrical power after the sun has set, we consider an alternative photovoltaic concept that uses the earth as a heat source and the night sky as a heat sink, resulting in a "nighttime photovoltaic cell" that employs thermoradiative photovoltaics and concepts from the advancing field of radiative cooling".

A new paper has been published revealing that researchers have created a new way that beams of light can communicate with each other.

This discovery has led researchers to explore a brand new way of computing. So, how does it work? In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kalaichelvi Saravanamuttu, an associate professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at McMaster says that using light beams and hydrogel developed by the Harvard team, the researchers were able to successfully prove the gel is "intelligent".

The hydrogels composition is composed of light-responsive molecules whose structures are altered once light is shone through it. This change in the gel gives it the capabilities of being able to contain light beams without 'bleeding' and the ability to transmit information from one source to another. Usually, as a beam of light travels, it broadens, but the gel is able to contain it into an almost tube-like structure.

Stem-cell research is pushing the boundaries into what is ethical and what is not. Questions have been raised as to whether or not human-animal hybrids should be approved under the guise of 'research'.

Back in late July 2019, Japan lifted the ban on the controversial stem-cell research enabling the University of Tokyo to conduct the first human-animal hybrid research. The research attempted to grow human call in rat and mouse embryos before it was brought to full term in a surrogate animal.

So why would scientists want to do this? Eventually, scientists and researchers would like to take stem-cell research to the point where they can grow human organs inside other animals. If this was achieved, then humans that require organ transplants will be able to receive those organs much faster than waiting for a human source.

NASA is moving full steam ahead into creating a lunar base that would essentially act as a launchpad for future expeditions to Mars.

The U.S. House of Representatives has recently proposed a new bipartisan bill that would limit NASA's experiments that can be conducted on the Moon's surface. This new bill states, "Any lunar in-situ resource utilization activities and shall not be included in the Moon to Mars Program and shall be budgeted separately from the Moon to Mars Program." What this means is that any Moon-specific research experiments that aren't directly linked to achieving humans on Mars could be considered not worth it.

This bill, called H.R. 5666, has stirred scientists raising their concerns towards its context and general goal. A group of scientists, engineers, resource management experts from 12 different states all signed an open letter sent to NASA that explains how this bill would be impeding the goal of making Mars habitable. Here's a small paragraph from the letter, "The integration of lunar (and Martian) resource utilization is vital for the sustainable and cost-effective human space exploration program beyond Earth orbit, as it is critical that we learn to "live off the land" beyond the Earth."

Today is the very first day in an astounding 909 years that is a palindrome. If you don't know what that word means, don't worry, you aren't alone -- I was exactly the same until I Googled it.

So what is a palindrome? Google says, "a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forwards". Examples of this would include madam or nurses. So, now that we know what a palindrome is, today being February 2nd is the first day in 909 years that is a palindrome as the date reads in month, date, year: 02/02/2020, Date, month, year: 02/02/2020 and finally year, month date: 2020/02/02.

The last day that was a palindrome day was 11/11/1111, and the next palindrome day won't be happening for another 101 years. If today's date already wasn't enough number satisfaction for you -- today is also the 33rd day of the year, and there are 333 days to go. I don't know what celebrations happen for this day (besides the Super Bowl), but I'd imagine it would have something to do with zero's and two's. Happy palindrome day!

NASA has today announced that they would be officially saying goodbye to the Spitzer Space Telescope. As a new telescope is on the brink of completion, Splitzer's time is unfortunately up.

The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched back in 2003 and has provided scientists, astronomers and researchers alike with some of the most influential discoveries to date. Spitzer is an infrared telescope that gave researchers discoveries such as finding some of the oldest stars in the galaxy, as well as being able to detect the light reflected off distant exoplanets.

The Spitzer Space Telescope worked hand-in-hand with the Hubble Space Telescope as Spitzer was able to detect light rays from distant objects, then Hubble was able to capture glorious images of them. This gave scientists and astronomers a better understanding on what is out there in the abyss of space. As the James Webb Space Telescope nears its delayed completion, NASA decided it's time to decommission the Spitzer Space Telescope, read more on that here.