Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 203

CES 2020 - CES 2020 is right around the corner, and before everything is about to kick off, we are already hearing about what kind of exhibits we are going to see this year.

For the first time in 52 years, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) will feature sex-toy companies on the show floor. Companies behind these sex toys will be promoting their "smart" products through exhibits, and according to WAPO it will include "a multitasking bed for sex and a number of "smart" and Internet-connected vibrators."

CES has recently changed its policy for what it allows at the show. This change of rules came after sex-toy company Lora DiCarlo won a CES innovation award that was later taken away from them due to their product not complying with standing CES policies. The award was later given back to Lora DiCarlo, and CES changed its policies to allow for "sex tech".

CES 2020 - The future is now. Pizza-making robots are making delicious 12-inch pizzas on the show floor of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week.

Picnic is a Seattle-based "innovator of food production technology and Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) solutions" that has teamed with live event hospitality leader Centerplate, to serve CES attendees fresh pizza. Picnic's robot is capable of making 300 12-inch pizzas an hour, which is a helluva lot of pizza per day.

The AI-powered pizza making robot uses a vision system to make adjustments to the pie if it is off-center, with Picnic CEO Clayton Wood explaining: "Picnic's distinct culmination of food production customization and throughput, smart data and cloud analytics is quickly resonating with food service operators".

Scientists use long particle accelerators to move particles close to the speed of light, this testing probes the capabilities atomic and molecular structures.

While most of the testing is done on long mile plus-long particle accelerators, scientists at Standford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created a nano-scale version. The teams created a vacuum sealed silicon chip that uses an infrared laser to accelerate particles, all within less than a hairs width. So how does this work exactly? Imagine a flat silicon chip, but etched in on its surface there are channels and flowing in these channels are electrons.

When the laser is activated it fires a burst of photons that then hit the electrons and accelerates them forward to almost the speed of light. So how does this help research in anyway? For the particle accelerator to be useful it needs to achieve 1 million electron volts (1MeV) or 94% the speed of light, and to reach that stage it needs to pass through 1,000 previous stages. Electrical engineer, Jelena Vuckovic explained that this might not be as difficult as it may seem due to the accelerator being a fully integrated circuit. Meaning all critical functions for it work are built right onto the chip.

The significance of The Hubble Space Telescope cannot be overemphasized, so in an effort to honor the telescopes numerous discoveries, the United States Mint might issue a 2020 coin dedicated to it.

The Mint's American Innovation $1 Coin Program, which was introduced in 2018, aims at honoring significant innovations and innovators by releasing new coins dedicated to the achievements. The program is a multi-year effort that will see the release of one-dollar coins representing each of the 50 U.S states and their specific achievements. In this instance, The Hubble Telescope will represent the state of Maryland.

April Stafford, director of the U.S. Mint's Office of Design Management, said at a Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) meeting, "I love the dichotomy within this portfolio. We have one set of designs that look microscopically inside us and then another that looks way outside and into the universe." The committee favored the design of Hubble orbiting Earth (seen above) as it depicts the telescope doing what it does best, observing distant stars. If you are interested in reading more on this, check out this article here.

Astronomers at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics located in Pune, India, have come across something that is currently a matter of debate.

The team used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to discover an extremely large ring of hydrogen gas that's bigger than the galaxy it's surrounding. The gas is estimated to have a diameter of about 380,000 light-years, which is equivalent to about four times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.

The galaxy that the gas is surrounding is called AGC 203001 and is located around 260 million light-years away from us. Usually, galaxies that are found to have an abundance of neutral hydrogen gas are actively forming stars. Shockingly, (here's the kicker) AGC 203001 is showing zero signs of being an active galaxy, puzzling astronomers at how the hydrogen was distributed. If you are after more information regarding this discovery, check out this article here.

If you have watched Star Wars or if you are even a little bit into science fiction or just general science for that matter, then you would know what light speed is. How would you like to travel at light speed?

If you aren't aware of what light speed is, then here's a quick science lesson for you. If you take a particle and accelerate it close to the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second, the energy required to move that particle becomes infinite. Making it impossible for any form of mass to reach the speed of light or exceed it.

Luckily, Google Maps isn't moving particles, and can instead give us observers a novel hyperspace experience through a nifty effect. If you didn't know, Google Maps is now equipped with a new tool that allows users to navigate the solar system at break-neck speeds, and here's how to do it.

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the best tools we have to observe the cosmos. To close out 2019, NASA has decided to honor the telescope by making the last photo from it.

Above, we have an image of the galaxy called ESO 021-G004, which is located 130 million light-years from Earth. The image that Hubble has taken is simply breathtaking, as we can see such a detailed image of the galaxy. NASA scientists offered some insights to what we are exactly looking at, here's what they had to say:

"This galaxy has something known as an active galactic nucleus. While this phrase sounds complex, this simply means that astronomers measure a lot of radiation at all wavelengths coming from the center of the galaxy. This radiation is generated by material falling inward into the very central region of ESO 021-G004, and meeting the behemoth lurking there-a supermassive black hole".

2020 is shaping up to be a massive year for NASA, and the space exploration company wants you to be as excited as they are.

A new video has given the public a basic road map of what to expect from NASA this year. In 2020, NASA is preparing for the launch of Artemis I for the Moon, rocket testing, making plans for commercial science missions to the Moon, preparing for a rover to land on the Moon and search for water, trying out the next-gen spacesuit and most importantly, launching American astronauts from the U.S.

The video also shows that Boeing and Space X will be bringing astronauts to the International Space Station. Despite some expected setbacks, NASA seems to be more than excited about what 2020 will allow the space exploration company to achieve. We will have to keep our eyes peeled because if NASA stays on schedule 2020 could be a monumental year.

Have you ever seen galactic fireworks? They don't have anything to do with traditional fireworks that use paper, powder and fire. Instead, they use sonic booms and gas.

The above photo is of a galaxy in NGC 4258, it's quite similar to our Milky Way galaxy but instead it has two extra spiral arms that flow in X-ray, optical and radio light. A new study using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that at the heart of this galaxy a supermassive black hole could be spewing out high-energy particles that then heat up the disk of the galaxy, and create shock waves that are much like sonic booms.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured an image that showed many bubbles of heated gas that were equivalent to about 10 million suns. Astronomers observed these bubbles and concluded that gas that was originally in the disk of the galaxy had been heated and then catapulted out into different regions of space.

Astronomers are peering out into the black void and are wondering how space bodies (comets, asteroids) are interacting with our Sun and Jupiter.

The scientists decided to simulate many different types of space bodies and watch how each of them interacted with the Sun and Jupiter as they approached them. The results were released in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and revealed that in some cases of an object entering our solar system, Jupiter could alter the trajectory of the object enough that it becomes bound to our solar system.

Hands and Walter Dehnen of the University of Munich said, "We used an advanced code which runs on graphics processing units rather than traditional computer processors to enable us to simulate such a large number of objects in a short time. The simulations took two days in total using around 70 graphics cards, so roughly 140 days if we had only used one card and much, much longer if we had used a normal desktop computer processor."

Just last year, it was revealed that a Stanford-trained scientist had created the world's first gene-altered human baby. That scientists and a few of his colleagues have now been sentenced in a secret Chinese court.

He Jiankui and his two colleagues are facing prison time of three years for being found guilty of "illegal medical practice". Jiankui is also required to pay a huge 3 million yuan fine, which is equivalent to $429,000 USD). Think that's where the pain for Jiankui stops? Nope. He is also banned from reproductive medical work for life.

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency says that back in 2016 the scientists and his co-workers (Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou) assisted in enabling the reproduction of "multiple couples of HIV-infected persons." The team edited the embryos of two of the babies that were implanted into women, removing the CCR5 gene in hopes of making the offspring resistant to HIV. The women eventually gave birth to three gene-edited babies.

If you didn't know, every planet in the solar system spins at a different speed. This is due to each of the planet's size and mass. So how fast are other planets spinning in comparison to Earth?

James O'Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japanese space agency (JAXA) and a former scientist over at NASA, has comprised a short animated video that gives us a clear visualization of each of the planets rotation speed. The video shows one globe, but each of the sections of the globe is the different planets in the solar system. Each is rotating at their respective speeds.

Earth rotates at 460 meters per second or roughly 1,000 miles per hour. This is how we established that there are 24 hours in one day. The above video shows how each of the other planet's full rotations compares to Earth's relative to our star. O'Donoghue said on Twitter, "I had the idea to make this back in December last year but I didn't think people would be interested in it." Since then, the video has had over 215,000 views.

NASA's Curiosity rover is hard on work uncovering mysteries and creating new ones on the distant red planet, and now it's at the center of another one.

Curiosity has given planetary scientists another brain teaser to wrap their heads around as the SUV-sized laboratory has found "significant seasonal and year-to-year variability" in Mar's oxygen levels. The SAM instrument aboard Curiosity measures what molecules makeup Mars' atmosphere. Scientists know that as the planet goes through its seasonal changes - CO2 freezes in winter, reducing air pressure. During summer and spring, things thaw out, and the CO2 raises air pressure.

Oxygen, on the other hand, accounts for only 0.16% of the Mars atmosphere but didn't follow the expected rises and falls. Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and first author on the new study, said "The fact that the oxygen behavior isn't perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it's not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can't yet account for."

With the planet becoming more and more demanding on energy, physicists already began exploring ways of creating unlimited energy. Now, we could be on the brink of unlocking it.

The Sun, our main source of energy in the solar system, generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. At the Sun's core, 500 million metric tons of hydrogen are fused each second, emitting massive amounts of energy. Physicists for some time have been trying to attempt to replicate this same principle of nuclear fusion on Earth, and if that is achieved, we can expect an unlimited supply of electricity.

According to scientists from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), boron powder has been injected into the plasma allowing for more control of the experiment, a lowering in greenhouse gas emissions, and removal of long-term radioactive waste. Adding boron powder to the mix of plasma prevents the tungsten in tokamak (fusion facilities) walls from interacting with the plasma.

Have you ever wondered what Earth would look like hundreds of millions of years from now? Scientists wondered the same thing and decided to great a great animated video of what our blue planet would appear to look like.

General science dictates that the entire Earth is divided into several tectonic plates that are floating on top molten rock. When these tectonic plates bump, we experience large scale earthquakes, sometimes resulting in tsunamis, depending on how big the 'bump' is.

Chris Scotese, a professor with Northwestern University's Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences studies the planets plate tectonics and how Earth's appearance will change in the future. On his YouTube channel, he has created an animated video showcasing how Earth will change in the millions of years to come, all the way up to 250 million years plus.

Just as we are about to close out the decade, we have been blessed by the annual solar eclipse. This year the Moon passed in front of the Sun to create a "Ring of Fire" effect.

People in the Eastern Hemisphere would have been star-struck as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, covering the face of the star. Due to the Moon being much smaller than the Sun and the position of Earth at the time, the leftover light emitting from Sun bled around the sides of the Moon, creating that gorgeous "Ring of Fire" effect.

According to Alexander Krivenyshev, the man who took the above image, "It was an amazing experience. This morning's annular eclipse was during sunrise, with some sand dust by the horizon. [A] beautiful, really beautiful, classic 'Ring of Fire' above Saudi Arabia." Not only did people on the ground enjoy the light display, but so did the astronauts in the International Space Station. Astronaut Jessica Meir posted several images of the show the Moon was casting on Earth on her Twitter account, check out those images in the entirety of this article.

While you would originally be thinking that it would be Santa Claus landing on your roof on Christmas Day, it very well could of been a meteor the size of King Kong.

The meteor which is called 2019 YB1 was scheduled to have a near miss with Earth on Christmas Day at around 11:41 GMT. NASA says that the space rock is estimated to be anywhere between 13 and 28 meters in diameter (almost 100 feet).

How close was it to colliding with Earth's atmosphere and breaking up? Estimations indicate that 2019 YB1 was about 993,000 miles from our planet, and while that might sound like quite the distance NASA says that this encounter falls under "close approach". At the time of its passing, 2019 YB1 was hurdling through space at 12,303 mph.

In almost half a decade, NASA's Mars 2020 rover has taken to the streets and successfully completed its first drive.

While the rover didn't literally take to the public streets, it did successfully complete a driving test where it steered and drive in three-foot increments. The initial driving took the rover over small ramps that were covered in special static-control mats. The ramps were at different heights, as this was a way for the rover to simulate rocks and other obstacles that will be present on Mars' surface.

The team behind the rover has equipped the vehicle with much better cameras that have a larger field of view and have a higher resolution. Not only does the rover get better cameras, but its also being equipped with better auto-navigation software that will allow the rover to travel up to 650 feet per day. NASA expects that the rover will land on Mars in 2021 and begin its search for life and information regarding Mars.

A new satellite called CHEOPS just launched into low-Earth orbit with the mission of observing and examining a number of exoplanets located outside our solar system.

CHEOPS was originally meant to launch this past Tuesday, but just as the launch was about to go underway, some problems occurred. After these problems were fixed, the satellite launched into low-Earth orbit on the Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. CHEOPS camera lens only measures in at 32 centimeters in diameter, but don't let its size fool you, as the plans for the satellite are to relay unprecedented information back to astronomers.

CHEOPS will be taking a look at some 4,000 different exoplanets that astronomers have located and measure their size, mass, and atmosphere. Through this examination, astronomers will be able to determine what the composition of the planet is and if it has the possibility of harboring life. CHEOPS will stand as a new tool for astronomers to use in the hunt for life outside of Earth.

SpaceX will be doing another delivery of cargo to the International Space Station next March, and aboard that flight will be some cannabis.

According to a new press release from Front Range Biosciences, who are partnering with SpaceCells USA Inc. and BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado to send hemp and coffee tissue to the International Space Station. The idea behind smuggling hemp to the ISS is to examine the effects of zero gravity on the plant's metabolic pathways.

While you might think that the astronauts aboard the ISS are going to be blazing up with their new stash in March, this is hardly the case. While hemp and weed (cannabis) are the same plant, for the plant to be deemed hemp it has to have no more than 0.3% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana. For comparison, marijuana usually has anywhere between 5 to 20% THC; from this comparison, you can see its impossible to 'get high' on hemp.