Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 206

A new means of storing renewable energy is being researched, and strangely enough in incorporates using mountains as big batteries.

The study by Julian Hunt and his colleagues of Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) details a new system of energy storage called "Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES)". MGES places cranes on the edges of steep mountains and then moves sand/gravel from a storage site located at the bottom of the mountain to another storage site located at the top.

This process is much like a ski-lift and requires a motor or a generator to transport the storage vessels but instead it generates electricity when the sand is lowered back down from the top site. How is this done? MGES uses gravity to its advantage, converting energy into storeable electricity that is proportional to the sand's mass, gravity and height of the mountain its situation on.

NASA has admitted that it is "struggling to explain" why oxygen is being created, and then consumed on Mars. The US space agency has been left scratching their collective heads since.

The reason behind this is that NASA's own Curiosity rover that is chilling on the Red Planet has returned some rather interesting data back to our Pale Blue Dot, showing that elevated methane levels were recorded, and NASA can't explain why. There have been tests conducted and completed to try and work out why these levels were so high, but NASA doesn't know why.

NASA's Curiosity rover "breathes" in the air on Mars, analyzes it and tells NASA what types of gasses are detected. But something interesting was discovered -- here on Earth the background levels of certain gasses will increase and decrease as the seasons change, and something similar is happening on Mars.

Scientists out of Britain have managed to create realistic 3D holograms that can be seen with the naked eye, heard and even felt.

A team of scientists working at the University of Sussex in southern England has managed to use technology to create a prototype called Multimodal Acoustic Trap Display (MATD). This prototype has the ability of "simultaneously deliver visual, auditory and tactile content". This is done through using sound waves or "acoustophoresis" that move and manipulate particles to form an image.

The team spoke out about how they achieved this, saying "Our system traps a particle acoustically and illuminates it with red, green and blue light to control its color as it quickly scans the display volume." Due to the system being developed with sound waves, it allows the hologram to not only be seen but also heard and felt.

The Kuiper Belt object located deep in our solar system has had its named changed from MU69 Ultima Thule, to Arrokoth.

Why have NASA decided to make the name change? Well, 'Ultima Thule' means "farthest place", but it also has the same term that white supremacists and Nazi's in particular used to refer to a mythical homeland. The 'Thule Society' was a German occultist group founded in Munich right after World War I.

The society was also heavily recognised by Adolf Hitler, and as you can imagine many people that knew these facts didn't think that NASA's name for the object fit. So in an effort to side-step the controversy, NASA decided to rename the object from 'Ultima Thule' to 'Arrokoth'. This new name is derived from Powhatan/Algonquian language and it means 'sky'. Above is a video of Dr. Phoebe Farris of the Powhatan-Pamunkey Tribe officially renaming the Kuiper Belt object.

Astronomers have confirmed that a star was ejected out the supermassive black hole that is located at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

A team of researchers of Carnegie Mellon University's McWilliams Center for Cosmology spotted the star, which is titled S5-HVS1 in a constellation called Grus. When spotted by the team, it was traveling at insane speeds, 10x the speed of most other stars in our galaxy. According to the team, S5-HVS1 was moving at a ridiculous 3.7 million mph after it was ejected out the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.

The team of researchers was led by Sergey Koposov, who said, "This is super exciting, as we have long suspected that black holes can eject stars with very high velocities. However, we never had an unambiguous association of such a fast star with the galactic center." Douglas Boubert, a researcher at the University of Oxford and a co-author of the study, said: "The velocity of the discovered star is so high that it will inevitably leave the galaxy and never return".

A new report out of the Wall Street Journal has suggested that Google has access to and is collating millions of patients' sensitive health information.

The WSJ reports that Ascension, a company with the second-largest health system in the United States, is currently in partnership with Google. This partnership involves Ascension sharing lab results with Google regarding patients' hospitalization records, health histories, names, dates of birth, and more.

According to a person close to the partnership, the project has been called "Project Nightingale" and that reportedly 150 Google employees have access to tens of millions of health records. But why? Google is said to be using the data to feed into new AI-driven software that will be able to make accurate suggestions for patients. It's said that Google wants to eventually be able to develop a searchable cloud-based tool that will be able to examine patient data at large.

Researchers are currently designing an extremely unusual but still awesome spacecraft for NASA. The spacecraft resembles a stingray, but it's not all just for show.

Researchers out of the University of Buffalo are designing the Bio-inspired Ray for Extreme Environments and Zonal Explorations (BREEZE). This is a project that has been selected by NASA to receive funding as it has the potential of changing space exploration forever. The researchers designing the spacecraft are envisioning a morphing spacecraft that can flap its wings and make efficient use of the high winds that are in Venus' upper atmosphere.

Researchers are planning on having BREEZE circumnavigate Venus every four to six days, with solar panels also located on the hull it can charge over two to three days on the planets illuminated side. This solar energy would be stored and then power the other instruments that will take atmospheric samples, track weather patterns, monitor volcanic activity, and more.

Just this past Monday, astronomers viewed Mercury sliding past the face of our Sun in quite a rare celestial event.

Astronomers equipped themselves to see the most inner-planet in our solar system go in-between Earth and the Sun. From the above image, we can see a tiny black dot, that's Mercury in comparison to the size of the Sun. US, Canada, and Central and South America managed to get the transition for around 5.5 hours, while Asia and Australia only got a brief show.

Why is this a rare transition? Due to the orbit of Mercury, astronomers don't expect to this occur until 2032, and North America, in particular, won't be able to see it again until 2049. Unfortunately, there was some weather coverage in Maryland for NASA solar astrophysicist Alex Young, he said "It's a bummer, but the whole event was still great. Both getting to see it from space and sharing it with people all over the country and world." A set of images have been provided in the entirety of this article.

On Monday, SpaceX's Falcon rocket took off to the stars, and aboard the rocket was Starlink mini-satellites. 60 mini-satellites in total to be precise.

The satellites aboard the Falcon rocket are just 575 pounds each (260kg), and have joined the other 60, which were launched back in May. Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive eventually wants to have thousands of these Starlink satellites floating around in orbit, as the plan is to offer the world a global high-speed internet connection everywhere.

Not only are there 60 more Starlink satellites now in orbit, but SpaceX also achieved two new milestones with this launch. This launch was the first time SpaceX flew a rocket with a previously used nose cone and an orbital booster that has been used three times previously. According to Musk, "These boosters are designed to be used 10 times. Let's turn it around for a fifth, guys".

The most detailed large-scale simulation has been released showing just after the Big Bang, all the way until the present day.

Scientists have been struggling with the creation of accurate simulations of cosmic-level events due to the limitations of computing power. The computational limitations forced scientists to choose between large-scale designs or fine detail. But now, scientists from Germany and the United States have completed and released the most detailed large-scale simulation of a galaxy forming.

The simulation is called TNG50 and is a state-of-the-art simulation of the formation of a galaxy similar in mass to our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. The video shows a formation of a single massive galaxy, with cosmic gas becoming denser and denser over the course of billions of years. The Hazel Hen supercomputer, located in Stuttgart, created the simulation over the course of a year using 16,000 computational cores. The results are an extremely detailed cosmic visualization that consists of 230 million light-years in diameter and more than 20 billion particles that represent dark matter, stars, cosmic gas, magnetic fields, and supermassive black holes.

Researchers have devised a new way to measure gravity, and they have done this by measuring the differences in atoms while they are in a superposition state.

To give a bit of background on this new way of gravity measuring, we must understand the traditional way of measuring gravity. Currently, the standard way of conducting an experiment to measure gravity is to drop objects down tubes that fly past measuring instruments. Unfortunately, with this method, some of the test results get obscured by stray magnet fields.

The team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to create a new way of measuring that doesn't require any objects to be dropped. Instead, researchers released a cloud of cesium atoms into the air of a small chamber; they then used flashing lights to split the atoms into a superposition state.

MIT can have fun too, and it's not in the same way that normal everyday people would. Instead, it's much cooler as they take they their Mini Cheetah robots out to do flips and kick a soccer ball around.

In a new video that has been posted onto the MIT Biomimetics YouTube Channel, we observe nine new Mini Cheetah robots being taken outside for some testing. The video begins with the robots merely making their way to the testing area, and some are kicking around a soccer ball and others and just enjoying bouncing around in one spot.

The testing also shows some coordinated dancing, body-slams, and a not-so-friendly game of uncoordinated soccer ball kicking. This video proves that MIT has made some leaps and bounds when it comes to robot improvement and range of motion. Eventually, as MIT perfect the designs of the Mini Cheetah's, some could be sent out to hazardous work sites, be used in search-and-rescue missions, and perhaps save some human lives.

Just this past Tuesday, NASA opened up some lunar samples that were brought back from the Apollo 17 mission. One of those samples was an untouched Moon rock.

NASA has said that the purpose of opening up tests into Apollo 17's samples is to gain insight into the correct techniques to practice for samples that will be returned from the Artemis mission. Francis McCubbin, NASA's astromaterials curator, said that "Opening these samples now will enable new scientific discoveries about the Moon and will allow a new generation of scientists to refine their techniques to better study future samples returned by Artemis astronauts."

CNN reports that most of the samples that were brought back from the Apollo 17 mission have already been under study by scientists at NASA, but a separate group of samples was set aside and stored for testing with more advanced technology. Dr. Sarah Noble, an ANGSA program scientist, said: "We are able to make measurements today that were just not possible during the years of the Apollo program."

Who doesn't love a good asteroid story, right? We know NASA does, and so should everyone else that is on Earth, as we can still sit in peace and watch another potentially dangerous one fly on by.

This 2,000 foot wide asteroid has been given the name 481394 (2006 SF6), and in just a couple weeks, it will have a close call with our blue planet. NASA scientists believe that the asteroid will come within 0.029 astronomical units of Earth on November 20th. While that sounds like an extremely small amount of space between the asteroid and Earth, it's still actually quite far away.

An astronomical unit (AU) is the average measured distance between Earth and the Sun, which comes in at 93 million miles. This means that the asteroid still manages to be around 2.7 million miles away from Earth, or to put it into a better perspective, more than ten times farther away than the distance between Earth and our Moon. It should also be noted that after the space rock passes Earth, it won't be a threat again for several hundred years as its orbit takes it off course.

Imagine if ships could be made unsinkable, it seems like a pipe dream of some sort because everyone knows that metal sinks quite quickly once submerged.

Scientists from the University of Rochester have been working on a solution to this problem, and from the above video, it seems they have come up with quite a great idea. The researchers have created a metal that repels against water by having pockets of air under it keeping it afloat. The researchers have done this by etching into the surface of the metal special patterns which were inspired by the natural world.

The team explains that some spiders and fire ants are hydrophobic, meaning that they repel against water. So, the researchers took this insight and created an etching technique called "superhydrophobic" and applied it to modern-day metals. The results could be revolutionary as described in the paper, "The key insight is that multifaceted superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces can trap a large air volume, which points towards the possibility of using SH surfaces to create buoyant devices."

I didn't think I'd ever be typing this, but when I read the news I was so interested and blown away by what science can do today that I was compelled to write it.

In what would've been a grueling 14-hour operation, surgeons transplanted a penis, scrotum, and lower abdominal wall to an injured veteran. Post-surgery, the patient reports that he has normal sensation and function -- including "near-normal" erections and even orgasms.

The patient, according to his medical team at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, can urinate standing up with what they call a "strong stream". The anonymous patient was the first to have this complex of a genital transplant, and only the third in the world with a successful penis transplant.

There are countless science experiments happening on the International Space Station, where astronauts on-board the ISS conducting the experiments in zero gravity while relaying the results back to researchers on the ground here on Earth.

A recent supply mission saw 12 bottles of wine delivered to the International Space Station, but the astronauts can't drink it... it's purely for science experiments. Why would they want to test wine in space? Simple -- the flavor of wine changes as it ages here on Earth with our gravity, but will the effect of zero gravity on the ISS change the flavor of wine over time? This is something that scientists want to know.

Not only does the effect of no gravity come into play, but the increased radiation in space versus the protected layers our Earth and its surrounding magnetic belts offer us from the sun. We might get completely new tasting wine, something that we literally could never have here on Earth outside of creating an artificial gravity and housing wine inside of it for decades.

Climate change is a problem we all must face, no matter what side of the planet you are on, we all have a responsibility to listen to the educated and take action where possible.

A new paper that has been published in BioScience by authors William J. Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University, along with more than 11,000 signatures from scientists located in 153 different countries have declared a climate emergency. The paper indicates key trend lines and also lays out six different ways humanity can slow the effects of climate change down.

The six areas in which the scientists think humanity should take to reduce the effects of climate change immediately are the following: Energy, replacing fossil fuels with low-carbon renewable's. Short-lived pollutants, cutting methane, soot, and other hydrofluorocarbons. Nature, through the restoration and protection of forests, ecosystems, and grasslands. Food, humanity switching to more plant-based meals, and fewer animal products. Economy, removing the profitable exploitation of ecosystems that ultimately hurt the planet. Finally, population stabilization.

Humans have now successfully got a second man-made object out into interstellar space. Voyager 2 has now officially joined Voyager 1 out in the abyss.

Researchers out of the University of Iowa have reported that Voyager 2 has officially entered the interstellar medium or ISM for short. The ISM is a region in space that is outside of the Suns solar winds, and this was discovered by researchers detecting a definitive jump in plasma density. Researchers noticed that the spacecraft went from the hot, low density plasma characteristics, to cool, higher density recordings.

According to Don Gurnett, an author on the study that is published in Nature Astronomy, "In a historical sense, the old idea that the solar wind will just be gradually whittled away as you go further into interstellar space is simply not true. We show with Voyager 2-and previously with Voyager 1-that there's a distinct boundary out there. It's just astonishing how fluids, including plasmas, form boundaries."

Eventually the human race will have autonomous robots take over all of the tasks we deem mundane. The first of these tasks will most likely be deliveries.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who have partnered with Ford have devised an answer to the question "how do we program autonomous robots to be able to map neighborhoods when they have constantly changing environments?" Engineers at MIT have developed the answer, which is a navigation method that allows robots to map their environment in real-time.

This new method uses machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms instead of specific GPS coordinates. In the above video you can see this technology in action, and how MIT robots have been taught to add different pieces of information together to form a completed path. Eventually, this technology will be that good that companies like Google and Amazon will want to license the navigation systems, that's if they don't build their own of course.