Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 207

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.

Infrared light which isn't visible to the naked eye accounts for half of all solar radiation on Earth's surface, and at the moment we aren't converting as much as we should be into power.

Researchers out of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology have successfully made a breakthrough in solar energy technology. This breakthrough comes in the form of a film that goes on the top of ordinary solar cells. At the moment solar cells capture some infrared light and convert it into energy, but once this new film is applied that efficiency will be increased by 10% or more.

According to Hans Agren, professor in theoretical chemistry at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the lead the researcher on the team who developed the film, "We have achieved a 10 percent increase in efficiency without yet optimizing the technology. With a little more work, we estimate that a 20 to 25 percent increase in efficiency could be achieved." If you are interested in anymore information on this new efficient way of converting IR light into energy, check out this link here.

Just this past Sunday, it has been reported that the residents of India's capital city 'New Delhi' were in one big toxic gas chamber.

The gas came in the form of pollution which blanketed the mega-city and caused hundreds of flight delays. The pollution came from car fumes, industrial emissions and smoke from stubble burning at farms in neighboring states. According to US embassy in Delhi, who independently monitors pollution levels, the air quality index for PM2.5 hit 810, putting the air in New Deli beyond the "hazardous" categorization.

So who was to blame? Politicians began naturally pointing fingers at either the federal or state level governments. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal took to Twitter to voice his opinion, saying "Delhi has turned into a gas chamber due to smoke from crop burning in neighbouring states". Kejriwal was also accused of politicizing the issue and painting both the states "in a bad light and as villains".

TSMC, or as they're officially known Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., have announced they are building a new research and development center in Taiwan that will begin research into a material beyond silicon.

The new center is part of a shift away from the previous talks of TSMC building a new plant in the United States, with TSMC Chairman Mark Liu saying recently that the US government has been in contact with its customers about moving semiconductor manufacturing into the US because of the recent allegations of spy equipment infused into major systems and motherboards including SuperMicro by China.

TSMC boss Mark Liu added that production of chips in the US is "very difficult" due to its costs, following up that the manufacturing giant will build a new Bell Labs-like research and development center in Hsinchu, Taiwan -- where 8000 engineers will begin research into materials beyond silicon. How damn exciting is that.

When you think about robots that can move all by themselves, your first thought probably isn't robotic jumping cubes. Yet they are here, and moving quite easily.

Researchers out of MIT have shown of version 2.0 of what has been called the "M-Block", a self-assembling robotic cube that was first revealed back in 2013. The above video has been released to showcase how the blocks work, and from the video we learn that the cubes generate their own momentum with an internal flywheel, and use magnets to latch onto other block faces.

Each of the blocks also have a specific 'barcode-like' print located on their faces, this barcode can tell the blocks to follow a fixed path to accomplished desired tasks. MIT News says that researchers imagine that this kind of block technology will be used in industries such as inspection, gaming, manufacturing, health care and strangely enough, disaster response. A quote from MIT News is located in the entirety of this article.

As we move onto the date of halloween, a new study has been published exploring the effects of full moon and the possible chance of a increase in crime activity.

The study explores what has been called the "lunar effect", which is term that suggest that when full moons occur crime increases. The investigation was conducted by Betagov who began by researching the literature surrounding the "lunar effect", ultimately they found quite mixed opinions on the subject.

The study eventuated in a conversation with a Vallejo police official from California who pulled together his crime data from January 2014 to May 2018. The crime data included the phase of which the moon was at the time of the crime and, what might be to your surprise, the data indictated that there was no association between crime events and full moons.

A new study that has been published suggests that the number of people threatened by climate change-related rising sea levels was incorrect, and that the number was much higher than previously thought.

The study which has been published by Climate Central in Nature Communications has suggested that a massive 300 million people who are located in low-lying lands are extremely vulnerable to ocean flooding by 2050. The study also says that a further 200 million people are likely to fall permanently below sea level by the end of 2100.

Climate Central says that sea level rising expectations are actually three times higher than previously thought due to topographical data of lands being measured incorrectly. Climate Central wrote in the report that NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), "generally overestimate elevation, particularly in densely forested and built-up areas. In low-lying parts of coastal Australia, for instance, SRTM data overestimate elevation by an average of 8.2 feet (2.5 meters)."

NASA has gotten into the festive spirit with Halloween in the coming hours, posting a photo to the official NASA pages on Facebook and Twitter of the sun looking like a gigantic flaming jack-o'-lantern.

The reasoning behind the Halloween-themed photo of our star is that NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) snapped the shot on October 8, 2014 -- with active regions of the sun at the top in a long line, and bottom two separate but similarly sized lines. When flipped upside down, resembles a face -- and more particularly, a jack-o'-lantern. It's pretty cool, or rather it's pretty hot.

NASA explained: "They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Angstroms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance".

The common representation of what an 'alien' would look like if we ever found one is large oval shaped heads, black eyes, small mouths and an overbearing intellect. NASA's Hubble Telescope has found something out in deep space that seems extremely similar to that.

Hubble was doing what it does best, tracking galaxies and giving us amazing pictures of the cosmos. Recently, the space telescope released the above image, and from what we think we know about aliens the image resembles something close to what a Grey is supposed to look like.

While the image is most certainly not an alien of any kind, but instead, and more accurately put - the galaxy system Arp-Madore 2026-424. This system is located about 704 million light-years from Earth and if you look closely at the two galaxies spinning near the center of the image they can be made into eyes.

There is nothing quite like a good selfie after a hard days work, or at least that's what NASA's Curiosity Rover thinks.

On September 24th, NASA's Curiosity Rover which is currently station on Mars performed some rare science work called "wet chemistry". This is the second time the rover has performed this experiement since it landed on the Red Planet seven years ago. The experiment consists of the rover dropping a drilled sample into a special solvent which could allow for scientists to identify carbon-containing molecules.

The reason the rover has decided to conduct the experiment now is because the its currently exploring an area that is rich in clay materials, and clay materials are great at preserving many chemical compounds. According to Paul Mahaffy, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, "We've been eager to find an area that would be compelling enough to do wet chemistry, now that we're in the clay-bearing unit, we've finally got it."

If you are aboard the International Space Station there is no doubt that you will run into some of the best scenery possible and maybe you will be lucky enough to capture it in a photo.

Astronaut Christina Koch was lucky enough to be able to do just that, as we can see from the above tweet on her personal Twitter account. While you might originally think that a timelapse photo would take quite some time to take while aboard the ISS, the above image only took 11 minutes to do complete due to the speed of which the ISS is traveling relative to Earth.

The image is comprised of 400 separate images and was taken as the ISS passed over Africa. Looking at the image now, we can see a lot of streaks of light in the sky which are stars. The bright clumps of light located on the planet are thunderstorms moving across the African continent and the green glow just above those light clumps is Earths upper atmosphere.

US Air Force recently announced that it broke the record for the longest endurance flight. That record has now been broken again, but why?

The US Air Force is clearly attempting to push space technology as far as possible, and they are doing that with the Boeing-made space plane X-37B. According to a new announcement from the US Air Force, X-37B successfully completed a 780 day orbit, beating its previous record of 717 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes.

According to USAF Rapid Capabilities Office director Randy Walden, the space plane completed "all mission objectives". Its still unclear what these 'mission objectives' are as the payloads aboard the X-37B are still highly classified. Officials involved within the space planes experiments have kept their answers quite vague in regards to the payload, saying that it "experimental electronics" and other scientific tests.

As a human we all bear the responsibility of keeping our oceans and rivers clean, this means we have to think of ways to reduce our waste and a Dutch investor might just have the best idea yet.

Boyan Slat, a 25-year old university dropout founded The Ocean Cleanup company to begin developing systems and devices to help reduce the amount of plastic pollution found in our waters. Just this past Saturday, Slat unveiled his newest invention, a floating solar-powered device titled "Interceptor" which is designed to scoop out plastic waste from rivers.

Slat believes that rivers are "the arteries that carry the trash from land to sea" and that as humans "we need to close the tap, which means preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place". Experts have said that an estimated 9 million tons of plastic in all forms flows annually into the ocean from beaches rivers and creeks. Slats motivation is to stop this plastic flow by nipping the problem in its bud.

Elon Musk thinks that Tesla's energy business could one day be the same size as, or if not bigger than the electric car business Tesla is known for (at least for now).

During a recent earnings call by Tesla Motors, CEO Elon Musk said in relation to Tesla's energy business compared to the electric vehicle business: "It could be bigger, but it will certainly be of a similar magnitude".

Tesla keeps the numbers of its energy business close to its chest, but out of the $6.3 billion that Tesla made in Q3 2019 -- $5.35 billion came from its automotive revenues. This includes the sales of the Tesla Model S, Model X, and Model X electric vehicles.

NASA will be partnering its newest planet-hunter satellite with the already established team that is searching for alien life among the stars.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS for short will be collaborating with the Breakthrough Listen project that currently in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives said "It's exciting that the world's most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine."

TESS launched from Earth back in April of 2018, and since then it has been measuring the slight dips in star brightness when a planet or object crosses in-front of a star. TESS has already found 10,000 or more new exoplanets since its launch, and from its findings the team has found more than 1,000 "objects of interest". TESS is a great addition to the search for alien life and TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager, planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said "We are very enthusiastic about joining the Breakthrough Listen SETI search.