Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 35

A team of researchers has uncovered a fossil that has revealed a species of meat eater that absolutely dominated South America.

The discovery has been detailed in a recent study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, and stems from a 265-million-year-old fossil that was in São Gabriel, Southern Brazil. The fossil was from a species called Pampaphoneus biccai and is the skull of the extinct apex predator. According to the researchers, this species was present just before the extinction-level event that wiped out an estimated 86% of all species on Earth.

However, before the meteor that pushed the already failing dinosaurs to extinction, the Pampaphoneus thrived on both the land and other animals as it was a herbivore and carnivore. Researchers estimate that it was medium to large in size, with the largest estimates putting the Pampaphoneus at a maximum size of 10 feet long at a weight of 880 pounds. The Pampaphoneus skull indicates the species was equipped with razor-sharp canine teeth designed for capturing prey.

It turns out even robot dogs grow old or can no longer be cared for, as Sony Japan is launching a special Aibo Foster Parent Program to find new homes for aging ERS-1000 Aibo robot dog companions. The ultimate goal is to reduce e-waste, not because they're for real dogs, and the only alternative is to put them down.

Sony's Aibo Companion Robot dogs retail for USD 2,899.99, and according to the description, they develop a "unique evolving personality through everyday interactions" bolstered by "lifelike expressions and a dynamic array of natural movements." And with that, they form real bonds with their owners. Even so, the Aibo Foster Parent Program sounds bizarre.

For owners that cancel their Aibo plans (i.e., no longer able to care for their robot companion), they can donate them to Sony, who, after "providing necessary treatment," will send these robot dogs to Aibo foster parents - including medical facilities or other institutions that could use a lifelike robot dog.

NASA collided a small high-speed spacecraft into a distant asteroid in an attempt to demonstrate that Earth is capable of deflecting distant asteroids that pose a direct threat to Earth. The test was successful and is called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

The test was conducted last September when NASA shot a vending-machine-sized spacecraft at the asteroid duo Dimorphos and Didymos. Dimorphos was the target and is the smaller of the two asteroids, orbiting its larger companion in a similar way the moon orbits Earth. The connection was successful, and NASA announced it slowed Dimorphos' orbit down by half an hour, from one full orbit of Didymos prior to impact taking 11 hours and 55 minutes to post-impact 11 hours and 23 minutes.

However, Jonathan Swift, a math and science teacher at the Thacher School in California has used the Tacher Observatory to observe the orbit of Dimorphos for a month following the impact, and found that the asteroid's orbit appears to be continuously slowing down, which is contrary to common astronomer predictions that said Dimorphos' orbit would return to its original speed after the collision.

The Apollo missions between 1969 and 1977 were the first to detect seismic activity on the surface of the moon, revealing that the moon was much more complex than meets the eye, with geological activity still occurring deep within its core.

Now, India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, the nation's first mission to the lunar surface, which has so far been successful with the landing of the Vikram lander on the moon's south pole on August 23, has detected what the Indian Space Research Organization are claiming as a "natural" moonquake.

Vikram's Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA), a device designed to detect seismic activity beneath the lunar surface, detected the movements of the Pragyan rover, but then recorded an event on August 26 that appears to be a "natural one". It's data such as this that will help researchers paint a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the moon and its overall evolution since its formation.

Results from a test conducted nearly 50 years ago are still the subject of question, with one group of scientists claiming NASA's testing methods may have killed Martian life forms living inside rocks.

The re-heating of the debate regarding these test results comes from Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, who penned a June 27 article in Big Think discussing the possibility of NASA's landers accidentally discovering and then killing Martian microbes. The astrobiologist claims that Martian microbes, forms of life known to survive in extreme environments, are possibly present in Martian rocks and that the testing process by the Viking landers involved the use of too much water, resulting in skewed test results.

Here's the ongoing debate. The Viking landers carried out four tests that ended in a general consensus that Martian soil didn't have the necessary ingredients for life as we know it. However, some scientists call into question the inclusion of water throughout the tests. The idea behind including water was to see if life would show itself, which Schulze-Makuch says was a reasonable presumption considering Earth is a water planet. However, there are some microbes on Earth that die when exposed to too much water.

SpaceX has taken to its update to issue an update on the developments of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket to ever take flight.

Elon Musk's rocket company has posted an update on its website outlining everything they learned from Starship's first orbital launch attempt that occurred on April 20, 2023. If you don't remember, the historic launch ended in a ball of fire, but not without a lot being learned. A launch vehicle of Starship's size and caliber had never been flown before, and SpaceX, along with company CEO Elon Musk, didn't even believe it was going to get off the launch pad.

Alas, it did take flight, reaching an altitude of 24 miles before leaking propellant resulted in fires that severed communications, and ultimately resulted in complete loss of control and an eventual detonation. While the rocket was detonated mid-air, SpaceX learned a lot from the flight and, according to the update, the necessary changes to prevent these problems from happening, or at least they hope so, during the second orbital flight test.

Elon Musk has been caught up in an online situation that originally claimed he denied Ukraine access to Starlink for an offensive attack against Russia.

As soon as these claims began circulating online, Musk was quick to squash the rumors, which suggested that Musk personally denied Ukraine access to Starlink for an offensive attack against Russia's navy fleet. The concerns that Musk prevented the attack originated from Walter Isaacson's new biography titled "Elon Musk", and now the author has stepped in to further clarify the situation.

Taking to X, Isaacson wrote that Ukraine "thought" Starlink coverage spanned all the way to Crimea, the target location of the Ukrainian offensive, and when the country realized, they asked Musk to enable it for the nation's drone attack on the Russian fleet. Musk promptly denied the request, which the SpaceX CEO further explained in a new X post that neither he nor SpaceX promised any coverage over Crimea, along with the explanation that SpaceX's terms of service states that Starlink is prohibited from being used for "offensive military action, as we are a civilian system."

Astronomers discovered an asteroid on Thursday, named it C9FMVU2, and then noticed its trajectory was to approach Earth in just a matter of hours.

Luckily, the asteroid safely zoomed past Earth at a distance of 2,500 miles, which is 100 times closer to the planet than the moon and five times closer than orbiting GPS satellites. Notably, the United States has navigational and positioning constellation GPS satellites at an altitude of 12,550 miles. So, why didn't astronomers or asteroid-detecting technology spot this asteroid days before it approached Earth?

Well, it was tiny, at approximately 6.5 feet wide, making it far too small for it to be detected at a distance, and simultaneously meaning it posed no threat to Earth at all. NASA has cataloged 30,000 near-Earth asteroids, and only 2,300 are considered "potentially hazardous". For an asteroid to be considered potentially hazardous, it needs to be greater than 460 feet wide and has an orbit that's within 20 lunar distances of Earth - one lunar distance is 238,854 miles.

Japan has launched a historic mission to the moon that, if successful, will be the world's first in terms of the technology used to land on the lunar surface.

Japan launched a H2-A rocket from its Tanegashima Space Center located in southwestern Japan at 8:42 a.m. local time. Then rocket carried not one but two payloads. The first is a new X-ray telescope designed to assist scientists in uncovering the mysteries of the universe, and the second is a high-precision moon lander that will, if successful, become the new foundation of lunar exploration for the nation. So, what is so special about Japan's new lander?

Emphasis is precision. The lander is more precisely named the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM for short. The precision of this lander is like none other as it has been given the name "moon sniper" due to its ability to land within just 328 feet of its target location. By comparison, other landers designed by competing nations require a radius of a few miles, which essentially means that NASA has an approximate landing zone rather than a precise one.

CNN released a report that claimed SpaceX was instructed by company CEO Elon Musk to turn off Starlink internet access over Crimea to prevent a major Ukrainian offensive attack against Russia's naval fleet.

CNN's sources were Walter Isaacson's new biography titled "Elon Musk" where it claimed that Elon Musk told SpaceX to deactivate internet access over the region to stop Ukraine from destroying Russia's fleets with drones. The publication states that since internet access was severed the drones that were en route to their targets "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly". Notably, this Ukrainian offensive happened last year, and Isaacson's book will be released on September 12, 2023.

Now, Elon Musk has responded to the recent claims, writing on X that the Starlink regions in question were not activated, and SpaceX didn't "deactivate anything". Musk followed up with further explanation, writing that the Ukrainian government issued an emergency request to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol, with the intent being to "sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor".

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the Indian equivalent of NASA, has announced that both its lunar lander and lunar rover have gone to sleep.

India penciled its name into the history books on August 23, 2023, when it successfully landed on the moon, becoming the fourth nation to do so and the first nation to land in the southern lunar region. The Chandrayaan-3 mission includes the solar powered Pragyan rover and the Vikram lander, both of which are now in sleep mode as they await the next lunar sunrise scheduled to happen in approximately two weeks. Notably, the ISRO announced via its official X account that its rover has a "fully charged" battery and that it is safe.

The decision to place India's lunar explorers into sleep mode came after the rover scoured over 330 feet of the lunar surface, searching for deposits of frozen water that may be trapped inside permanently shadowed craters. These water deposits, if discovered, will be extremely valuable to Earth when we begin colonizing the surface of the moon as technology could convert the frozen water into not only drinkable liquid for astronauts but also fuel for returning rockets.

A new pilot study published in Nature Communications has explored the possibility of creating bionic organs to replace failing human organs.

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco created a bioreactor and placed it inside a pig to test the vital functions of the synthetic organ, and the results were promising. According to a pilot study published in Nature Communications, the team's "proof-of-concept" device contained kidney cells that were then implanted in a pig, and according to the study's results, at least 90% of the cells survived, indicating "viability and functionality".

The idea behind the study was to demonstrate that synthetic organs can be accepted by a body, hence the testing on pigs. Notably, these results don't mean that this specific bionic organ can be used in humans. However, the results were promising, and the researchers behind the study believe that they could eventually be used to replace failing human kidneys, or more specifically, people suffering from kidney disease that require constant treatments such as dialysis.

NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of the Red Planet in February 2021, and since then, the rover has been photographing anything of scientific interest on Mars while simultaneously looking for any evidence of ancient microbial life.

There are many peculiar-shaped objects on the surface of Mars, and while researchers have confirmed through landscape observations and soil samples that the Red Planet was once home to large swaths of water, scientists haven't confirmed that the planet had life. That is the purpose of the Perseverance rover - to find evidence of ancient microbial life. Now, the recently released images, despite their appearance, don't confirm life existed.

However, they are a testament to the human phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is the brain's tendency to perceive meaningful imagery where there is none. An example of this is the above image. The image on the left looks like a shark fin, while the image on the right resembles a crab claw.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that Starship is ready for its second orbital launch attempt, following the first orbital launch attempt that came to a fiery yet successful end.

Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, conducted its first orbital launch attempt on April 20, and while SpaceX deemed the first attempt a success as much knowledge was gained, the rocket didn't make it to orbit as it failed to separate its stages, resulting in the rocket tumbling, losing altitude and ultimately being exploded mid-air. Since then, SpaceX has been rebuilding Starship, implementing what it learned from the first orbital launch attempt while also conducting static fire tests on its newly constructed and now reinforced launch pad.

Now, SpaceX and the company's CEO Elon Musk has taken to X to announce that Starship is ready for its second launch attempt and that the only thing stopping SpaceX from pressing the launch button is approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulators of the skies. This is hardly surprising, as the FAA has long stood in front of launches by making sure SpaceX has dotted its i's and crossed all of its t's before a launch is approved. With this news from Musk, we can assume that SpaceX has completed the construction of Starship and is now just waiting for the FAA's stamp of approval.

A team of Australian scientists have discovered an incredible alternative to throwing out coffee grounds and adding to the exponential issue of organic waste.

A new study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production by a team of Australian scientists details a process utilizing coffee grounds that typically ends up in landfills around the world. Notably, 10 billion kilograms, or 10 million tonnes of coffee grounds, are disposed of each year, and the team behind the study proposes reducing the amount of natural sand extracted around the world that's meeting the exponential demand of the construction industry with organic waste such as coffee grounds.

The team took coffee ground and heated them to 660° F, as coffee ground by themselves can't be added to concrete mixture due to them leaking chemicals that make the structure weaker. However, after being baked at 660° F, the team was left with no organic moles and a carbon-rich substance called biochar. This is capable of being mixed with a cement matrix and produced a durable cement mixture that's strong and useable.

A new study published in the journal Communications Biology has detailed the discovery of an ancient ape skull in Turkey, thus challenging the widely held theory that humans originated in Africa.

The new study details the discovery of a part of an ape skull that was found by archaeologists in Cankiri, Turkey, and its significance is derived from its estimated age, which is 8.7 million years ago, along with its location. Notably, hominins, which include African apes and eventually humans, are dated to have appeared in Africa around 7 million years ago.

The ancient ape skull called Anadoluvius turkae now challenges the theory that human ancestors, African apes, came exclusively from Africa, even going as far as to suggest that hominins may have evolved in Europe first and then migrated to Africa. The researchers write that to prove this theory, additional fossils need to be found dating between the two aforementioned eras (seven and eight million years ago), and a link needs to be established.

A team of biologists was shocked when they discovered the longest-living vertebrae thousands of miles away from their natural habitat.

That vertebrae is none other than the Greenland shark, a species of shark that can live between 250 and 500 years, and its strange appearance was brought to biologists' attention when they were tagging tiger sharks off the coast of Belize. A line was set in Belize's protected Glover's Reef Atoll, and upon returning to the line, the biologists noticed it had moved several miles away into waters as deep as 2,000 feet.

The team photographed the extremely rare catch and determined that it was "most likely" a Greenland shark, describing its appearance as "very old" and "like something that would exist in prehistoric times." Notably, this species of shark typically lives thousands of feet below the surface, and typically thrives in Arctic waters where it's extremely cold. So, why was it in the Caribbean? The team speculates that since the reef has a sharp slope that stretches some 9,500 feet down, there is a prime environment for a Greenland shark to live.

The astronauts of Crew-6 have safely made it back to Earth, splashing down just off the coast of Florida after spending 6 months aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Welcome home, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, left, NASA astronaut Warren "Woody" Hoburg, second from left, NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen, second from right, and UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi. All of the aforementioned astronauts spent 6 months aboard the International Space Station conducting various scientific experiments and now have safely splashed down off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.

The crew clocked in 79 million miles during their mission, and according to NASA, completed hundreds of scientific experiments "for the benefit of all humanity," writes NASA its press release. Notably, Bowden completed three spacewalks, who was joined by Hoburg for two, and Alenyadi for one, where they completed preparation and installed one International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays used to augment power generation for the floating laboratory. The crew returned to Earth in SpaceX's Dragon capsule, marking the fourth flight for the capsule named Endeavour.

NASA has revealed, or at least the space agency thinks it has found, the location where Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon.

On August 19, Roscosmos, Russia's equivalent of NASA, announced that it had lost communications with its Luna-25 spacecraft, which was scheduled to make a landing on the moon. The Russian space agency announced that the spacecraft failed to complete a critical orbital maneuver that resulted in it being thrown into an unpredictable orbit that eventually met with the surface of the moon. Russia has since acknowledged the failure of the mission and announced that it will still be continuing with future Luna missions.

Before there is another Russian space launch, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is used to capture periodic images of the surface of Earth's closest neighbor to document asteroid impacts, etc, was used to locate the Luna-25 crash site and NASA believes it has found it. Writing in a new blog post on NASA's official website, the space agency states the estimated impact location is close to a new impact crater, leading the LRO team to conclude that this impact crater is likely to be from the Luna-25 mission, rather than a natural impactor.

Russia's first lunar mission since 1976 ended in absolute failure when the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the surface of the moon, ending the mission.

The catastrophic event for Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, occurred on August 19 when the Luna-25 spacecraft failed to make a critical orbital maneuver that resulted in the spacecraft being sent into an unpredictable orbit and, eventually, into the surface of Earth's closest neighbor. At the time, Roscosmos took to Telegram to issue an update on the status of the Luna-25 mission, writing that communications with the spacecraft were severed and were never able to be reestablished.

Now, per a recent Reuters article, Roscomos spokesperson Dmitry Peskov discussed the failure of the mission, downplaying the severity of it while simultaneously announcing that Russia will continue its space program despite the unfavorable climate to do so. Peskov said in a call with reporters, "This is not a reason to despair, nor to tear our hair out. This is another reason to analyse the causes (of the failure) and eliminate them next time."