Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 472

For more than 100 years now, astronomers have gazed into space and attempted to figure out what fuels the massive hurricane-like storm that orbits just below Jupiter's equator. During the 1800's the storm was estimated to measure more than 25,000 miles across, and recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope show that it is just a mere 10,250 miles across today. To put that into perspective, back in 1890, three Earth's could fit inside the storm, and today only one would could squeeze in.

At the moment, scientist have no conclusive theory on why the storm is shrinking, it has been able to figure out that the storm is shrinking faster as they years go by, and that it is currently losing about 580 miles in diameter per year. One early theory suggest that Jupiter's atmosphere is losing some of its volatility and bleeding off energy, which in turn is causing the storm to slowly die down. The video below from Videos From Space shows just how fast this shrinkage is taking place.

"In our new observations, it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm," Amy Simon, associate director for strategic science at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. "We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the accelerated change, by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot."

According to reports, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX Elon Musk agreed to help fund the Nikola Tesla Museum, thanks to Matthew Inman's illustration in The Oatmeal.

Inman led the fundraising via Indiegogo to bring up a museum based on Nikola Tesla's invention by using one of his facilities which was going to be torn down. Inman was able to successfully raise $1.5 million to buy the property in time. He needed to raise $8 million more so that the facility can be converted into a museum.

Recently he posted a two-part comic about owning a Tesla Model S. In part One he called it as a 'magical space car' and in Part 2, it was about asking Tesla Motor's Elon Musk to help him fund for the museum via twitter. Inman explained why it would be a good gesture for the electric car company to help fund this project.

For countless decades, scientists have been gagged and bought when it comes to "global warming" or "climate change". You might not want to hear it, but if you dig deep enough, the rabbit hole begins to make sense. For those who have never heard of "Suspicious0bservers" on YouTube, you might want to check out his videos - he's quite the expert and spokesperson to the masses.

Suspicious0bservers, or Ben Davidson, has over 180,000 subscribers on YouTube, but his latest video "Why Global Warming Failed" should be an eye-opener for you. The video above has plenty of data and links to papers he cites from, with some very large points to be made. It's not just the Earth that is experiencing changes, but virtually every single planet in our solar system is going through some form of change. Those planets aren't having changes due to man now, are they?

We, mankind, are causing some form of pollution and "climate change" but it is in no way near the numbers scientists, governments and corporations are reporting. During the video (at around the 8:30 mark), you can see the CO2 levels on Earth are skyrocketing - something that man is surely doing. But, the temperature - "global warming" - is right on the models that have been tracked over the last 300,000 years. We're actually seeing the temperature in Antarctica dropping a few degrees in the last 300,000 years - where every 100,000 years we're seeing a drop of a couple of degrees.

Scott White from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been working on something quite incredible: a plastic that is lined with something similar to an artificial vascular system, just like the veins and arteries that see the blood flow through your body, that can repair for larger breaks.

This new system features two different liquids, with the first containing long, thin molecules, and the other with three-sided molecules, in separate channels. Once these fluids mix, a reaction sees them joining together to create a scaffold, which forms a thick gel. Mixing in some other ingredients causes the gel to solidify over a few hours.

Once the plastic is fractured, the vascular system is damaged, with the two liquids pouring out. The liquids mix together, forming a restorative gel. This gel can fill a 4mm hole with 35mm of surrounding cracks within 20 minutes, hardening in a 3-hour span of time. The patch that is created is around 60% as strong as the original plastic, so we're not talking about a complete 100% strength, but this is an incredible feat nonetheless.

As NASA and other space programs ramp up Mars research, the U.S. space agency is interested in creating a plant-growth experiment in mid-2020. As part of the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX) project, it could be an important step towards potential manned missions and colonization endeavors.

"In order to do a long-term, sustainable base on Mars, you would want to be able to establish that plants can at least grow on Mars," said Heather Smith, MPX deputy principal investigator, in a statement. "This would be the first step in that... we just send the seeds there and watch them grow."

MPX would focus more on being a self-contained project, rather than trying to plant seeds in the Martian dirt. The rover would provide water and researchers will check back within 15 days to see if the greenhouse project is successful.

NASA takes a lot of time to kill bacteria and other contaminants on spacecraft that it sends into space. It's particularly important to kill off any bacteria that might be on a spacecraft that will land on the surface of another planet to prevent contamination. The problem NASA is having is that some of the bacteria on spacecraft are nearly impossible to kill.

In fact, some have proven so resilient that NASA is looking for new ways to kill bacteria on future spacecraft. Some of those bacterial spores can survive space and NASA fears that it might be sending life out into space away from Earth. This poses problems for future missions that may send probes to other world's.

One specific bacterium called Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032 has a high resistance to the techniques used to clean spacecraft such as peroxide treatment and UV radiation. Those spores can also survive in the vacuum of space. NASA placed these spores outside the ISS and they survived for 18 months. One of the big challenges for NASA is to develop methods of killing bacteria on smaller spacecraft that can't survive the heat of NASAs currently approved dry heat microbial reduction. Some believe that in the near term this is a moot point because bacterial exchange between mars and Earth has been going on for millennia.

The Pentagon has been building itself some robots, with a new Terminator-like rescue robot that would be deployed into disaster situations, where it would search for survivors.

The 6-foot 2-inch robot named Atlas is one of the entrants in a contest that is designed to build a robotic hero, thanks to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The competition sees entrants' robots capable of finding their way through rough terrain and entering buildings. The competition was created after the magnitude-9 earthquake in Japan which crippled the Fukushima nuclear plant and sent a tsunami into the country.

DARPA is The Pentagon's go-to research department, which has just shown off its Atlas robot - featuring LED lighting, but was switched off and simply in a "static" display for the competition. Head of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, Brad Tousley, told US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Hollywood has portrayed an unrealistic expectation in peoples' minds about what robots are capable of - at least at this point in time.

Wireless power is something I simply can't live without, but I can only charge one or two devices at once. But, over in Daejeon, Republic of Korea, scientists have used something they call the Dipole Coil Resonant System to charge 40 smartphones simultaneously, even if the power source is up to 5m away.

We already know about MIT's Coupled Magnetic Resonance System (CMRS) which was unveiled in 2007, which used a magnetic field in order to charge devices - but it had an envelope of 2.1m. CMRS had some major technical limitations for commercialization, most of which haven't been solved: "a rather complicated coil structure (composed of four coils for input, transmission, reception, and load); bulky-size resonant coils; high frequency (in a range of 10 MHz) required to resonate the transmitter and receiver coils, which results in low transfer efficiency; and a high Q factor of 2,000 that makes the resonant coils very sensitive to surroundings such as temperature, humidity, and human proximity".

Chun T. Rim, a Professor of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering at KAIST, along with his team, developed the "Dipole Coil Resonant System" or DCRS. This system is for an extended range of inductive power transfer, at up to 5 meters between transmitter and receiver coils. Professor Rim's solution to CMRS' problems are all but solved with DCRS.

In something that feels like it's right out of HBO's 'True Blood,' we're looking at a future of artificial blood, mass manufactured on an industrial scale - in the near future.

Wellcome Trust is behind the research, with scientists working on getting to the point of reaching a trial stage of using artificial blood made from human stem cells. Principal researcher, Marc Turner, has said that his team has made red blood cells that are capable of being used in a clinical transfusion. Professor Turner has talked of a technique to culture red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells - cells that have been taken from humans, and 'rewound' into stem cells.

From there, biochemical conditions that are similar to what happens inside of the human body are recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells - best of all, in the universal blood type O. Prof Turner explains: "Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being".

Well, it looks like the military is having some fun above the skies of Texas, where defense technology blog Ares is reporting on a mysterious, unidentified flying object flying over the skies of Amarillo, Texas, back on March 10.

Bill Sweetman, Aviation Week's defense experts is perplexed, but he is convinced it's real. "Three of us here-myself, Graham Warwick and Guy Norris-concur that the photos show something real. Guy and I have known Steve Douglass for a long time, and know that the reason that he sees (and monitors by radio) unusual things is that he spends time looking for them. Here is Steve's account of one of his better radio intercepts. This is more than a random image.

The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn't than what it is. The size is very hard to determine, for example, although the image size at contrailing height suggests that it is bigger than an X-47B. However, the basic shape-while it resembles Boeing's Blended Wing Body studies or the Swift Killer Bee/Northrop Grumman Bat unmanned air system-is different from anything known to have flown at full size, lacking the notched trailing edge of Northrop Grumman's full-size designs".