Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 66

Fast food chains are certainly interested in providing customers with as much food as they can while keeping costs down and one way to do that is to automate the process.

Automating the process of food construction can come in various ways, and one new way that has recently gone viral on TikTok is a robot designed to make hot dogs for paying customers, allowing the restaurant chain to keep selling products without any employee present. The above video showcases a robot named Robbie, which was built for a paid partnership between robotics company VeloxAlpha and Poland's largest convenience chain, Zabka Polska.

Robbie has been rolled out to several Zabka Polska locations across Poland, with officials from VeloxAlpha claiming that Robbie is the "first of its kind of the market" that aims to create a "user-friendly" system that will be "available 24-7 for everyone". However, there seem to be some apparent issues with Robbie's technique, as the above video shows the robot failing completely at preparing a hotdog for a customer. The video has since been viewed more than 12 million times, with some TikTok users commenting, "it's his first day on the job" and "it ain't much, but it's honest work".

A two-year adventure to capture the Moon in never-before-seen detail has revealed a stunning singular image that is made up of more than 200,000 separate images.

The above image was captured by two astrophotographers, Andrew McCarthy and planetary scientist Connor Matherne and according to the pair, this is "the most ridiculously detailed picture" of the Moon yet. The 174-megapixel image is made up of more than 200,000 separate images and showcases the true colors of the Moon that are typically unobservable from Earth. The Moon's surface features a reddish tinge on one side while the other is a gunmetal blue color.

The red color can be traced back to iron and feldspar oxidization that's caused by errant oxygen atoms from the Earth. While the Moon certainly looks different here when compared to typical images, the colors seen in the above image are more accurate to the Moon's true colors. Since our eyes aren't sensitive enough to view the colors, Matherne performed color correction on the image, increasing the saturation to bring out the red and blue we can now see.

A study on the new water map titled "A Mars Orbital Catalog of Aqueous Alteration Signatures (MOCAAS)" has been published in the journal Icarus.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a new map of Mars that shows mineral deposits from across the Red Planet, using data collected by the ESA's Mars Express OMEGA (Observatoire pour la Mineralogie, l'Eau, les Glaces et l'Activite) instrument and the CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The map charts the locations and amounts of aqueous minerals, typically clays and salts, produced by rocks that came into contact with water and became chemically altered.

Different elements in volcanic rocks on Earth lead to varied clay formations on Earth, such as iron and magnesium leading, resulting in smectite and vermiculite, respectively. When volumes of water are larger, rocks can be altered more substantially, carrying away soluble material and leaving clays such as kaolin with high aluminum concentrations.

The European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) La Silla Observatory has spotted a rare phenomenon over Chile's Atacama Desert known as red sprites.

Red sprites are large-scale electric discharges, similar to lightning, that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, about 50 to 90 kilometers (31 to 56 miles) into the atmosphere. They often occur in clusters, appearing as bright red-orange flashes that are sometimes mistakenly called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, they aren't as hot as true tropospheric lightning and are more like the discharges within fluorescent tube lights.

The above photo, taken by the ESO's 3.6-meter (11.8 feet) telescope at the La Silla Observatory, shows red sprites appearing rather low in the sky, though this is only due to the camera's perspective. The rest of the sky takes on a green hue, which is the result of a phenomenon known as airglow, where the atmosphere itself emits a faint amount of light. It is usually only noticeable in very dark skies with little light pollution. It results from electrons recombining with nitrogen and oxygen atoms at night after sunlight splits them apart during the day.

A Stanford Professor has claimed there is an active coverup on the government possessing technology that has come from another planet.

Dr. Garry Nolan, an immunologist at Stanford that recently became involved in UFOs and their disclosure, has sat down for an interview where he discussed his role in working with the government on analyzing and studying individuals that encountered UFOs. According to Nolan, there is a group of people that were involved in recovering UFO debris for secret government programs, and these individuals will soon be coming forward to reveal what they know.

The Stanford professor says that he "knows" there has been an "active coverup" of authorities, claiming that he has spoken to important people who are about to "whistleblow on it". The interviewer noted that the Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced the creation of a new office dedicated to studying Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) or UFOs, and that an analysis will be conducted starting from 1947 onwards - the date of Roswell.

A startup company based out of Silicon Valley called Sanas plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to modify the voices of workers in call centers to remove their accents.

The company's demo features the voice of a man with an Indian accent, reading through a call center script in a simulated customer interaction. Enabling the slider on screen to use Sanas' technology seamlessly switches from obviously human audio to a processed version that finds itself in the uncanny valley. The voice is still noticeably synthesized, but the Indian accent is gone and replaced with a more Americanized or "white" accent.

Sanas launched in August 2021 and has already received large amounts of funding, with $32 million in funding secured during a Series A funding round in June 2022. The company's founders, three former students of Stanford University, claim the funding is the largest amount ever put towards a speech technology service. The company eventually wants to offer more voices for its accent translation, expand to changing voices during video and audio calls, and potentially even work on films or television shows.

The latest discovery of debris from a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that returned to Earth early last month is the fourth to turn up in New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

The piece of debris was found in the state's Snowy Mountains, near Tumbarumba, after locals found two bits near Dalgety and another near Jindabyne over the last month and a half. The various pieces of space debris have been discovered following a loud bang that residents heard in the region on July 9th, 2022, associated with the Crew Dragon spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

The latest piece, found on August 13th by cattle farmer Jordan Hobbs on his land, is believed to belong to the same spacecraft as the other pieces of space debris found in the region, which the Australian Space Agency later confirmed to be of SpaceX origin. Australian National University (ANU) researcher Dr. Brad Tucker was called by Hobbs to investigate the new piece after he examined the previously discovered debris in the region.

Reports indicate that a new species of dinosaur has been discovered in New Mexico as researchers delve into collected specimens.

Newsweek reports that the new species of dinosaur is called Bisticeratops froeseorum, and it was first discovered in 1975 in the Upper Cretaceous rocks located in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. A team of researchers came across what seemed to be a bone sticking out of the ground, and upon further investigation, discovered the bone was attached to an entire skull that was nearly complete. After decades of analysis, researchers weren't able to link the skull to a species until now.

The official new species is believed to have existed about 74 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, which was the last period before the asteroid assisted the dinosaurs into their extinction. Bisticeratops froeseorum is a member of ceratopsid dinosaurs, quadrupedal herbivores from the Upper Cretaceous that walked on four legs. Dinosaurs such as the recognizable triceratops were also a member of this family, making the new species a distant cousin.

Drought conditions in Texas have caused dinosaur tracks from approximately 113 million years ago to appear in a river bed flowing through the state's Dinosaur Valley State Park.

Stephanie Salinas Garcia of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department explained that the extreme drought conditions of the past summer have dried up the river in many locations, allowing more tracks to be uncovered throughout the park. The river is described as "one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world," and the newly revealed three-toed footprints belong to multiple species of dinosaurs, including the Acrocanthosaurus and the Sauroposeidon.

An adult Acrocanthosaurus (meaning high-spined lizard) stood 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall and weighed almost seven tons (6,350 kilograms), while an adult Sauroposeidon (meaning lizard earthquake god) stood 60 feet (18.3 meters) tall and weighed 44 tons (39916 kilograms).

A woman has filmed what she claims to be a black UFO hovering above a city in Mexico, and the video has since been viewed thousands of times.

TikTok user "xixsteph" or Stephany posted the above video three days ago, and it has since been viewed nearly 200,000 times. The video shows a recording of a black object hovering in the sky near Merida, Mexico, at 7:30 pm, with Stephany even zooming in on the object to reveal a unique-looking snowflake shape. Most citizen UFO videos are terrible in quality, or the focused object is extremely hard to see, but Stephany's footage is overall very smooth and high quality. But is this a UFO?

The video was posted to the /r/UFO subreddit, and the community of UFO hunters began to quickly debunk the footage while simultaneously praising its quality. Moderators categorized the video as "likely identified," with many users reporting that it's a helium balloon that has an interesting shape, with one user writing that there was a recent balloon festival happening near Merida, the vibrant capital of the Mexican state of Yucatan.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a new image captured by the famous Hubble Space Telescope.

Being 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has achieved much during its time in operation, and while being far superseded by the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble can still produce some incredible images. The ESA has taken to its website to showcase a new image of globular cluster NGC 6540. The photograph was snapped with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys and reveals thousands to millions of stars all bound together by gravity.

NGC 6540 is located within the constellation Sagittarius, and the above composite image displays many bright stars that are defined by their diffraction spikes, which is the cross-shaped pattern seen across various stars. Notably, these cross-shapes are an imaging artefact that is caused by Hubble and not the star.

This year's International Military-Technical Forum, also known as Army 2022, held at the Patriot Congress and Exhibition Centre near Moscow, Russia, saw multiple new technologies and designs unveilke.

One such design at the expo was a physical model of Russia's planned space station, the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS). Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has been vocal about potentially severing ties with the International Space Station (ISS), which it jointly operates, since late February 2022 after other nations imposed sanctions on the agency and Russia itself following the nation's invasion of Ukraine.

Those threats were issued by the previous head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin. However, Rogozin has since been replaced by Yuri Borisov after Borisov was appointed to the position by President Vladimir Putin. Recently, Borisov announced that Russia would leave the ISS after 2024 while working on its own space station in the meantime. NASA says it has yet to receive official confirmation from Roscosmos as to whether it will continue with the ISS until 2028, as was previously understood.

A study on the black hole jets titled "Collimation of the kiloparsec-scale radio jets in NGC 2663" has been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Researchers from Western Sydney University have discovered one of the largest known black hole jets, coming from the NGC2663 galaxy situated at a relatively close distance of 93 million light-years away from Earth. It contains approximately ten times the number of stars found in the Milky Way galaxy and a central black hole with jets shooting out from it in opposite directions.

The team observed NGC2663 as part of its Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) survey. They used the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO's) collection of 36 linked radio dishes in Western Australia that comprise the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), which work together as a single, giant telescope. The radio waves detected from the galaxy revealed jets shooting material out from its black hole, spanning over a million light years from end to end, making them about 50 times larger than the galaxy itself.

A study on the new material titled "Electrical control of glass-like dynamics in vanadium dioxide for data storage and processing" has been published in the journal Nature Electronics.

Researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) were experimenting with vanadium dioxide (VO₂), a material used in electronics, and its transition between phases. In doing so, they made a chance discovery that shows the compound can "remember" the entire history of external stimuli that have affected it.

VO₂ exists as an insulator at room temperature but quickly transitions into a metal at 68 degrees Celsius (154.4 degrees Fahrenheit), and Ph.D. student Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo at EPFL's Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab) was investigating how long it takes for VO₂ to transition between states. Applying an electric current to a sample of VO₂ causes its lattice structure to change as it transitions between states, and removing this current causes it to revert to its initial state.

A study on the brain stimulation titled "Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation" has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers from the University in Massachusetts have used weak electrical currents to repeatedly zap the brains of adults over 65 over several days, demonstrating improvements in memory that lasted for up to one month. Their research builds on previous studies that suggest that separate brain regions handle long-term and working (short-term) memory.

Stimulating a region near the front of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with high-frequency electricity improved long-term memory. At the same time, the inferior parietal lobe, found further back in the brain, was best stimulated by low-frequency electricity to produce improvements in working memory. The brain was electrically stimulated using a non-invasive method called transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), which places electrodes on the scalp to deliver electrical currents.

NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope has pointed its highly advanced instruments at the largest planet and king of our solar system - Jupiter.

Webb has captured new images of the giant planet that have given researchers more clues to explore about Jupiter's existence until now and its evolution into the future. The two new images were captured using Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). NASA explains that since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the gathered data from Webb's instrument was translated onto the visible light spectrum, and the result is the above and below images.

Citizen scientist Judy Schmidt successfully translated the Webb data into gorgeous images, including a composite image of Jupiter in three light filters - F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan). The above image of Jupiter shows auroras stretching to the high altitudes of the planet, with aurora activity seen at both the north and south poles.

A new opinion piece written in The Hill by Marik Von Rennenkampf outlines the new definition Congress has taken on UFOs, or as officials would like them to be referred to, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP.

That naming has since been updated with Congress now revising the definition of a UFO to include "transmedium" objects, which means objects that are capable of transitioning "between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water".

In a previous Congress report, a nation-security-focused committee pointed out a growing number of objects demonstrating technology that allowed them to seamlessly travel between space, air, and water, with the report noting "transmedium threats to United States national security are expanding exponentially."

A study on the Tonga volcano explosion titled "Energetic output of the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption from pressure measurements" has been published in the journal Shock Waves.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have compiled a new dataset relating to the Hunga Tonga underwater volcano eruption on January 15th, 2022, comprising data from weather stations across the globe and social media. The dataset was compared against historical data of the most powerful human-made explosion ever, produced by the Tsar Bomba nuclear bomb, showing the eruption released even more energy than the bomb.

The eruption generated acoustic-gravity waves that were detected at the edge of space by satellites and various instruments worldwide. Weather stations across the planet detected a passing Lamb wave, a type of acoustic-gravity wave, that resulted in local atmospheric pressure spiking before dropping over about 45 minutes, compared to the effect earthquakes have, which typically last between a few seconds and a few minutes.

Famously space is believed to be silent but that isn't always the case as NASA has "listened" to a black hole.

NASA took to its social channels on Monday to share a common misconception about space, and that is most people believe there is no sound at all since its a vacuum, which means there is no way for sound to travel. However, this isn't the case for galaxy clusters, as NASA writes that there is so much gas within some galaxies clusters that researchers are able to create a sonification. Notably, the audio clip was posted back in May, but the re-sharing has caused sparked virality with many people commenting on NASA's posts.

As explained in NASA's May release, there is a black hoel located at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, and astronomers discovered that pressure waves created by the black hole ripple through the galaxy's hot gas. Notably, researchers were able to translate these pressure waves into notes that humans are able to hear. The results have been interpreted as somewhat eerie and the created sound resembles similar sounds heard in horror or thriller movies.

NASA is currently preparing for its Artemis I mission, where it will launch an extremely large rocket around the Moon and then back to Earth.

NASA has moved the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to launch pad 39B at the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 17, which moved the 322-foot-tall rocket into its correct position ahead of the scheduled test launch on August 29 or after. The SLS rocket will take NASA's Orion crew capsule on a reconnaissance mission towards the Moon, eventually cruising around in and then flying back to Earth.

The SLS rocket is the most powerful rocket that NASA has ever constructed, with 8.8 million pounds of thrust that comes from its four core stage engines along with two rocket boosters. The goal of the Artemis I mission is to gather large quantities of data regarding the journey to and from the Moon that will assist the space agency in its Artemis II mission, where it will send four astronauts back around the Moon.