Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 66

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.

Elon Musk's lawyers have sent out subpoenas to prominent figures such as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey regarding the Twitter lawsuit.

Musk backed out of the $44 billion deal to purchase the world's second-largest social media platform Twitter on April 25, which turned into a lawsuit filed by Twitter to get Musk to follow through with the initial deal to purchase the platform. Twitter filed for an expedited trial citing the nature of the deal and how leaving it in limbo negatively impacts the company. The court agreed to an expedited trial with a date set for October 17.

The latest unravelings of the Musk-Twitter trial are Musk's lawyers now sending out subpoenas to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, along with former product chief Kayvon Beykpour and former head of revenue Bruce Falck. At the moment, it's not known how Dorsey or the other former Twitter officials that received subpoenas fit into Musk's legal teams' argument, but the subpoena, at least with Dorsey, refers to "documents and communications reflecting, referring to, or relating to the impact or effect of false or spam accounts on Twitter's business operations."

A fossilized shark tooth from a species that has been extinct for many years now has been discovered by a curious 8-year-old boy.

Riley Gracely of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, traveled to Myrtle Beach with his father, Justin Gravely, his mother, Janelle Gracely, and his brother, Collin. The family decided to have a look around Palmetto Fossil Excursion Summerville, South Carolina, in search of a discovery, which was later found by Riley, who was exploring the bases of large piles of dirt and gravel. Riley bent down and pulled out what he believed to be a tooth and when the object was finally excavated, it was revealed to be a 4.75-inch tooth from a prehistoric shark.

In an email to Fox News Digital, Justin Gracely explained that employees at the Palmetto Fossil Excursions said that Riley's discovery was significant considering the species the tooth is from, its condition, and its size. Officials confirmed the tooth to be from an Otodus angustidens, which is a species of megatooth shark that is a close relative of the megalodon, the world's largest prehistoric shark that measured in at a whopping 68 feet in length.

The new augmented reality (AR) glasses are developed by startup company XRAI Glass.

The company's CEO, Dan Scarfe, conceived of the glasses after the previous year's Christmas, spending it with his family, including his 97-year-old hard-of-hearing grandfather. Scarfe noticed his grandfather struggling to engage in conversations with the rest of the family in real-time, telling Euronews Next that "it's just so difficult when there are so many people around you and you're trying to keep track of the different conversations which are going on," and that "it's got to the point now where he literally just sits in silence."

Scarfe thought to himself that his grandfather always watches TV with subtitles, planting the idea to "subtitle the world" for him and others. Six months later, his company XRAI Glass had partnered with Nreal, a manufacturer of AR glasses, to reveal the XRAI Glasses. The glasses are connected to a mobile phone that will process the required information and create the graphics to be displayed and used to create and display a speech transcription from nearby people using Amazon's Alexa transcription service.

On Tuesday, August 16th, 2022, an employee found a foot inside a shoe floating in the Abyss Pool at Yellowstone National Park.

The Abyss Pool is located in the West Thumb Geyser Basin in the southern region of the park, and law enforcement officers have opened an investigation into its origin. Currently, it's believed that an incident involving an individual to whom the foot belonged occurred on July 31st, 2022, and that no foul play was involved. No photos have surfaced of the incident, and no other details have yet been shared by park officials, but they are reminding park visitors to stay on designated paths and "exercise extreme caution around thermal features."

The West Thumb Geyser Basin and its parking lot were temporarily closed following the discovery but have since reopened. According to the National Park Service (NPS), "the ground in hydrothermal areas is fragile and thin, and there is scalding water just below the surface." The Abyss Pool is over 50 feet (15.24 meters) deep, making it one of the park's deepest hot springs, with a temperature of about 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius).

A study on growing plants on Mars titled "Farming on Mars: Treatment of basaltic regolith soil and briny water simulants sustains plant growth" has been published in the journal PLOS One.

Researchers from Iowa State University have tested what crops are best suited for growing in Martian regolith, which mostly comprises basaltic dust (weathered pieces of volcanic rock). Volcanic regions on Earth are typically nutrient-dense, and Mars' volcanic regions share similar nutrients in the surrounding soil. However, on Mars, there is a lack of organic carbon, so the regolith doesn't hold water well, nor does it contain enough nutrients to support growing calorie-dense crops.

To make the soil on Mars more viable for crops, it will need to be sufficiently fertilized. The researchers determined this could be achieved by growing alfalfa, which requires few nutrients to grow, and which the team was able to grow in simulated Martian regolith. Furthermore, by crushing up the alfalfa into powder form and using it to fertilize the regolith directly, the researchers could support the growth of other plants like turnips, radishes, and lettuce.

Russia's Defense Minister has announced the nation has successfully fired three missiles that have displayed "outstanding qualities".

Reports from RT that cite Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, that took to Russian 1 TV over the weekend, Kremlin military have successfully fired three Kinzhal hypersonic missiles during its conflict with Ukraine. The Kinzhal (Dagger) is a Russian hypersonic air-to-surface missile that was put into service in 2017, and according to reports, the missile is capable of traveling at Mach 12, or 9,207 mph, and can even perform maneuvers during its journey.

RT states that the missile is nuclear-capable and can be launched from Russia Tu-22M3 and MiG031 bombers. Russia announced the first use of the hypersonic missile in March, when its Defense Ministry claimed it used the Kinzhal missile to destroy a Ukrainian weapons depot in western Ukraine, marking the first time a hypersonic weapon has been used in combat.