Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 67

NASA astronaut Bob Hines took to Twitter to share photographs taken of Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, August 17th.

Hines shared a collection of four photos from a larger time-lapse taken of the northern lights that will potentially be released at a later date. Also known as the aurora borealis, the lights are caused by disturbances in the planet's magnetosphere owing to solar winds. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun and other more significant solar activity enhance the appearance of the light show, and three recent CMEs directed towards Earth were predicted to result in a G3, or strong, geomagnetic storm on August 18th.

The recorded storm was only registered as G2, or moderate, geomagnetic storm. Forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have indicated G1-class, or weak, geomagnetic storms could occur on August 22nd, as a small CME has been fired towards Earth from the AR3078 sunspot. However, according to Spaceweather.com, the CME is unlikely to result in a geomagnetic storm as it grazes Earth's magnetic field.

Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to post a teaser for an upcoming progress reveal for the highly anticipated Neuralink.

Musk took to his Twitter on August 22 to reveal that there will be a progress "show and tell" on October 31, coinciding with Halloween. For those that don't know, Neuralink is another one of Musk's pioneering ventures that aims at developing a human brain and machine interface. The device, which would be implanted into an individual, is said to be capable of translating a human's thoughts into actions. An example of this would be typing, pressing buttons, or manipulating a mouse or joystick.

Reuters recently reported that Neuralink is playing catch up with development woes surrounding is brain implant device. Notably, the report also states that Musk recently approached brain chip implant developer Synchron about a potential investment following the company's announcement of creating a breakthrough platform, "an endovascular brain-computer interface that can access every corner of the brain using its natural highways, the blood vessels."

Elon Musk is back again, tweeting out a meme calling CERN's Large Hadron Collider "demonic technology" and that should totally, totally not surprise us at this point.

For those unaware of what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is, it's the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator located underground in Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research with over 10,000 scientists, hundreds of universities and laboratories, with the collaboration of over 100 countries.

CERN recently turned the Large Hadron Collider back in 6 weeks ago, with Elon tweeting out the meme 6 weeks and 6 hours after the LHC was turned back on. Elon's tweet had a meme that reads: "please let me use the CERN Large Hadron Collider. I am normal and can be trusted with a demonic technology unlike anything the world has ever seen".

An international team of researchers have published what is claimed to be the largest image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to date.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been making headlines since it began its scientific operations in July, with the space agency publishing the first batch of images snapped by the space telescope's next-generations instruments. Now, an international team of researchers that includes 105 scientists from 19 from 28 institutions around the world have used the telescopes instruments to gather an immense amount of data on the cosmos. The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Study (CEERS) has now released the image.

Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) were all used to gather the data, which was then converted to imagery and then stitched together to form an incredible mosaic piece. Out of the myriad of galaxies captured in the images the researchers honed in on six specific galaxies. A blue spiral galaxy, some elliptical galaxies, a galaxy nicknamed Pac-Man for its resembling shape, and galaxies that are extremely old - dating around 9 billion years ago.

NASA has released new footage of the spacecraft that will be sent to one of Jupiter's moons for an upcoming mission.

The timelapse video features NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft as it is being put together in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility. The main body of the Europa Clipper stands 10 feet (3 meters) high and 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide and will reside in High Bay 1, an ultra-clean room, over the next two years as engineers and technicians prepare it for its mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, in October 2024.

At Europa, the spacecraft will complete almost 50 flybys of the moon to gather data about its atmosphere, surface, and interior. It's believed that underneath the moon's icy crust, vast oceans may have suitable conditions to sustain life, so the spacecraft will also assess how the thickness of the surface ice, the salt content of the subsurface ocean, and any potential vents from the subsurface ocean that may leak water into space.

A study on the moisture-driven electricity generation (MEG) device titled "An Asymmetric Hygroscopic Structure for Moisture‐Driven Hygro‐Ionic Electricity Generation and Storage" has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) College of Design and Engineering (CDE) have created a new ultra-thin MEG device, consisting of only a thin layer of fabric, measuring only 0.3 millimeters (mm) thick, sea salt, carbon ink, and a water-absorbent hydrogel. The device generates electricity by utilizing the moisture in the air, and the concept of MEG devices shows promise for various applications such as wearable electronics.

Water saturation has been one of the challenges facing existing MEG devices, stopping them from being able to produce more electricity. The researchers overcame this by creating their new MEG device with two distinct regions, each with different properties that can indefinitely maintain a difference in water content between them. The fabric is made from wood pulp and polyester and coated with carbon nanoparticle ink.

A study on the newly discovered crater titled "The Nadir Crater offshore West Africa: A candidate Cretaceous-Paleogene impact structure" has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers from the University of Arizona have discovered an impact crater at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, which indicates additional asteroids may have struck the Earth during the extinction event that marked the end of the dinosaurs. Named the Nadir Crater, it is thought to have been created by an asteroid striking Earth around the same time as when the Chicxulub asteroid impacted Earth off the coast of what is now Yucatan, Mexico, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.

The Nadir Crater was found buried beneath up to 1,300 feet (396 meters) of seabed roughly 250 miles (402 kilometers) off the coast of Guinea, West Africa, and spans over 5 miles (8 kilometers) in diameter. The crater was found using scientific instruments that can see deep into Earth, and if confirmed, the crater will be added to the list of fewer than 20 confirmed impact craters in the ocean on Earth.

Dallas-based company Colossal Biosciences has set its sights on bringing the Tasmanian tiger, an Australian marsupial also known as the thylacine, back to life after it became extinct in 1936.

The Tasmanian tiger marks the second species in Colossal Biosciences' plans to bring extinct species back from the dead, as they are also working on reviving the wooly mammoth species. The Tasmanian tiger roamed the Earth for millions of years before it became extinct, living across mainland Australia and its island state, Tasmania. It became extinct two thousand years ago on the mainland, likely due to native dingos, but was only fully made extinct by hunters in Tasmania in 1936.

NASA is scheduled to collide a high-speed spacecraft with an asteroid in an attempt to change its orbit using a technique called a "kinetic impactor".

The mission is called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and launched on Nov. 23, 2021, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft successfully exited Earth's atmosphere, and since then, it has been on a journey towards its target, a binary near-Earth asteroid system called Didymos and its smaller moonlet Dimorphos. The DART mission is the very first planetary defense mission that will attempt to deflect an asteroid, and the results from the mission, if the method is proven effective, will affect how Earth as a planet defends itself from asteroids entering our orbit.

The small spacecraft headed on a suicide mission with the Dimorphos will approach the space rock at extremely high speeds, with NASA officials estimating that the craft will be traveling 14,760 mph or 4.1 miles per second. The extreme speed of the aircraft and the kinetic power that will be generated by its impact should be enough to change the Dimorphos' orbit around the larger Didymos. To what degree the orbit changes will determine if the mission has been a success and if the results line up with NASA pre-launch estimations.

NASA is gearing up for the first mission of its Artemis program, which will be the first big step the agency takes to getting humans back on the Moon and eventually stepping up an off-world base.

Commander Moonikin Campos wearing the new Orion Crew Survival System spacesuit.

NASA is closing in on the launch date for its Artemis I mission which will include launching its new Space Launch System, which features the SLS mega-rocket along with the Orion capsule. The goal is to send the rocket around the Moon to record vital data that will be used to ensure the safety on efficiency of humans revisiting the lunar surface in Artemis III. The Artemis I mission will be uncrewed, which means no humans will be on board the Orion capsule, but that doesn't mean the capsule will be empty.

Military has fired upon Europe's largest nuclear power plant, with officials inside the plant now performing disaster drills.

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and is located in southeastern Ukraine near the city of Enerhodar. Currently, Russia occupies the power plant, but the technicians inside are Ukrainian. Recent reports revealed the plant suffered a missile strike that local government officials claim to have been at least a "several dozen" projectiles, with some being guided missiles that came just "ten meters" from hitting barrels filled with spent nuclear fuel.

Both Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for missile strikes, with both countries claiming "nuclear terrorism". However, Kyiv and Moscow have both agreed that the nuclear power plant needs to be visited by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to assess its condition, which has led to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelendskyy and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday for a discussion regarding the Zaporizhzhia situation.

Mission control has ordered a Russian cosmonaut to get back into the International Space Station (ISS) after spacesuit issues.

The Russian cosmonaut told to get back into the ISS is called Oleg Artemyev, and at the moment, there isn't a clear idea of what the specific issue was with the spacesuit. However, in a statement to Space.com, NASA spokesperson Bob Navias said that Artemyev was never in "any danger" and that the anomaly occurred when fellow Russian cosmonaut Denis Matveev and Artemyev were venturing outside of the ISS to work on the European Space Agency's robotic arm that's equipped with cameras.

The issue was noticed by mission control three hours into what was going to be a six-hour spacewalk, and upon noticing the malfunction with what appeared to be the suit's battery power, mission control immediately ordered Artemyev to return to the ISS airlock and plug in his suit into the station's power supply.

The paper published in the scientific journal Science Advances details warns that California's biggest threat may not be droughts or wildfires but a megaflood that may occur in the not-so-distant future.

The study examined the chances of a megaflood hitting the California state across the next forty years and found that due to climate change, the chances of "catastrophic flooding" occurring have doubled. The researchers recognize that many Californian residents are used to water being scarce rather than there being an abundance, but according to historical and paleoclimate data, the state is still at risk of large amounts of rainfall.

The study notes that a megaflood has occurred in the past, citing flooding events that happened in 1969, 1986, and 1997. More specifically, the researchers pointed to the benchmark megaflood that happened between 1861 and 1862, which happened after winter storms battered the area that produced catastrophic flooding across virtually all of California's lowlands. The flooding during this period was so bad that it even produced an inland sea that stretched 300 miles in length.

In a new segment on "The Daily Show," the 91-year-old actor William Shatner gave a narration on the life of Elon Musk.

The recently aired Daily Show segment featured Star Trek actor William Shatner giving a narration on an overview of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The video, as seen above, is done in a humorous manner but still had many digs thrown at Musk, with Shatner referring to him as "part annoying dude in the group chat", and saying that one day "we'll all be his serfs, but in a funny way".

Shatner's commentary is also directed at Daily Show host Trevor Noah where Shatner can be heard saying, "unlike other South African celebrities, he didn't make his childhood into a whole thing", which is a reference to Trevor Noah's past comments on Musk and his book. The segment also shined a light on claims Musk made about Tesla's autopilot features while simultaneously showing instances where the vehicle failed to perform efficiently.

The aurora borealis may make an appearance in select locations across the United States, according to weather officials.

Activity on the surface of the Sun was recorded by space weather officials from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and according to the officials' warnings, there was a series of intense solar eruptions that launched what is called a coronal mass ejection (CME) at Earth. Officials recorded two CMEs heading towards Earth, accompanied by high levels of solar wind that can be traced back to a corona, or a hole, in the surface of the Sun.

The charged particles from the Sun are expected to hit Earth's magnetic field on Thursday, August 18, which may result in auroras appearing in the night sky at much lower geographical locations than they usually do. Space Weather Prediction Center, which is a branch of the National Weather Service, writes that there is a possibility for auroras to appear as far south as New York, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday night.

A man has flown a drone over an active volcano that is currently going off in Iceland, and during the flyover, the drone was struck by lava, but lived to tell the tale.

A content creator named Parker Sheppard has taken his small drone to what seems to be the Fagradalsfjall volcano that recently became active after a series of earthquakes struck the area. The Fagradalsfjall volcano became active on August 3, sparking a heavy amount of tourism to the area as individuals can get extremely close to the action. Sheppard took his drone and flew it around the erupting volcanic fissure, capturing absolutely stunning footage of the bubbling lava with his GoPro.

Throughout the flight, Sheppard moved too close to the unpredictable eruptions, and the drone flew straight through a spray of hot lava. The lava immediately stuck to the drone, and in the above footage, you can hear the damage that it caused despite such a small amount. In the below video, you can hear Sheppard saying, "oh my god, I just went straight through so much lava. I think my camera is messed up, I can't see anything it's so blurry".

A study on Messier 87's black hole titled "The Photon Ring in M87*" has been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have taken the data used to create the historic first-ever photo of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, known as M87*, and render its photon ring. It was initially predicted that behind the orange blur that was first imaged, should be a thin, bright ring around the black hole, created by photons of light being cast around the black hole by its gravity.

The research team stripped away elements of the original imagery taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to "remaster" what was first seen, revealing "the environment around the black hole." The data collected to produce the first photo of M87* was collected in 2017 and computed using algorithms to produce the final image, which blends much of the data.

A study on the cancer vaccine titled "Lipid nanoparticle-mediated lymph node-targeting delivery of mRNA cancer vaccine elicits robust CD8 + T cell response" has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from Tufts University have created a new targeted cancer vaccine, more effective than the many that have come before it from different institutions. They used their vaccine in mice to eliminate tumors and prevent them from returning, and they function similarly to mRNA vaccines developed for use against Covid-19.

The cancer vaccine delivers mRNA inside small bubbles of fat that enter immune cells, allowing the cell to read the mRNA within. The mRNA codes for antigens found on cancer cells identified within the body that the immune cells can then produce.

Another robot dog emulating the design of Boston Dynamics' iconic Spot robot has been shown off while equipped with high powered weaponry.

At the International Military Technical Forum "Army 2022" military expo in Kubinka, near Moscow, Russia, a robot dog was seen sporting an all-black outfit resembling that of a ninja, with only its eyes showing. Though its apparel makes it difficult to glean much about the robot itself, Twitter users pointed out that its eyes appear to resemble that of a robotic dog available on Amazon for about $3,730 on AliExpress.

Russia's state-owned news agency RIA Novosti shared footage of the robot dog, dubbed the M-81 by its creators. On the robot's back is an RPG-26 rocket launcher that is longer than the robot itself, similar to a recent example of an AliExpress robot dog equipped with a submachine gun in Moscow. According to the M-81's developers, the robot is a "sample of the M-81 robotic system, capable of conducting aimed shooting and transporting weapons," and though non-combat related applications involve use "in the emergency zone for reconnaissance, passage through rubble and delivery of medicines."

A study on the asteroids titled "A pristine record of outer Solar System materials from asteroid Ryugu's returned sample" has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Researchers are beginning to publish findings relating to the Ryugu asteroid, sampled by the Japanese Hayabusa-2 space probe during a six-year mission. The probe launched in December 2014, traveling approximately 300 million kilometers (186 million miles) to reach Ryugu. It collected 5.4 grams (0.2 ounces) of rocks and dust from Ryugu by firing an "impactor" into the asteroid's surface after landing on it in April 2019.

Hayabusa-2 returned to Earth in 2020, bringing evidence that key molecules essential for life on Earth may have first formed in space, before being brought to Earth. These include organic materials like amino acids as well as water. According to a recent study by Japanese researchers, "volatile and organic-rich C-type asteroids may have been one of the main sources of Earth's water."