Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 74

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has demanded an ambitious new construction project to rival the pyramids of Egypt.

The project, first unveiled in 2021, is known as The Line and comprises plans for a 105-mile-long (170 kilometers) linear urban development in the northwestern desert of Saudi Arabia. Part of the project is called the Mirror Line, which is planned to be the world's largest structure. The Mirror Line will see two skyscrapers running parallel for 75 miles (120.7 kilometers), standing 1,600 feet (487.7 meters) tall, interconnected with walkways and its own high-speed train that can carry people from end-to-end in 20 minutes.

The Mirror Line and other projects make up a grander vision by Prince Mohammed to build the Neom city, "the first cognitive city," designed to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy by attracting foreign investment and tourism and decreasing its reliance on oil. Completing construction of the Mirror Line has a 2030 deadline, though a 2021 assessment suggests that construction could take up to 50 years.

The Russian Navy received the massive new nuclear-powered submarine from Sevmash Shipyard, Russia's largest shipbuilder.

Named the Belgorod, it is the world's longest known submarine and is a modified version of Russia's Oscar II class of submarines. Construction began in December 2012 on what was known as Project 09852, culminating in the 184-meter-long (608 feet) submarine that was received by the Russian Navy on July 8th, 2022. According to the state-run Russian News Agency TASS, Belgorod will carry Russia's new nuclear-capable Poseidon torpedoes.

A study on the spiders titled "Necrobotics: Biotic Materials as Ready‐to‐Use Actuators" has been published in the journal Advanced Science.

Researchers from Rice University have repurposed the carcasses of deceased wolf spiders to serve as mechanical grippers, taking the first step in a novel research field dubbed "necrobotics" by the researchers. The team's lab specializes in soft robotics, a subfield of robotics that utilizes nontraditional materials to achieve more flexibility and unique functions unattainable with traditional plastics, metals, and electronics.

China has released an incredible image of one of Mars' natural satellites that orbit the Red Planet - the moon named Phobos.

There are two moons that orbit Mars, Phobos, and Deimos. Phobos is the larger of the two natural satellites and is positioned more closely to Mars than its sister satellite Deimos at just 3,700 miles. Both of the moons were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, and now China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft has captured Phobos in unprecedented detail, showcasing the craters scattered across its surface.

Notably, Phobos' diameter stretches some 7 miles across, and looking at the recently released image, we can see impact craters from asteroids on its surface - in particular the crater Opik, which was named after the Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist Ernst Julius Opik. Furthermore, China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft has completed all of its required scientific operations, but since it's still operational, China's space agency is preparing the spacecraft for future missions.

A child has had his finger broken by a robot during a chess tournament, and the moment was captured on video.

The 7-year-old boy that has yet to be named, was participating in a chess tournament in Moscow against a chess robot that was playing three games simultaneously. First reported by the Russian news outlet Baza, the robot was rented by the Moscow Chess Federation and has previously appeared in my exhibition matches in various locations.

As explained by Moscow Chess Federation President Sergey Lazarev, the child made a move and failed to give the robot enough time to calculate an appropriate move. As a result, the robot "grabbed him". Notably, outlets have reported that the child suffered from a fractured finger but was able to finish the tournament while wearing a cast.

A team of researchers has created the very first gene-edited dogs using a cloning process that involves skin cells.

South Korean biotech company ToolGen, along with Chungnam National University, created the gene-edited dogs and used CRISPR to remove a specific gene known as DJ-1 from the dogs' genomes. The DJ-1 gene is linked to cancer, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, and strokes.

According to the researchers, many purebred dogs can suffer from many inherited genetic conditions such as heart, skin, and eye problems, but this new gene-editing technique has the potential to remove the genes that cause those conditions before the dogs are birthed. The researchers spoke to The Telegraph and said their goal is to cure dogs of "pathogenic mutations induced by inbreeding".

An artificial intelligence system trained to produce images from text descriptions has revealed what it "thinks" is inside a black hole.

The AI system is called DALL-E and is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3, a autoregressive language model that using deep learning to produce human-like text. Both AI systems were developed by OpenAI, and DALL-E, in particular, has proven to produce very interesting results based on the text that is entered into its prompt box. Users can ask DALL-E to produce anything they want. Quite literally anything.

I asked DALL-E to show me an image of the inside of a black hole, which, as many people would know, is literally impossible verify given human's current understanding of black holes and their vicious nature. However, the results that DALL-E provided me was still very surprising as the AI was able to produce a completely original batch of accurate black hole images that can be found below.

NASA has warned that male astronauts masturbating in space, is a major hazard: female astronauts could get impregnated like the sperm is a face hugger from Aliens.

This story became a thing from a discussion during Conan O'Brien and his "Needs A Friend" podcast, who was interviewing a NASA engineer when the topic came to the "strict guidelines" on "alone time" in zero gravity on the International Space Station.

During the interview, O'Brien asked the NASA engineer if porn was sent up, or I guess streamed on the International Space Station. The NASA engineer, who is only identified as "Smythe" said: "No, none of that".

The United States Navy's USS Essex has been equipped with a brand-new ElemX printer made by Xerox.

The printer weighs 4,630 pounds (2,100 kilograms) and was lifted via crane onto the vessel while in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It measures 9 feet (2.7 meters) wide and 7 feet (2.1 meters) tall, The printer itself resides within a large CONEX box, adding up to a total weight of around 15,000 pounds (6,803 kilograms), and measuring about 20 feet (6.1 meters) long. Unlike a conventional printer that prints ink, the ElemX prints from spools of aluminum wire.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially deemed the unprecedented spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

The rating is the highest level of emergency the WHO can assign. It was announced on Saturday, July 23rd, 2022, as cases have risen to almost 17,000 worldwide. The ongoing series of outbreaks beginning in May 2022 has seen the virus appear in 74 countries in total, with 68 countries not having previously reported monkeypox infections. Of the 16,836 cases reported at the time of writing, only 243 are from countries that have previously reported cases, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracker.

An expert committee could not collectively decide whether to consider the global monkeypox outbreak as a PHEIC, so the decision ultimately fell to the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The monkeypox virus is a poxvirus, similar to the smallpox virus, for which vaccines like Imvanex already exist. On July 22nd, the European Union announced it recommends approving the use of Imvanex to treat monkeypox.

A Reddit user has shared photos taken from a plane flying above the clouds over the Atlantic Ocean.

According to the post, the red glows visible in the photo were something the pilot had never seen, which prompted many theories to be suggested by other users. The red light is most likely a result of large lighting arrays used by fishing vessels to catch Pacific saury. However, without closer inspection, the cause can't be known for certain.

Such ships are equipped with hundreds of red lights around the ship's perimeter, with LED being the preferred option for its higher efficiency, lower weight, and the ability to target the light more effectively than other lighting solutions like high-intensity discharge (HID). However, the strong glow from high up past the clouds suggests HID could have been in use, explaining how much light escaped upwards.

A paper on the new torpedo system has been published in the Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems, run by the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.

Researchers from Beijing have created designs for a small, cheap, and disposable nuclear reactor to power individual torpedoes. The torpedoes would be similar to the uncrewed Russian Poseidon submarine, the world's first nuclear-powered underwater drone. However, the torpedoes would be much smaller to enable mass production and deployable from a standard torpedo tube.

The torpedoes would have a range of ten thousand kilometers (6,200 miles) and reach a cruising speed of more than 32 knots (60km/h or 37mph), allowing them to cross the Pacific Ocean in roughly a week. The mini-reactor would be as heavy as two average adult males and use less than 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds) of low-concentration uranium fuel to generate over 1.4 megawatts of heat.

Astronomer Scott Sheppard has written a Perspective piece titled "In the glare of the Sun" in the journal Science.

Sheppard is an astronomer from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and believes scientists need to search more closely for near-Earth objects (NEOs) in space in the direction of the Sun. He notes that most observations are often taken of the night sky, but NEOs like asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth could lurk between the Sun and the Earth, some of which have been discovered recently.

One such near-Earth asteroid (NEA) was found inside Venus' orbit, and another was discovered with the shortest-known orbital period around the Sun. The night sky is surveyed more frequently as light from the Sun does not overwhelm observations. However, Sheppard notes the technology now exists to survey the sky in the direction of the Sun during twilight hours.

The Department of Defense's (DoD) new office, called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), will focus on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The AARO was founded to expand the scope of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group (AOIMSG). The AARO will coordinate efforts across the DoD and with other departments in the United States government and federal agencies to detect and identify "anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects."

The focus is on objects that operate in, on, or near military installations, operating and training areas, restricted airspaces, and "other areas of interest." The AARO's mission is to classify such objects and "mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security." Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick will lead the office as its director, after most recently being the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center.

A study on the neurotoxin titled "A concise synthesis of tetrodotoxin" has been published in the journal Science.

Researchers from the New York University (NYU) have devised a new 22-step process for synthesizing tetrodotoxin (TTX), the most potent natural neurotoxin known to humanity. Pufferfish and other marine animals produce TTX, and researchers have attempted to synthesize the toxic molecule for over a century. While not the first synthesis of tetrodotoxin, Professor Dirk Trauner from NYU, one of the study's authors, told Interesting Engineering that their method "is the most efficient to date, improving on state of the art by 30 fold."

Though TTX is highly poisonous to humans, blocking nerves from sending signals to muscles and leading to paralysis, it is believed to serve other functions such as acting as a pheromone or a feeding stimulant in other organisms. However, the nerve-blocking action of TTX interests researchers for its potential to unlock a new class of painkillers, circumventing the need for opioids or similar painkillers with addictive properties.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express satellite captured the new images.

The Mars Express captured views of the Ius Chasma and Tithonium Chasma, comprising part of the Mars' Valles Marineris canyon system. Valles Marineris is 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) long, 200 kilometers (124 miles) wide, and up to 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) long. The canyon is almost ten times longer, twenty times wider, and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon in the United States.

The canyon system is the largest in the Solar System, and on Earth would reach from the northernmost point of Norway to the southernmost point of Sicily. The above high-resolution image was taken with the Mar Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on 21 April 2022 and is a "true colour" image, appearing as it would to the human eye. The resolution captures about 25 meters (82 feet) per pixel.

Dutch company Land Life has inadvertently triggered a wildfire in Spain.

Land Life is a reforestation company that uses a technology-focused approach to scale up its tree planting efforts in areas that need to be reforested. This contrasts with afforestation, which plants trees to create forests where there never was one. Land Life helps companies offset their carbon footprint by planting trees to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

The company is currently working on a reforestation project in Ateca in Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain. Unfortunately, Spain and many other European countries are currently experiencing widespread droughts and fires amidst a severe and ongoing heatwave. The poor conditions primed the area for disaster, and when contractors working for Land Life were working in the area, their activity on July 18th sparked a fire that led to roughly 35,000 acres of land being burnt.

A study on serotonin depression titled "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence" has been published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Researchers from the University College London (UCL) have conducted a major review of the studies that have looked at serotonin activity and depression, including previous meta-analyses and reviews, and found no evidence of a link between the two. This suggests that depression is not the result of a chemical imbalance as is often claimed and raises questions about what antidepressants are actually doing.

Most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), designed to raise unusually low serotonin levels. The review looks at various mechanisms tested by many studies, with one approach artificially lowering serotonin levels by depriving individuals of specific amino acids in their diet required to make serotonin, which did not produce depression in hundreds of healthy participants.

A team of divers has stumbled across an ancient shipwreck full of treasure within the Bay of Abou Qir located near Alexandria.

The discovery was announced by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM), and according to reports, the ancient Greek shipwreck dates back to the Ptolemaic era (305 to 30 BC). The team of divers detected the ship with a prototype sonar ray, and when they approached, the divers noticed it was under approximately 15 feet of clay.

According to Franck Goddio, the president of IEASM, the ship sank in the depths after large blocks from the temple of Amun fell onto it. Notably, Goddio and his fellow colleagues believe that the ship was originally docked at a wharf before a cataclysmic event triggered the destruction of the Amun temple. Furthermore, the blocks that crushed the ship pinned it to the bottom of the canal and simultaneously provided it with the correct conditions to be preserved for such a long amount of time.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has only just begun its science operations, and it's already breaking records.

Since it began science operations, Webb has been making headlines for the phenomenal images it has produced, and now researchers believe the world's most advanced space telescope has snapped an image of the oldest galaxy ever observed. Reports indicate that NASA's newest space telescope has detected light from the galaxy called GLASS-z13, that's estimated to be 13.5 billion years old.

GLASS-z13 being 13.5 billion years old means that Webb has observed light from a galaxy that's age is only 300 million years after the Big Bang. Notably, Webb's recent observation has beaten the previous record holder for the oldest galaxy ever observed by 100 million years, which was a galaxy called GN-Z1 spotted by the famous Hubble Space Telescope in 2016.