Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 8

The Solar Orbiter is on a journey toward the Sun, and last year, in March, it reached the halfway point where it snapped twenty-five images of our local star, which have now been stitched together to form an insanely high-resolution image of the Sun.

For those that don't know, the Sun is preposterously large compared to Earth, with its diameter measuring 1.39 million km across (863,705 miles), compared to Earth's diameter of 12,769 kilometers (7,926 miles). Given its massive size, the Sun is responsible for 99% of the mass in the Solar System while also being the anchor point that all objects in the Solar System orbit due to its intense gravitational pull. The Sun has been doing this for the past 4.6 billion years, and while it can be violent and unpredictable at times with its constant outbursts of charged particles, without it, we wouldn't have life on Earth. Check out the image here.

Despite its necessity, we still don't know everything about the Sun, which is why the European Space Agency (ESA) has sent the Solar Orbiter on a journey to investigate it, with the space probe tasked to capture high-resolution images of our local star as it progresses. The Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020 and is equipped with high-resolution imaging equipment, along with instruments to measure the Sun's magnetic fields and solar wind. The Solar Orbiter will come within 42 million km (26,097,590 miles).

Neuralink, the Elon Musk-led brain chip company, announced its preparing its next round of experiments, and this time around patients will be able to control a robotic arm with their thoughts.

Neuralink took to its official X account to announce a new "feasibility trial" that's goal is to expand the company's Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) offerings. Notably, the new trial will use the N1 implant, which involves controlling "assistive robotic arm". Neuralink writes the new trial has the objective of taking one of the first important steps to not only restoring digital freedom but also physical freedom for those suffering from paraplegia and other physically debilitating ailments.

Along with a description of the new trial, the company posted a link to its patient registry, which suggests Neuralink is still looking for the right patient. While Neuralink has never attempted this kind of trial before it has been conducted others in the past, with reports indicating that Caltech researchers implanted what was described as a "neural prosthetic device" into the brain of a paraplegic man. The device was connected to a robotic arm that he was able to control with his thoughts.

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface (BCI) startup, Neuralink, has announced it has received approval to test its BCI implant with an assistive robotic arm.

The first-ever study will see someone using a BCI to control a robotic arm with just their thoughts, the post by Neuralink on X said: "We're excited to announce the approval and launch of a new feasibility trial to extend BCI control using the N1 implant to an investigational assistive robotic arm".

Brain implants and controlling a robotic arm isn't something entirely new, as it has been done before with cumbersome setups that required cables running to the research participants' head and then to a computer that decoded the brain signals. Neuralink's brain-computer interface (BCI) is wireless, making everything far easier. On top of that, Musk has Tesla and its robotics side, so it's a family affair technology wise.

A NASA scientist has captured an unprecedented view of a secret US military research base that is known as the "city under the ice".

That NASA scientist is Chad Greene, who was joined by other NASA engineers who were conducting testing on the Greenland Ice Sheet with a radar instrument, which gathers valuable data by beaming out radio waves at a target and measuring how long it takes for them to get back to the instrument. By doing this, researchers are able to map the surface of ice sheets, and what's beneath them. Using NASA's UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) mounted to the belly of the aircraft, researchers detected signs of a base beneath the ice.

The team corroborated the radar data with the known coordinates of Camp Century, otherwise known as the "city under the ice". This scientific military base was drilled directly into the ice sheet of Greenland and was used during the Cold War as an outpost to conduct experiments on creating nuclear missiles capable of hitting the Soviet Union across Greenland. Camp Century is now approximately 100 feet below the surface, and the evidence of the base gathered recently by NASA scientists lines up with the historical maps of the base's planned layout, such as underground parallel structures used for all of the base's many facilities.

SpaceX recently completed its sixth flight of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, and now the company has released awesome footage of Ship splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

The Elon Musk-led company recently unlocked a new phase of development following its sixth launch of Starship, which was deemed a successful test flight despite automated health monitoring checks triggering Super Heavy, the booster, to abort a catch on the launch tower.

The suborbital flight took place on November 19, and the ship landed off the northwestern coast of Australia. The splashdown moment was captured by a camera floating in the water near the landing zone, which shows the 165-foot-tall upper stage of Starship slowly making a descent by firing its boosters. Notably, Flight 5 was launched during the morning time in Texas, which resulted in a splashdown in the Indian Ocean during the night local time. As for Flight 6, SpaceX conducted the launch during the late afternoon on November 19, resulting in a splashdown during daytime.

NASA has announced it will be choosing SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket to send its Dragonfly spacecraft to one of Saturn's many moons. The goal will be to investigate the moon for any signs of ancient or current life.

The space agency took to its blog on its official website to announce it has selected SpaceX to power its $3.35 billion mission to Saturn's massive moon Titan. The mission will involve the use of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which was also used as a means of transportation for NASA's Psyche and Europa Clipper missions. As for what SpaceX will be getting out of that $3.35 mission budget, NASA writes the contract with the launch provider as a firm-fixed-price contract that has a value of approximately $256.6 million, which includes all launch services and other mission-related costs.

As for what Dragonfly will achieve, NASA plans on launching the car-sized rotorcraft to Titan in July 2028. Dragonfly will spend six years getting to Titan, where it will land and then go from location to location, testing samples of materials it collects. Titan was selected as a location because it is the only known body beyond Earth that hosts stable liquids, meaning it could be possible the environment is capable of supporting life. Notably, Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered rotorcraft that will spend approximately 2.5 Earth years on the surface of Saturn's moon.

Tesla is actively hiring from its AI Teleoperation team, with successful applicants needing to use a state-of-the-art VR rig to remotely use and train their robotaxis and humanoid robots.

We last heard that the company was paying $48 per hour for staffers to wear a motion capture suit and use a VR headset to train the robots, but now Tesla's AI Teleoperation team will provide remote access to their robotaxis and humanoid robots, with state-of-the-art VR rigs to remotely operate them in the real world.

What to expect: Tesla AI's Teleoperation team is charged with providing remote access to our robotaxis and humanoid robots. Our cars and robots operate autonomously in challenging environments. As we iterate on the AI that powers them, we need the ability to access and control them remotely. This requires building highly optimized low latency reliable data streaming over unreliable transports in the real world.

SpaceX's exciting Starlink team has just enabled its direct-to-cell satellite communications, with a direct connection from Starlink satellites to your smartphone, bypassing traditional cell towers in areas with no coverage.

Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk said that Starlink's new satellite "enables internet connectivity for your mobile phone with no extras equipment or special app. It just works". The new direct-to-cell Starlink connectivity isn't available in every country, but it is available through particular carriers in the following countries:

It's an incredible move by Starlink, slowing webbing out their satellite communications technology with rocket launch after rocket launch, new satellite after new satellite. Personally I'm using Starlink here in South Australia, and enjoying 250-350Mbps where I can only get 50-60Mbps through fiber in my area.

SpaceX is cooking up some upgrades to its Starlink satellite internet system, with upgrades of up to 2Gbps speeds and even lower latency in the future.

At the annual Baron Investment Conference on Friday, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell said: "Next generation, we'll have smaller beams, more capacity per beam, lower latency". The SpaceX COO continued, talking about the continuous upgrades to Starlink's satellite communication and its advancements moving fast.

Shotwell said that similar to Moore's Law, which famously predicted the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years, she added: "The cycle of the increased capacity is basically on the same cycle as chipsets, which is like double the capability every two years".

SpaceX has just wrapped up its sixth flight of Starship where the company once again expanded the envelop of what's possible with Ship and its booster Super Heavy.

The Elon Musk-led company launched Starship from Starbase on November 19, 2024, with the massive Super Heavy booster engaging its 33 Raptor engines to push Ship to its designated altitude for separation. Once separation was complete, Super Heavy began the process of returning to the launch site for a catch attempt by the launch tower, as was proven possible in Flight 5.

However, during this phase, automated health monitoring checks were conducted on Super Heavy and the catch tower, resulting in risk mitigation processes being triggered, causing Super Heavy to abort the catch tower attempt.

In the future, electronic data storage systems could consist of complex, dense strands of DNA that has all of the readable data mapped to the genetic code.

While that sounds like something out of a comic book or a futuristic sci-fi film, it's exactly what researchers are attempting to do, and according to recent reports, the team has created what is the equivalent of the printing press but for writing data to DNA. Typical forms of writing data to DNA sequences consisted of writing a single letter a time, or the equivalent of threading beads on a string one at time. However, the team has created a new technique that dramatically speeds up the process.

Reports indicate the team created 700 DNA bricks, each of these bricks contains 24 bases. These bricks can be arranged in a desired order to "print" the applicable data onto blank DNA template strands. The new process has increased the writing process from one at a time to up to 350 bits simultaneously. Here's how it works. Researchers decided to encode the data using binary, or ones and zeros. Some of the DNA bricks are chemically marked one or zero.

A mystery surrounds NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft that entered Mars' orbit in 1975, eventually landing on the surface of the Red Planet and becoming the first American spacecraft to touch down on Mars.

One of Viking 1's goals was to test if life resided on the surface of Earth's neighbor, and at the time, much of the testing methodology mimicked processes used on Earth to test samples for the presence of microbes. These processes involve the use of water, one of life's main ingredients, but according to one scientist, the involvement of water could have been what killed any Martian life within the soil samples, resulting in the testing results being negative.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany recognizes the possibility that life may have been discovered by Viking, but the water-based testing process of its experiments could have unintentionally killed it.

A legally mandated report from the Department of Defense's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (ARRO), a Pentagon office responsible for UFO reports, has issued a recent report revealing how many cases it has solved over the past year and how many remain a mystery.

The new report was released just a day after the House subcommittee conducted a hearing about UFO, or as recently re-branded to UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. During the hearing, witnesses testified to programs being in place to gather wreckage of UFOs, potential alien visitations, and more. However, the Pentagon's report from 2023-2024 states,"to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology."

The latest report from ARRO says that none of the reports from US personnel of UAP sightings over the reporting period indicated observers didn't suffer from any adverse health effects. The report states 118 cases have been resolved, with 70% of the closed cases of suspected UFOs being attributed to weather balloons. 8% of closed cases were attributed to birds, and 4% attributed to satellites. ARRO says there are 444 remaining cases, but it doesn't have enough evidence to determine the source of the sighting. In total, the office has 1,5652 UAP reports.

SpaceX is currently preparing for the sixth launch of the world's largest and most powerful rocket Starship, with company CEO Elon Musk taking to his personal X account to share a video of the success of the last flight.

It was only yesterday SpaceX announced it had moved the Starship vehicle to the launch pad ahead of the scheduled launch on November 18. Now, SpaceX has announced via its official X account that Super Heavy has also joined its counterpart at the launch pad. The sixth launch of Starship will be very similar to the fifth launch, which was when SpaceX demonstrated the impressive capability of being able to launch and catch a 233-foot-tall or 20-story building-sized rocket mid-air.

The catch was achieved with the "chopstick" arms attached to the Mechazilla launch tower, which closed around Super Heavy as it made a controlled descent back down to the launch pad. Flight 6 will essentially be the same as Flight 5, but with a few small additions. SpaceX's objectives will be once again to return Super Heavy back to the launch site for a catch and reignite a Raptor engine in space, along with testing a bunch of heatshield experiments and maneuvering capabilities.

SpaceX is currently preparing for the 6th launch of the world's most powerful and largest rocket, Starship, where the company will once again attempt to catch the monstrous rocket on the launch pad.

SpaceX has taken to its official X account to share images of the "Ship" section of the rocket being rolled out to the launch pad in preparation for the coming launch. The images reveal an engineering joke next to the "S31" moniker, an indicator of the ship version. The engineering joke is a banana holding a smaller banana for scale, which is likely a reference to engineers using a banana for scale when building something extremely large, such as Starship.

Let's use that banana for scale. Starship fully stacked measures an astonishing 400 feet tall, and the average banana measures anywhere between 6 and 9 inches in height. Starship's 400-foot height in inches is 4,800 inches, and if you divide that by the average length of a banana, let's use 7 inches, it would mean Starship is 685 bananas tall.

The world of robotics is certainly heating up with the recent showcase of Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot and now Chinese company Deep Robotics' unveiling of its quadruped Lynx.

The company released a video on its YouTube channel showcasing the capabilities of the Lynx, such as its ability to navigate uphill and downhill terrain that is rough, rocky, and unstable. Lynx uses all-terrain wheels for hands and feet, and it appears the design has been inspired by off-road quad bikes but combined with traditional robotics. The video showcases the Lynx conquering uphill and downhill slopes at 50-degree inclines in a woodland setting while also being able to climb up a rock that measures 80cm from the ground.

Deep Robotics is an already established robotics manufacturer with the company's flagship products, the X20 and X30 models, already being adopted across various sectors such as security, exploration, and public rescue operations. Notably, X20 models were used to perform inspections on earthquake-stricken regions in 2023. The robots are capable of carrying out independent searches by themselves or also coordinated searches over an area, making them useful for gathering information on a location.

A network of four telescopes identified an asteroid entering Earth's atmosphere on October 22, and just two hours later, it plummeted over the Pacific Ocean.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey located in Hawaii is a network of telescopes dedicated to identifying asteroids that have a trajectory that lines up with Earth. The system scans the sky for any moving objects and maps their trajectory, marking those that are going to collide with the planet. As for last month's asteroid, the detection system didn't spot the space rock due to its position near the edge of two adjacent viewing fields.

The position of the asteroid resulted in it being marked as a moving object rather than an "imminent impactor" which is what it should have been categorized as. Notably, this is the third "imminent impactor" detected only hours before collision this year, with the two others being 2024 BX1, approximately 3.3 feet wide, and burnt up over Berlin, and the other, 2024 RW1, which exploded over the Philippines.

A former Pentagon official has testified to Congress that the US government has evidence that "we are not alone in the cosmos" and that a government "cabal" is hiding the evidence from the American people, and the world.

Luiz Elizondo was the former head of the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and was tasked with investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Elizondo was joined by other witness and UFO whistleblowers that testified before the House Oversight Committee.

Elizondo said: "Excessive secrecy has lead to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public, all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos" after which he referred to the group as a "cabal".

In May 2023, an "alien signal" was beamed at Earth from Mars, and it contained a coded message that has now been finally deciphered.

The "alien signal" was beamed at Earth by the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe as part of a partnership between the ESA and Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project is an art piece called "A Sign in Space," but it has real experimental value as its been used to test how long it would take for a real alien signal detected on Earth to be deciphered.

After more than a year of deciphering, father and daughter team Ken and Keli Chaffin have decoded the message, and according to a statement from the ESA, the team was able to decode the signal by following their "intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end." Before the signal could be decoded, it needed to be extracted from the raw radio signal data, which took 10 days and a group of more than 5,000 citizen scientists.

The CEO of Telegram has offered women free IVF treatment if they are willing to use his sperm for the procedure, in what he says is an effort to help couples struggling with infertility.

It was only back in early September that Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that he has more than 100 biological kids, and that he plans to open-source his DNA so it's easier for his biological children to find each other. Durov explained the initiative was born when a friend struggling with infertility approached him for his sperm, which Durov said resulted in the boss of the sperm clinic informing him there is a shortage of "high quality donor material".

Now, a new partnership with Durov and the AltraVita IVF clinic, based in Moscow, Russia, is offering women free IVF fertilization if they choose to use Durov's sperm. According to the AltraVita website, it's the exclusive source for Durov's sperm, and the Telegram CEO is willing to "finance all the IVF protocols that use his sperm". For those couples struggling immensely with pregnancy, IVF can be a prosperous route. However, it doesn't always work, and in some cases, depending on the region, it can result in thousands of dollars spent with no luck.