Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 87

Astronaut Matthias Maurer from the European Space Agency (ESA) returned to Earth on May 6th, 2022, after a 176-day stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Speaking with German broadcaster ARD, Maurer recounted what he could see from space as the war in Ukraine unfolded after starting on February 24th, 2022, about a week after passing three months aboard the station. Maurer said the war "was clearly visible to the naked eye from space," noting "huge black columns of smoke over cities like Mariupol."

Maurer described seeing the country around the time the war began, saying, "the whole country went dark at night," but people aboard the station particularly recognized Kyiv. Within the first days of the war, they could "see lightning at night" and even explosions from "rockets hitting."

A study on the civilization titled "Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have used airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) from a helicopter while flying over the Amazon basin to reveal evidence of previously unknown settlements. These ruins were built by a lost pre-Hispanic civilization and confirm that the region was capable of sustaining large populations of people.

Thousands of infrared LIDAR pulses per second revealed two large settlements (147 hectares and 315 hectares) and more connected by a network of roads and causeways. The settlements also had a "massive water-management infrastructure" that utilized canals and reservoirs. The new findings show the Casarabe culture from the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin extended much further than was previously known.

A study on the new robots titled "Submillimeter-scale multimaterial terrestrial robots" has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Exploratory research by engineers from Northwestern University has led to the creation of the smallest controllable robot yet, in the form of a crab smaller than the size of a flea. It can jump, bend, twist, crawl, walk, and turn without being powered by hydraulics, electricity, or other complex hardware.

The crab is controlled by applying a laser beam to its various body parts, heating them and causing them to change shape. The shape-memory alloy material used to construct the crab allows it to return to its original form once it has cooled. The robot's size allows it to cool very quickly, and using a scanning laser enables it to move in the direction the laser scans.

It has been some 20 years since scientists created the first complete reference human genome that contained approximately 3 billion DNA letters, but now some improvements are being suggested.

The first complete reference human genome has been added to over the years, with approximately two million additional variations of the code being included in the model. Now, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been discussing how that model could be placed into a storage system, but on a far larger scale. Musk replied to a tweet that provided a graph on the size of a human genome in data, which stated the human genome is 3.3 Gb in size, the HIV virus is only 9.7 kb, and the largest known vertebrate genome is 130 Gb.

Antonio Regalado, the senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review, pointed out that the storage for a human genome DNA sequence is "more like 100 gigabytes" due to the extra information from sequencing. Furthermore, Musk went on to speculate that with a "lossless compression delta" and having "a few reference human genomes", one could "probably fit the DNA sequences of all humans alive today in a fairly small data storage system."

NASA has revealed that in 2015 a group of researchers discovered two species of shark living within an active underwater volcano.

The underwater volcano called Kavachi, located in the Soloman Islands, entered into an eruptive phase in October 2021, and as a result, satellite images showed discolored water coming from the submarine volcano located 15 miles south of Vangunu island.

Notably, researchers in 2015 on an expedition discovered two species of shark living within the active crater which seemed to be able to survive in the superheated, acidic, and sulfur-rich water. Experts believe that the sharks must have mutated by some degree to be able to survive in the extreme environment.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to share some images of SpaceX's Falcon 9 doing what it does best.

The SpaceX CEO posted an image of the Falcon 9 rocket that recently lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on May 25, carrying 59 small satellites into orbit. The "rideshare" mission is titled Transporter 5, as SpaceX's rocket is carrying multiple satellites designed for various purposes from a variety of different customers.

As represented by the name, SpaceX's Transporter 5 mission marks the fifth time the company has conducted a small satellite rideshare mission, with the first rideshare mission being in January 2021, when a Falcon 9 transported 143 satellites into orbit. Musk posted an image of the Falcon 9 going supersonic as it barreled its way through Earth's atmosphere before the first stage of the rocket separated to fall back down to Earth and land in the same place it took off from.

Dyson is showing off a little bit of the future, and something that it's actually working on -- some prototype robots that are in development.

The company is working on autonomous robots that would do household chores and tasks around your house, with Dyson wanting to have the autonomous robots on the market, and in your house by 2030. Dyson showed off some impressive fine motor skills in these prototype robots: they have arms that can lift plates out of a rack after they've dried, vacuum the couch, and picking up mess off the ground.

It's all part of the "big bet" that Dyson has placed on making robots that can do your household tasks by 2030, with the company wanting to build the largest robotics research center in the UK -- at the Hullavington Airfield site -- which is close to its design center located in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.

SpaceX has received testing authorization from the FCC to use the Starlink satellite internet service to helicopters, and planes.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation's (SpaceX) Starlink satellite internet service is now testing in-flight internet connectivity to commercial airlines -- you know, planes -- with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk testing it on his private jet.

The FCC filing happened in February 2022, with approval last week: allowing Starlink to test out their satellite internet services in the air. The filing explains: "In this experimental application, SpaceX seeks to expand this testing to allow operation of terminals on a variety of fixed wing and rotary airframes to support internal, commercial, and government research projects".

A study on the fossil specimens titled "Thanatosdrakon amaru, gen. et sp. nov., a giant azhdarchid pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Argentina has been published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

Remains from the largest pterosaur species to have lived have been unearthed in Argentina in South America. Paleontologists found two specimens in the Plottier Formation, located in the Province of Mendoza. The wingspans of each specimen were 23 feet (7 meters) wide and 30 feet (9.1 meters) wide, respectively.

The specimens belong to the species Thanatosdrakon amaru and is the only species within the Thanatosdrakon genus, which belong to the Azhdarchidae family of pterosaurs. Its name derives from "Thanatos," meaning "death," "drakon" meaning "dragon", and "amaru" meaning "flying serpent." The species lived during the Cretaceous period between approximately 145.5 million and 65.5 million years ago, and these particular specimens are at least 86 million years old.

A study on binary stars and their possibility for alien life titled "Binarity of a protostar affects the evolution of the disk and planets" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have determined that planetary systems form very differently around binary stars compared to how they do around singular stars. Almost half of all stars similar in size to our Sun exist in binary star systems, and in the search for potential alien life, looking for stars similar to our own is a good start.

NASA has taken to its blog to hone in on an elliptical galaxy and a surrounding unusual star-forming dwarf galaxy.

The space agency explains that the elliptical galaxy is called NGC 541, and the irregular dwarf galaxy seen as the blueish object in the above image is named the Minkowski's Object. Notably, NASA explains that elliptical galaxies are almost egg-shaped galaxies that consists of a dense group of stars that have formed after a galaxy merger. These galaxies shoot out radio jets that can't be seen by human eyes, but are detectable with NASA's high-tech instruments equipped to space telescopes such as Hubble.

Furthermore, the radio jet that has been shot out of NGC 541 has "likely" caused the star-formation that can be seen in Minkowski's Object as the extreme heat from the jet compresses the surrounding gas, heating it up - ionizing it. The ionized gas converts back to its lower-energy state, resulting in a radiation cloud. Over time this cloud then cools, beginning the slow process of starbirth. For context, Minkowski's Object holds approximately 20 million stars and is only 7.5 million years old.

Celestis, a space company based out of Texas, launches cremated human remains into space for space burials.

The cremated remains of 47 individuals from five countries are being launched by Celestis from Florida's Space Coast this week. The remains will be onboard a telecommunications satellite, which will orbit Earth for about a decade until it is decommissioned and eventually de-orbits and burns up on re-entry through the atmosphere.

Celestis was founded in 1994, and innovations in the space industry have allowed the company to increase its frequency of launches from about one per seven-year period to having five scheduled in the upcoming 14 months. The packages the company offers start at around $5,000.

Researchers have constructed a new soft robot capable of navigating through mazes without the use of batteries, motors, or computers.

The new spiral-shaped device is made from a rubber-like material that is impregnated with liquid crystals. When the device is placed on a surface, and that surface is heated to at least 131 Fahrenheit, the areas on the device that are touching the surface begin to heat up and expand, while the areas that aren't touching the surface "remain static". The result of this interaction with the heated up surface causes the device to snap in a twisting motion that moves it up to 3.8 millimeters per second.

Notably, when placed in a maze, the soft robot moves in one direction until it reaches an obstacle. Suppose the device cannot pass the obstacle after several attempts. In that case, it will switch its orientation to the opposite of what it currently was, meaning the soft robot will simply collide with all obstacles in its path until it eventually finds its correct path out of the maze. Furthermore, the researchers were able to demonstrate the soft robot with no intelligent control was able to navigate over sand, pebbles, climb slopes, and even push small aluminum cylinders.

The space agency took to its blog on May 19 to share a new study that focused on the universe's expansion rate.

The press release found on the NASA website details a study that used the Hubble Space Telescope, along with other highly advanced instruments designed to observe the universe in a variety of different ways, to accumulate a large pool of data that was boiled down to what is now considered "the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe" to date.

The increase in precision has come with its own problems, as researchers found a discrepancy that has left them scratching their heads. The discrepancy is between the "expansion rate as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations from right after the big bang, which predict a different expansion value." Furthermore, NASA states that previous data from Hubble indicated the universe was expanding at a rate of 72 plus or minus 8 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which is much faster than the researchers' prediction of 67.5

A study on the socially aware robot titled "High-efficiency cooling via the monolithic integration of copper on electronic devices" is available on the pre-print server arXiv.

Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T) have devised a new method for robots to move through the world without colliding with people. Their robot uses Spatiotemporal Occupancy Grid Maps (SOGM) to predict where dynamic obstacles like people will move to with time. This video shows a real-life perspective of the robot moving paired with its internal digital representation.

A study on the new cooling method titled "High-efficiency cooling via the monolithic integration of copper on electronic devices" has been published in the journal Nature Electronics.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have invented a new cooling solution for electronic devices, dramatically increasing space efficiency and the power per unit volume of the devices. The team sought to address three shortcomings they identified in current cooling solutions.

The first is that they "can be expensive and difficult to scale up." Secondly, conventional heat spreaders or heat sinks are attached to the top of a device, while most of the heat is typically generated underneath the electronic device, so the cooling solution is less efficient. Thirdly, thermal interface materials (TIMs) like thermal paste or pads are necessary to connect such cooling solutions to electronic devices and have their own inherent inefficiencies.

NASA's Lucy space probe had a unique perspective of the recent total lunar eclipse on the night of May 15th.

Here on Earth, during a total lunar eclipse, the Moon takes on a reddish appearance due to the remaining red wavelengths of sunlight that make their way around Earth and onto the surface of the Moon. However, the Lucy probe operated by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was able to observe the Moon and Earth while about 100 million kilometers (65 million miles) from the latter.

The cancer-killing virus has been used in a human patient for the first time in a new clinical trial.

The experimental virus is called CF33-hNIS, otherwise known as Vaxinia, and was developed by Australian biotech-company Imugene and the City of Hope cancer care and research center in Los Angeles. The drug candidate is what's known as an oncolytic virus, meaning a virus that selectively infects and destroys only cancer cells.

Previous research conducted with animals has shown the potential for the drug also to spur the immune system to become more proficient in destroying cancer cells. If clinical trials go well and the drug is safe for use, more trials involving combinations with currently used cancer therapies such as pembrolizumab will be carried out.

SpaceX has just announced its new "Starlink for RVs" internet service, which is available right now -- and better yet - there's no waitlist on dishes.

The company has taken to Twitter, announcing: "Starlink for RVs can be used anywhere Starlink provides service and is ideal for camping and other activities in rural or remote locations where internet access has been unreliable or completely unavailable".

You're looking at $599 up-front for the Starlink dish, and then $135 per month for the internet connection. This isn't too bad, considering the residential service is $110 per month, but a big key difference with the new Starlink for RV service is that you can 'pause' and 'un-pause' your service. This is a big deal for people travelling less, or more often -- being able to tweak your Starlink for RV service before you go, is pretty awesome.

One startup company is proposing that all of Earth's most important data be gathered and transported off-planet to be kept safe.

The cloud storage provider Lonestar Data Holdings is planning that future services for the company will be storing Earth's most important data off-planet on servers located on the moon. Lonestar founder and CEO Christopher Stott explained the company's perspective, "It's inconceivable to me that we are keeping our most precious assets, our knowledge, and our data, on Earth, where we're setting off bombs and burning things. We need to put our assets in place off our planet, where we can keep it safe."

The theory is certainly an interesting one, and it makes sense on multiple levels for humans to have an off-world server that contains as much of humanity's achievements and failures as possible. However, storing a server on the moon that is accessible on Earth comes with its own challenges that will need to be overcome. For example, the moon has harsh temperatures that vary from -298 degrees Fahrenheit at night, to 224 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.