Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 94

NASA is expecting a large asteroid to make a close approach with Earth in the coming days, according to CNEOS database entries.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology's Small-Body Database Lookup has listed the space rock 418135 (2008 AG33), which is estimated to be anywhere between 1,150 and 2,560 feet in diameter. 2008 AG33 is scheduled to make a close approach with Earth on April 28 when it will fly safely past our planet at 23,264 miles per hour.

Furthermore, NASA's database states that 2008 AG33 will be at its closest point to Earth when its about 2 million miles away from Earth. For a perspective on just how far away 2 million miles is the moon is 240,000 miles away from Earth. Above is an screenshot of the CNEOS database orbit tracker that shows the asteroids orbit and its position in space in relation to the Sun, Earth and other planets.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to observe a distant "wispy" or "ultra-diffuse" galaxy called GAMA 526784.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published a new image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope, and it showcases GAMA 526784, which is the dimly light region of space slightly left of the center of the image. This galaxy resides in the constellation Hydra and is approximately 4 billion light-years away from Earth.

Notably, GAMA 526784 and other ultra-diffuse galaxies harbor many mysteries that astronomers are yet to explain fully. One of those mysteries is how ultra-diffuse galaxy's dark matter content has only been observed as either extremely low or extremely high. Another is how they contain an unusual amount of globular clusters when compared to other galaxies.

There are things that are exclusively something that you'd say "only in Japan" which is reflected in my headline, where today I saw Reuters sharing a video of "Pedia_Roid": a lifelike child-looking robot that dentists are using in training.

The robot is made in the style of a 6-year-old girl, who is nervous about her dental treatment -- don't worry fantasy real-world, but robotic young girl, I'd be nervous as well -- which "realistically mimics the typical reaction & behavior of child patient who is nervous of receiving dental treatment".

Nissin Dental Products Inc. made the robot, specifically designer for dental, medical, and healthcare students to hone their skills on treating young patients. These learning skills involve communication with the child, facial expression monitoring, avoiding medical accidents, as well as basic life support in an emergency. The company explains that these training situations are "difficult to perform on live child patients". Well, yeah... uh.

NASA has released several new images of the moon taken aboard the floating laboratory called the International Space Station (ISS).

The official International Space Station Twitter account published four of the images on April 24, showcasing the power of the ISS's vantage point of 250 miles above the surface of Earth. From that vantage point, astronauts aboard the station are able to man cameras and snap incredible photographs of not only the moon but also the Earth.

The new collection of moon images has been uploaded to Flickr, where they can be downloaded in high resolution for wallpaper use. Furthermore, the Flickr listings for each of the images revealed they were captured with a Nikon D4 camera on a variety of different dates throughout 2022. Each of the images shows the moon from various places in the ISS's orbit around Earth, revealing just how different the moon can look depending on the viewer's location.

A new report from Fox News correspondent Lauren Green has revealed that a Pennsylvania elementary school is being sued by the Satanic Temple.

The Satanic Temple has filed a lawsuit with against Northern Elementary School in York, Pennsylvania, on the grounds that the elementary school did not allow them to host "an After School Satan Club last week". The lawsuit was filed on constitutional grounds and claims that the Northern York County School Board discriminated against the Satanic Temple by refusing its after-school gathering when other organizations were approved.

Last week top scientists from the US National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine recommended that exploring Uranus is a top priority for science.

The mission proposed by the scientists would include sending a Uranus Orbiter and a Probe to a strange distant planet. The orbiter would be used to measure and observe Uranus' exotic atmosphere, and the probe would be sent deep within the atmosphere to gather vital data from within gas giant. In the published piece by the scientists, they outline that this mission could take place sometime in 2030 if engineers began the development process in 2023.

While the plan certainly seems like it will yield great academic value, it hedges on the development of launch vehicles capable of taking the orbiter and probe to their destination. The survey's author didn't directly reference Elon Musk's SpaceX but did write, "a Uranus mission is favored because an end-to-end mission concept exists that can be implemented in the 2023-2032 decade on currently available launch vehicles."

NASA has taken to its blog to explain how its Hubble Space Telescope has been used to explore galactic wings.

NASA posted to its social channels and website last Friday to showcase a picture of two merging galaxies located in the VV-689 system. The two merging galaxies have been nicknamed "Angel Wing", as the above image shows that the two galaxies are currently on a collision course that has created an almost symmetrical shape that depicts angel wings.

Notably, the above image of colliding galaxies comes from the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project, a crowdsourced program involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers who comb through Hubble's data to locate and classify galaxies. In Hubble's long trove of data, the volunteers have discovered many galaxies that are yet to be fully studied and understood.

Chinese officials have revealed plans to construct a "space defense system" that will begin testing sometime in 2025.

In an interview with China Central Television, the deputy head of China's National Space Administration (CNSA), the equivalent of NASA in China, Wu Yanhua, revealed plans to construct a space defense system that would be able to monitor space for any potentially dangerous asteroid and redirect it if it was on a collision course with Earth.

Furthermore, Wu revealed that the system would include both ground and space-based components and potentially have the capabilities of protecting spacecrafts, per Reuters. Notably, the space defense system would be able to catalog all asteroids and be able to determine the likelihood of their orbits crossing over with Earth in the distant future through the use of calculated computer simulations. The Global Times reports that the project hasn't reached full approval as it requires "coordination of multiple departments."

NASA has many ways of observing Mars, and one of them is the agency's InSight lander, which was designed to measure the planet's interior and allow researchers to develop a better understanding of the history, present, and future of Mars.

In the past, the InSight lander, which first landed on Mars in November 2018, detected marsquakes and measured them with its seismometer, its primary scientific instrument. Now, according to a newly published study in the journal The Seismic Record, the InSight lander has detected two large marsquakes that have broken all previously set records. The first was detected on August 25, 2021, which was followed by the second on September 18, 2021.

The first marsquake was labeled S0976a and lasted for several seconds before passing. The InSight lander's instruments recorded a magnitude of 4.2. The second marsquake lasted much longer than the first, spanning a length of 94 minutes before passing. The 94-minute martian-quake is now the longest marsquake to have ever been detected by humans. Notably, both of the marsquakes came from the far side of Mars, with most of the already recorded marsquakes being traced back to sources of origin near the InSight lander.

NASA's Perseverance Rover first landed on the surface of Mars just over a year ago, on February 18th, 2021.

Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars and, in its first science campaign, has collected eight rock-core samples from the area. It has since journeyed to Jezero's ancient river delta on April 13th, 2022, to begin its second science campaign, known as the "Delta Front Campaign." The new science campaign is expected to be the rover's best chance of finding ancient microbial life signs.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) completed a demonstration of the wireless power beaming at the U.S. Army Research Field at Blossom Point, Maryland.

1.6 kilowatts of power was beamed over a kilometer using a ten gigahertz microwave beam (3,280 feet) as part of the Safe and Continuous Power Beaming - Microwave (SCOPE-M) project. At MIT in Massachusetts, a second SCOPE-M project was set up at the Haystack Ultra Wideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR) transmitter.

The ten gigahertz frequency was chosen for its ability to beam through heavy rain with a power loss of less than five percent and falls within international standards of safety for birds, animals, and humans that may be present. The Maryland tests saw the system operating with 60 percent efficiency, and though they had a lower peak power, the average power level was higher, resulting in more energy being delivered.

Astrobotic revealed the flight model of its new Peregrine lunar lander on April 20th, 2022.

The new model differs from previous test models and is the actual version of Peregrine that will fly to the moon. It is scheduled to land on the moon in the fourth quarter of this year, and doing so would make Peregine the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo program. Peregrine is the first lander that is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) and will fly to the moon on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket.

The patient had a persistent COVID-19 infection lasting 505 days, over 16 months, exceeding the previous record of 335 days.

The patient from the United Kingdom contracted the disease in early 2020, and their weakened immune system and underlying conditions prevented them from entirely clearing the virus from their body. They were in and out of hospital repeatedly following their initial infection and tested positive every time, with genetic sequencing showing the infection was the same and not the result of re-infection.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was inactive for three years as maintenance, consolidation, and upgrade work was performed.

The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and on the 22nd of April at 12:16 CEST, it was restarted for the first time in three years. Two proton beams circulated throughout the LHC's 27-kilometer (16.8 miles) ring in opposite directions with an injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV).

NASA has built the new alloy to withstand extreme environments and temperatures.

NASA innovators have created the NASA Alloy GRX-810, a new metal alloy created using 3D printing. It is an oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) alloy and can endure temperatures exceeding 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (1093 degrees Celsius). Compared to current state-of-the-art alloys, GRX-810's advantages include "twice the strength to resist fracturing," "1,000 times the durability under stress at high temperatures," and is more malleable, with "three and a half times the flexibility to stretch/bend prior to fracturing."

3D printing allowed the NASA team to uniformly disperse nanoscale oxides throughout the alloy, improving durability and high-temperature properties while using a more efficient, cost-effective, and clean manufacturing process. The team also used thermodynamic modeling to determine the final composition of the alloy.

The missile test features the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The missile is also known as Satan II and was tested for the first time at 15:12 Moscow time (12:12 UTC) on April 20th from a silo launcher. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the missile would make his country's enemies "stop and think." The missile was launched from Plesetsk in northwest Russia and hit its targets in the Kamchatka peninsula, approximately 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) away.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are now expecting to undock the Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) crew from the International Space Station (ISS) on April 23rd.

The crew will undock at 8:35 p.m. EDT on April 23rd (00:35 UTC April 24th) and splash down around 1:46 p.m. Sunday, April 24th (17:46 UTC April 24th) off the coast of Florida. The crew originally left Earth bound for the ISS on April 8th, and were due to return on April 19th, but poor weather conditions on Earth have meant their return has been delayed.

The return was initially pushed back to April 20th, but with the latest update moving their return to the 24th, the crew will have spent another five days aboard the space station on top of their originally planned ten. NASA and Axiom prepared for the possibility that the private astronaut team would spend additional time on the ISS and ensured there were sufficient provisions for all crew members.

A study on antidepressant effectiveness titled "Antidepressants and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for patients with depression: Analysis of the medical expenditure panel survey from the United States" has been published in the journal PLOS One.

The study is a meta-analysis that examined data from the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS) spanning 2005 to 2016. MEPS is a longitudinal study that follows 17.47 million adults in the United States diagnosed with depression, of which 57.6% take antidepressants. Females made up 67.9% of the MEPS cohort, and 60.5% were on antidepressants compared to 51.5% of males.

Within the MEPS cohort, mental health saw a general improvement over time. However, there was no detectable difference between those taking antidepressants and those who didn't. The researchers concluded that antidepressants do not "continue to improve patients' HRQoL [health-related quality of life] over time" and that instead of focusing on the short-term effects of pharmacotherapy, future studies should consider longer-term impacts.

The U.S Department of Defense has given the go-ahead for a new prototype nuclear reactor in Idaho.

The department has signed off on the Project Pele plan, which includes plans to build a mobile nuclear microreactor prototype and reactor fuel outside of Idaho before assembling and operating the reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. Two designs are being considered, and officials have estimated that building and testing the microreactor would take about three years.

Elon Musk is out and hyping his latest product -- Optimus -- Tesla's upcoming robot that the SpaceX and Tesla boss says will be "worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD".

The news on Optimus came during Tesla's Q1 2022 earnings call, where Musk said: "I was surprised that people did not realize the magnitude of the Optimus robot program. The importance of Optimus will become apparent in the coming years. Those who are insightful or looking, listening carefully, will understand that Optimus will ultimately be worth more than the car business, worth more than FSD".

Until now, we've seen nothing but a hype trailer... a man dressed in all-white spandex, pretending to be a robot. It wasn't a robot... it was a human, but that's how Tesla is selling it. Like it's this whizz-bang next-gen robot that is beyond The Jetsons but we'll have to wait and see what Musk and his team have in store for us.