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An instrument aboard NASA’s New Horizons is sending back data that could help scientists predict when the unmanned deep-space probe will reach interstellar space. Using the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard the spacecraft, a team of researchers led by Southwest Research Institute are learning more about how the solar winds change in the outer regions of the solar system.

Though the solar system may look like a big ball of nuclear fire at the center surrounded by a scattering of tiny, solid objects sitting in a lot of very hard vacuum, all that nothingness is permeated by the solar winds – an unceasing flow of ionized particles from the Sun that forms an uneven bubble around our family of planets called the heliosphere.

The outer limit of the heliosphere is where it encounters materials from interstellar space. This is the point where the solar wind slow down to subsonic speeds due to interacting and then is stopped altogether by the interstellar medium. These two points are called, respectively, the termination shock and the heliopause.

The term “Isotonic” originates from the Greek root words “iso” and “tonos.” The root “iso” isn’t just a file format, it actually means equal. “Tonos,” on the other hand, means to stretch. The word Isotonic can mean a multitude of things stretching from material and physical sciences to liberal arts.

Equal Stretch Regression (Isotonic Regression) is a really cool model for statistical inference. My obsession with isotonic regression has long been expanding, because the model is just so interesting, and cool.

NASA astronaut Nicole Stott examines scenes depicting space from movies and television and breaks down how accurate they really are. What actually happens when your helmet cracks in space like in Total Recall? Are the spacewalks in Gravity realistic? Could there really be AI on a space station like in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

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NASA astronaut breaks down space scenes from film & TV | WIRED

Insects typically have a variety of complex exoskeleton structures, which support them in their movements and everyday activities. Fabricating artificial exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots that match the complexity of these naturally-occurring structures is a key challenge in the field of robotics.

Although researchers have proposed several and techniques to produce exoskeletons for insect-inspired robots, many of these methods are extremely complex or rely on expensive equipment and materials. This makes them unfeasible and difficult to apply on a wider scale.

With this in mind, researchers at the University of California in San Diego have recently developed a new process to design and fabricate components for insect-inspired robots with structures. They introduced this process, called flexoskeleton printing, in a paper prepublished on arXiv.

Lo sviluppo di biorobot autonomi compie un passo avanti grazie allo sviluppo di dispositivi robotici morbidi guidati dal tessuto neuromuscolare. Creati da un gruppo di ricerca dell’ Università dell’Illinois con a capo il professore di ingegneria meccanica e scienze meccaniche Taher Saif e il professore di bioingegneria Rashid Bashir, sono i primi biorobot semiautomatici capaci di muoversi autonomamente.