The space race has been silently intensifying with the geopolitical battle raging on the ground. With the United States having delayed its Mars mission to bring back samples to Earth, China could beat its rival in achieving that milestone. 4th Failure? NASA’s Artemis Rocket ‘Leaks’ During Pre-Launch Test As US Aims To Land Humans On […].
The Universe is a vast place, filled with more galaxies than we’ve ever been able to count, even in just the portion we’ve been able to observe. Some 40 years ago, Carl Sagan taught the world that there were hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, and perhaps as many as 100 billion galaxies within the observable Universe. Although he never said it in his famous television series, Cosmos, the phrase “billions and billions” has become synonymous with his name, and also with the number of stars we think of as being inherent to each galaxy, as well as the number of galaxies contained within the visible Universe.
But when it comes to the number of galaxies that are actually out there, we’ve learned a number of important facts that have led us to revise that number upwards, and not just by a little bit. Our most detailed observations of the distant Universe, from the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, gave us an estimate of 170 billion galaxies. A theoretical calculation from a few years ago — the first to account for galaxies too small, faint, and distant to be seen — put the estimate far higher: at 2 trillion. But even that estimate is too low. There ought to be at least 6 trillion, and perhaps more like 20 trillion, galaxies, if we’re ever able to count them all. Here’s how we got there.
In his keynote at Amazon re: MARS, Alexa AI senior vice president and head scientist Rohit Prasad argued that the emerging paradigm of ambient intelligence offer… See more.
Rohit Prasad on the pathway to generalizable intelligence and what excites him most about his re: MARS keynote.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated an artificial organic neuron, a nerve cell, that can be integrated with a living plant and an artificial organic synapse. Both the neuron and the synapse are made from printed organic electrochemical transistors.
On connecting to the carnivorous Venus flytrap, the electrical pulses from the artificial nerve cell can cause the plant’s leaves to close, although no fly has entered the trap. Organic semiconductors can conduct both electrons and ions, thus helping mimic the ion-based mechanism of pulse (action potential) generation in plants. In this case, the small electric pulse of less than 0.6 V can induce action potentials in the plant, which in turn causes the leaves to close.
“We chose the Venus flytrap so we could clearly show how we can steer the biological system with the artificial organic system and get them to communicate in the same language,” says Simone Fabiano, associate professor and principal investigator in organic nanoelectronics at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping.
There are still questions about the Moon readiness of Artemis 1 after Monday’s wet dress rehearsal was not without its problems.
Inside NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, scientists form bubbles from ultracold gas, shown in pink in this illustration. Lasers, also depicted, are used to cool the atoms, while an atom chip, illustrated in gray, generates magnetic fields to manipulate their shape, in combination with radio waves.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Continue reading “Ultracold Bubbles on Space Station Open New Avenues of Quantum Research” »
Monday is NASA’s fourth attempt at the final prelaunch test for its Artemis 1 Moon rocket.
The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind—known as a white dwarf—is sucking in debris from both the system’s inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers and colleagues report today.
This is the first case of cosmic cannibalism in which astronomers have observed a white dwarf consuming both rocky-metallic material, likely from a nearby asteroid, and icy material, presumed to be from a body similar to those found in the Kuiper belt at the fringe of our own solar system.
