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Category: space – Page 624

Massive solar storms in space can be picked up by iOS and Android smartphones, meaning billions of people have a personal geomagnetic storm detector — but the signals threaten to interfere with future location-based applications.

Hoping to get the public more involved in science, study author Sten F. Odenwald, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, published a paper on the topic April 2 in Space Weather. It indicates that even through the unavoidable interference caused by other smartphone components, the phone’s built-in magnetometers can detect geomagnetic storms.

“Smartphones — at least theoretically — should be able to detect some of the strongest storms, pretty easily in fact,” Odenwald told The Academic Times. “Especially if you happen to live up in the northern latitudes — in Minnesota or in Canada, or places like that where it really rocks and rolls.”

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Circa 2020 o.o

The NASA Perseverance Rover has a device aboard called MOXIE that will convert the air available on Mars into oxygen. The device is a test, and if the technology was used on a larger scale could produce oxygen for humans to breathe on the Red Planet and could be used for rocket fuel. NASA knows that one of the most challenging parts of putting people on Mars will be getting them off the planet and back to Earth.

Two get a crew for off Mars would require 55000 pounds of oxygen to produce thrust from 15000 pounds rocket fuel. Rather than send all of the oxygen needed from Earth to Mars, scientists want to enable the astronauts to create the rocket fuel on Mars. MOXIE is a first-generation oxygen generator meant to test technology that could create the required oxygen.

MOXIE stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment and is an experiment that is entirely separate from the Perseverance’s primary science mission. One of the main missions of Perseverance is to recover rock samples that can be returned to earth that might have signs of ancient microbial life. MOXIE is focused on the engineering required for future human exploration efforts.

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Thermoelectrics directly convert heat into electricity and power a wide array of items—from NASA’s Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars to travel coolers that chill beverages.

A Clemson University physicist has joined forces with collaborators from China and Denmark to create a new and potentially paradigm-shifting high-performance thermoelectric compound.

A material’s atomic structure, which is how atoms arrange themselves in space and time, determines its properties. Typically, solids are crystalline or amorphous. In crystals, atoms are in an orderly and symmetrical pattern. Amorphous materials have randomly distributed atoms.

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Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity. Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity. For example, many languages have a word that denotes the color red, but no language has individual words to distinguish ten different shades of the color. These additional words would complicate the vocabulary and rarely would they be useful to achieve precise communication.

A study published on 23 March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed how develop spontaneous systems to name colors. A study by Marco Baroni, ICREA research professor at the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), conducted with members of Facebook AI Research (France).

For this study, the researchers formed two artificial neural networks trained with two generic deep learning methods. As Baroni explains: “we made the networks play a color-naming game in which they had to communicate about color chips from a continuous color space. We did not limit the “language” they could use, however, when they learned to play the game successfully, we observed the color-naming terms these artificial neural networks had developed spontaneously.”

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New Horizons is the fifth most distant spacecraft from Earth.

Pioneer 10, which was launched in 1972 and was the first probe to pass through the asteroid belt and to fly by Jupiter, reached 50 AU on Sept. 22, 1990. Today, it is approximately 129 AU from Earth.

Its sister ship, Pioneer 11, reached 50 AU a year later in 1991. It was launched in 1973 and in addition to flying by Jupiter, was the first to make direct observations of Saturn. It is now about 105 AU from Earth.

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