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Category: space – Page 657

Singapore researchers control Venus flytraps using smartphones

Researchers in Singapore have found a way of controlling a Venus flytrap using electric signals from a smartphone, an innovation they hope will have a range of uses from robotics to employing the plants as environmental sensors.

Luo Yifei, a researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), showed in a demonstration how a signal from a smartphone app sent to tiny electrodes attached to the plant could make its trap close as it does when catching a fly.

“Plants are like humans, they generate electric signals, like the ECG (electrocardiogram) from our hearts,” said Luo, who works at NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Hologram experts can now create real-life images that move in the air

They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University’s holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.

Inspired by the displays of science fiction, the researchers have also engineered battles between equally small versions of the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser that incorporate photon torpedoes launching and striking the enemy vessel that you can see with the naked eye.

“What you’re seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them,” said lead researcher Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. “This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical . These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space.”

In the emptiness of space, Voyager 1 detects plasma ‘hum’

Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.

The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system’s border with interstellar —into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.

Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. “It’s very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth,” Ocker said. “We’re detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas.”

In a first, researchers may have just detected background ‘hum’ of the Universe

If you are a space enthusiast, there is some good news for you. In a new research, that could possibly open doors to many unknown aspects of the Universe, researchers have detected a resonant “hum” produced by the gravitational waves in the Universe. Experts say this can be imagined as a gravitational wave background of the Universe.

This hum of the Universe was reportedly detected by the North American Nanohetz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), and the findings of the research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In a report, ScienceAlert said this gravitational wave background can be imagined as “something like the ringing left behind by massive events throughout our Universe’s history”.

AI “Magic” Just Removed One of the Biggest Roadblocks in Astrophysics

Using neural networks, Flatiron Institute research fellow Yin Li and his colleagues simulated vast, complex universes in a fraction of the time it takes with conventional methods.

Using a bit of machine learning magic, astrophysicists can now simulate vast, complex universes in a thousandth of the time it takes with conventional methods. The new approach will help usher in a new era in high-resolution cosmological simulations, its creators report in a study published online on May 4, 2021, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“At the moment, constraints on computation time usually mean we cannot simulate the universe at both high resolution and large volume,” says study lead author Yin Li, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “With our new technique, it’s possible to have both efficiently. In the future, these AI-based methods will become the norm for certain applications.”

Cracking the Mysteries of Venus: New Information on Planet’s Spin and Internal Structure

15 years of radar measurements provide new information on planet’s spin, internal structure.

Venus is an enigma. It’s the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead.

Now, new observations from the safety of Earth are lifting the veil on some of Venus’ most basic properties. By repeatedly bouncing radar off the planet’s surface over the last 15 years, a UCLA-led team has pinned down the precise length of a day on Venus, the tilt of its axis and the size of its core. The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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