Well lit and close to Earth this summer, Mars and Saturn got the crisp glamor shots that they so richly deserve, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope.
On June 27, Saturn’s orbit brought it into opposition with the Earth, meaning that the two planets were fully aligned with the sun, and as a consequence Saturn could reflect a maximum amount of sunlight back towards Earth. Hubble — NASA’s cheeky interstellar paparazzo and a non-sentient satellite containing imaging hardware — observed the planet on June 6, 2018, while it was about 870 million miles from Earth.
Due to Saturn’s tilt toward the Earth at this moment in its orbit, Hubble was able to very clearly image all of the bands and gaps that comprise Saturn’s rings: Moving inward from the outermost ring, these are known as the A ring, the Encke Gap, the Cassini Division, the B ring, and the C ring with the Maxwell Gap.
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Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years.
Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the world works — the Internet, smartphones, radio telescopes — but it’s hard to really put that kind of change into perspective.
Thankfully, pictures often speak louder than words, and so below are nine photos that’ll make you stop and raise your *praise hand* emojis to the sky in honour of the scientists and engineers that have got us where we are today.
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Hopefully in the future, when somebody tells you they will be making an appointment with a surgeon for an augment, they will come back smarter. The world will be a better place for it.
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Eric C. Leuthardt, M.D., is a neurosurgeon who is currently a professor with the Department of Neurological Surgery and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is Director of the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology and the Brain Laser Center. His work has yielded him numerous accolades as a scientist, a neurosurgeon, and an inventor. He was named one of the Top Young Innovators by MIT’s magazine Technology Review. The magazine names individuals under the age of 35 each year whose work in technology has global impact. In addition to numerous peer reviewed publications, Leuthardt has numerous patents on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for medical devices and brain computer interface technologies.
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After a long search, a cosmic mystery has an answer. Astronomers have made the very first unambiguous detection of a radioactive molecule in space — an isotope of aluminium, found in the heart of a rare nova.
Scientists have long been searching for 26 AlF — or Aluminium monofluoride — containing 26 Al, but a direct observation has been exceptionally illusive.
We’ve known about the presence of 26 Al in space for decades. In 1984, NASA’s HEAO 3 satellite data was used to identify gamma-ray radiation originating from the beta decay of the isotope. According to these observations, there’s roughly two solar masses of 26 Al in the Milky Way.
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Optical neural network demo
Posted in robotics/AI
These cells pack together tightly. To accommodate the curving that occurs during embryonic development, it has been assumed that epithelial cells adopt either columnar or bottle-like shapes.
However, a group of scientists dug deeper into this phenomenon and discovered a new geometric shape in the process.
They uncovered that, during tissue bending, epithelial cells adopt a previously undescribed shape that enables the cells to minimize energy use and maximize packing stability. The team’s results will be published in Nature Communications in a paper called “Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia.”
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