One of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is producing an artificial star — a guide star — in the skies above the Atacama desert, above the flowing Milky Way.
The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images.
A toxic chemical produced by algae and linked to motor neuron disease has been detected in NSW rivers. Its presence — long suspected but now confirmed — could be linked to a disease hotspot in the Riverina.
A scientific experiment to reanimate dead brains could lead to humans enduring a ‘fate worse than death,’ an ethics lecturer has warned.
Last month Yale University announced it had successfully resurrected the brains of more than 100 slaughtered pigs and found that the cells were still healthy.
The reanimated brains were kept alive for up to 36 hours and scientists said the process, which should also work in primates, offered a new way to study intact organs in the lab.
How did your smartphone end up in your hands? The microchips that help power our smartphones and computers start out as sand. Explore how microchips come to live in our phones, with the help of IoT technologies.
In today’s adorable-and-I’m-not-crying-you’re-crying news, NDTLreports that an engineer in New Delhi named Milind Raj saved a puppy using a drone he equipped with a giant claw.
Raj was out for a morning walk in New Delhi when he heard whimpering and traced the sound to a puppy that had become stuck in a boggy drain between two roads. Raj said the condition of the puppy was “miserable” and tells The Verge that local residents had heard the animal crying for two days. Others hadn’t stepped up to the task of trying to rescue the pup because “the drain was so filthy,” says Raj. “It was not possible for a human to rescue the puppy without endangering their own life.”
Raj decided to take up the task himself, and immediately set to work constructing a drone capable of rescuing the pup. Even though Raj has an extensive history in both AI and robotics, he said building the right tools was a challenging exercise. Within a few hours, he had strapped a robotic arm with a claw of sorts to a six-rotor drone, both custom-made in his lab, located in the city of Lucknow. While he had built the drone itself two years ago, the arm he equipped it with was something he specifically created for this rescue, installing sensors to track heartbeat and breathing patterns to keep tabs on the wellness of the puppy. “The AI helped me monitor the animal’s heart rate,” he said. “If the grip was too tight, the pup would suffocate.”
Archaeological discoveries of ancient humans keep pushing our knowledge about our species further back in time. The Americas haven’t been populated by people as long as other parts of the world, but exactly how long they’ve been here and how they got here are open subjects we still have a lot to learn about. Occasionally, a skeleton or a skull is found that dates back to the beginnings of their settlement. Real Clear Science give us a list of some of the biggest such discoveries.
Kennewick Man, perhaps the best known and most controversial ancient human remains in the United States, was found jutting from a patch of eroded dirt along the Columbia River near Kennewick Washington just 22 years ago. In life, roughly 9,000 years in the past, he spent much of his time moving around by water, hunting and eating marine animals and drinking glacial meltwater. In death, his remains were constantly the focus of lawsuits between indigenous peoples who sought to bury the remains and archaeologists who sought to learn from them. After DNA tests confirmed that Kennewick Man was closely related to modern day Native Americans, his remains were returned and reburied at an undisclosed location.
The Dragon cargo ship made it back home on the same day NASA launched the InShight Mars lander, after its return to Earth was delayed for three days.
After a month of preparation, SpaceX’s unmanned Dragon capsule has finally returned to Earth on May 5, safely delivering its precious cargo, Space.comreports.
The Dragon cargo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at about 3 p.m. EDT (12 p.m. PDT, 19:00 GMT), a few hours after leaving the International Space Station (ISS).
