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Blog – Page 1144

Read about NASA’s latest demonstration for its laser communication system!

NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Christina Koch, and Kjell Lindgren, and other NASA employees recently sent images and videos of their pets to the International Space Station (ISS) via the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program to further test laser communications between ground-based stations and space-based systems, including the ISS. This demonstration holds the potential to further enhance laser communications systems that could be useful for long-term space missions.

For this demonstration, the SCaN program used its elaborate and coordinated system consisting of the High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking (HDTN), which is run by NASA’s Glenn Research Center and capable of sending data at quadruple the speeds of current DTN technology; NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which orbits at 22,000 miles above the Earth; and the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) payload attached to the ISS.

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Four Russian warships including a nuclear submarine have reached Cuba, just 200 miles off the coast of Florida, ahead of a planned military exercise in the Atlantic. The fleet — made up of a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker and a rescue tug — arrived in Havana Bay on Wednesday, welcomed by a 21-cannon salute from Cuba. Dramatic images from the arrival show the ominous and massive vessels entering the bay as Cubans lined up on…

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Most of the fires detected in this map are burning in grass or cropland areas. Reports assert the fires are the result of both large and small-scale farmers attempting to manage the land in the most cost-effective way possible. However, in Angola, 80% percent of farmers are smallholders, which could explain the extensive use of burning practices in the country.

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Researchers have demonstrated a new intelligent photonic sensing-computing chip that can process, transmit and reconstruct images of a scene within nanoseconds. This advance opens the door to extremely high-speed image processing that could benefit edge intelligence for machine vision applications such as autonomous driving, industrial inspection and robotic vision.

Edge computing, which performs intensive computing tasks like image processing and analysis on local devices, is evolving into edge intelligence by adding artificial intelligence (AI) driven analysis and decision-making.

“Capturing, processing and analyzing images for edge-based tasks such as autonomous driving is currently limited to millisecond-level speeds due to the necessity of optical-to-electronic conversions,” said research team leader Lu Fang from Tsinghua University in China. “Our new chip can perform all these processes in just nanoseconds by keeping them all in the optical domain. This could be used to significantly enhance, or even replace, the traditional architecture of sensor acquisition followed by AI post-processing.”

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What connection does nicotine and cannabis use have on mental health stressors, including anxiety, depression, and discrimination, for young adults? This is what a recent study published in Addictive Behaviors hopes to address as a team of researchers led by Indiana University investigated how increased use of nicotine and cannabis in young adults also comes at a time when mental health stressors are also on the rise with them, as well. This study holds the potential to help researchers, medical professionals, and the public better understand the link between nicotine and cannabis use and mental health, especially with the legalization of recreational cannabis becoming more prevalent across the United States.

For the study, the researchers conducted a survey between 2019 and 2021 consisting of 2,478 young adults from Los Angeles between 18 to 29 years old with the following demographics: 57 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Asian, 15 percent White, 4 percent Black, and 3 percent as Multiracial. The participants were instructed to provide their mental health symptoms status (anxiety and depressions) and social stressors (discrimination), along with how much they use cannabis or nicotine, including vaping.

In the end, the researchers found a correlation between nicotine and cannabis use, along with some dual use, with higher rates of depression and anxiety with Hispanic young adults, with both Hispanic and Asian young adults having increased use of nicotine and cannabis correlating with higher rates of discrimination. For Black young adults, the researchers found increased use of nicotine products with higher anxiety while finding the opposite occurred for higher rates of depression and discrimination.

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Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest’s undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child’s immune system, according to an experiment in Finland.

When daycare workers rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth (such as dwarf heather and blueberries), and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of the young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time.

Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile, and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centers in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days.

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MIT researchers have developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair.

Deep brain stimulation, by implanted electrodes that deliver electrical pulses to the brain, is often used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, the electrodes used for this treatment can eventually corrode and accumulate scar tissue, requiring them to be removed.

MIT researchers have now developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair. In a study of mice, they showed that this stimulation can trigger neurons to release dopamine, in a part of the brain that is often targeted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“By using ultrasonography, we can create a new way of stimulating neurons to fire in the deep brain,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the senior author of the new study. “This device is thinner than a hair fiber, so there will be negligible tissue damage, and it is easy for us to navigate this device in the deep brain.”

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