The Australian Space Agency has revealed its shortlist of names for the country’s first lunar rover — and you can help choose the winner by casting your vote.
In partnership with NASA, the agency’s Australian-made, semi-autonomous rover is slated to launch to the moon as part of a future Artemis mission by as early as 2026. The rover will have the ability to pick up lunar rocks and dust, then bring the specimens back to a moon lander operated by NASA.
British architecture studio Foster + Partners has released visuals of its design for the Saudi Arabia pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, which will be modelled on the kingdom’s traditional villages.
It will be among the national pavilions at the upcoming World Expo, for which Sou Fujimoto Architects is developing the masterplan on the artificial island Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, Japan.
Foster + Partners said its aim for the pavilion is to offer visitors “a spatial experience that echoes the exploration of Saudi Arabian towns and cities”
Architect Tariq Khayyat has designed The Fold, a sculptural housing development in Dubai that features curved facades and aims to create a “communal oasis” behind a main road.
The Fold, which comprises 28 terraced townhouses, is located along the large Al Wasl Road in Dubai’s Jumeirah district and was designed to have a more organic feel than neighbouring developments.
“We wanted to plant a tulip field on the Al Wasl Road,” Tariq Khayyat Design Partners founder Khayyat told Dezeen.
When speaking to one another, much of the communication occurs nonverbally – through body posture, hand gestures, and the eyes. Our eye gaze during conversations therefore reveals a wealth of information about our attention, intention, or psychological states. But, there remains little scientific knowledge about the information that human eyes convey in interactions – is looking at others’ faces enough, or does our communication require eye-to-eye contact?
Researchers from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) have studied the prevalence of eye contact by recording the eye gazing behavior in face-to-face dyadic interactions and found that although eye-to-eye contact occurred rarely, it communicated important messages which are vital for subsequent successful social behavior.
The study participants, who did not know each other beforehand, were paired and presented with an imaginary survival scenario which required the pairs to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. The researchers analyzed how often the participants looked at each other’s eye and mouth regions. The researchers also tested each participant individually for gaze following and linked the prevalence of different types of mutual looks during the interaction (i.e., eye-to-eye vs. eye-to-mouth) with the tendency to follow their partner’s gaze.
In 2018, Groh’s team discovered that the ears make a subtle, imperceptible noise when the eyes move. In a new report appearing the week of November 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Duke team now shows that these sounds can reveal where your eyes are looking.
It also works the other way around. Just by knowing where someone is looking, Groh and her team were able to predict what the waveform of the subtle ear sound would look like.
These sounds, Groh believes, may be caused when eye movements stimulate the brain to contract either middle ear muscles, which typically help dampen loud sounds, or the hair cells that help amplify quiet sounds.
Cell toxicity and genomic instability are potential side effects from the use of CRISPR-Cas9. The gene editing tool can also cause large rearrangements of DNA through retrotransposition to theoretically trigger tumor development.
While rare, the fact that CRISPR is used to edit millions of cells for some therapies means precautionary steps are warranted given the potential increase in cancer risk. However, retrotransposition is much rarer during base editing, a more precise technique that chemically changes just one “letter” of the genetic code without causing a double-strand break in DNA.
Although MHRA decided that the benefits of Casgevy outweigh its risks, the U.K. regulator granted a one-year conditional marketing authorization of the world-first gene therapy based on the findings of two global clinical trials, noting that no significant safety concerns were identified during the trials.
Quantum advantage is the milestone the field of quantum computing is fervently working toward, where a quantum computer can solve problems that are beyond the reach of the most powerful non-quantum, or classical, computers.
Quantum refers to the scale of atoms and molecules where the laws of physics as we experience them break down and a different, counterintuitive set of laws apply. Quantum computers take advantage of these strange behaviors to solve problems.
There are some types of problems that are impractical for classical computers to solve, such as cracking state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. Research in recent decades has shown that quantum computers have the potential to solve some of these problems. If a quantum computer can be built that actually does solve one of these problems, it will have demonstrated quantum advantage.
University of Missouri researchers’ conceptual design of a nanomaterial could potentially pave the way for new uses of nanotechnology in medicine and science.
In a recent study, scientists at the University of Missouri developed a proof of concept for a nanocapsule — a microscopic container — capable of delivering a specific “payload” to a targeted location.
While beyond the scope of this study, the discovery has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of drugs, nutrients, and other chemicals in humans and plants. The power of the forward-thinking idea for this tiny delivery mechanism comes from its inventive structure, said Gary Baker, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and study co-author.
True to form, a “strange metal” quantum material proved strangely quiet in recent quantum noise experiments at Rice University. Published this week in Science, the measurements of quantum charge fluctuations known as “shot noise” provide the first direct evidence that electricity seems to flow through strange metals in an unusual liquidlike form that cannot be readily explained in terms of quantized packets of charge known as quasiparticles.
“The noise is greatly suppressed compared to ordinary wires,” said Rice’s Doug Natelson, the study’s corresponding author. “Maybe this is evidence that quasiparticles are not well-defined things or that they’re just not there and charge moves in more complicated ways. We have to find the right vocabulary to talk about how charge can move collectively.”
The experiments were performed on nanoscale wires of a well-studied quantum critical material with a precise 1−2−2 ratio of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon (YbRh2Si2). The material contains a high degree of quantum entanglement that produces temperature-dependent behavior.
