Lifeboat Foundation

Nao is the new shoulder to lean on for children.

Sometimes it can be difficult for children to open their hearts to adults. If there is a mental disorder, this situation can be even more difficult. However, a robot called “Nao” overcame it.

Robots may be more effective in identifying children’s mental health problems than parental or self-reported testing, according to a recent study by the University of Cambridge.

Egor Suvorov/iStock.

That sentence belongs in a sci-fi movie, but it also belongs right here in real life.

Exoplanets are rarely seen in images.

In a first for the James Webb Telescope, astronomers from the joint NASA/ESA/CSA cooperative used the space-based telescope to bring back images of an exoplanet. Exoplanets are planets orbiting other suns than our own, helping us to understand if we are unique in the universe or if other Earth-like planets exist.

ESA

Continue reading “James Webb Telescope captures its first images of an exoplanet” »

The hack created a massive traffic jam in Moscow.

Drivers working for Yandex Taxi, the largest taxi service in Moscow, did not have a good day on Thursday as hackers messed with the company’s app and sent dozens of cars to the same location resulting in a traffic jam that lasted up to three hours, according to Twitter reports.

A co-founder sanctioned for propaganda.

Continue reading “A hacker attacked Yandex Taxi and sent dozens of cars to the same location” »

She could be related to modern-day Malaysians.

A study by Universiti Sains Malaysia has revealed a prehistoric woman’s facial reconstruction. It is thought that this prehistoric “Penang Woman” lived about 5,700 years ago during the Neolithic or New Stone Age in what is now Malaysia, the study suggests, which was published on August 5. However, the woman’s full identity is still unknown.

Universiti Sains Malaysia researcher Shaiful Idzwan Shahidan, one of seven USM researchers who worked on the project, told FMT that Penang Woman is estimated to have died when she was 30 to 35 years old.

Continue reading “5,700-year-old Neolithic Woman’s Facial Reconstruction Revealed by Scientists” »

A couple years ago, we wrote about the Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON—Dragon, of course. It’s one of the wildest drones we’ve ever seen, consisting of four pairs of gimbaled, ducted fans, with each pair linked together through a two-axis actuated joint, making it physically flexible in flight to a crazy degree.

Dragon is one of those robots with literally more degrees of freedom than it knows what to do with—in the sense that the hardware is all there. But the trick is getting it to use that hardware to do things that are actually useful in a reliable way. In 2018, Dragon was just learning how to transform itself to fit through small spaces, but now it’s able to adapt its entire structure to manipulate and grasp objects.

Boeing Starliner flights to the ISS cost NASA more than twice what they pay SpaceX to ferry astronauts.

NASA confirmed Wednesday that it has awarded five additional crew transportation missions to SpaceX, and its Crew Dragon vehicle, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. This brings to 14 the total number of crewed missions that SpaceX is contracted to fly for NASA through 2030.

As previously reported by Ars, these are likely the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. While there are no international agreements yet signed, NASA has signaled that it would like to continue flying the orbiting laboratory until 2030, by which time one or more US commercial space stations should be operational in low Earth orbit.

Continue reading “NASA will pay Boeing more than twice as much as SpaceX for crew seats” »

Orsted.

In its bid to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the U.K. is banking heavily on wind-generated power. To this effect, it commissioned the Hornsea One project, which was the largest offshore wind farm in the world at the time of achieving fully operational status in 2020. Two years later, the Hornsea 2 project is fully operational and has claimed the bragging rights for being the largest offshore wind farm in the world.

Most of us grow up familiar with the prevailing law that limits how quickly information can travel through empty space: the speed of light, which tops out at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second.

While photons themselves are unlikely to ever break this speed limit, there are features of light which don’t play by the same rules.

Manipulating them won’t hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology.