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Penn State agricultural engineers have developed, for the first time, a prototype “end-effector” capable of deftly removing unwanted apples from trees—the first step toward robotic, green-fruit thinning.

The development is important, according to Long He, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, because manual thinning is a labor-intensive task, and the shrinking labor force in apple production makes manual thinning economically infeasible. His research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences conducted a new study that led to the end-effector.

The apple crop is a high-value agricultural commodity in the U.S., with an annual total production of nearly 10 billion pounds and valued at nearly $3 billion, according to He, who is a leader in agricultural robotics research, previously developing automated components for mushroom picking and apple tree pruning. Green-fruit thinning—the process of discarding excess fruitlets in early summer, mainly to increase the remaining fruit size and quality—is one of the most important aspects of apple production.

An extraordinary image of the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 628 taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has drawn comparisons to a Doctor Who vortex, but it could reveal important clues about how dust behaves in galaxies.

The image is a composite of three sets of data at different wavelengths taken by JWST’s mid-infrared instrument team. Gabriel Brammer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who isn’t affiliated with the team, downloaded the data and translated each of the infrared wavelengths to red, green and blue before combining them to produce one image.

NGC 628 has been imaged with visible light by other telescopes, including Hubble, and looks similar to our own Milky Way if viewed from above the galactic plane. But JWST’s ability to observe infrared light in high resolution reveals a hidden structure. “If our eyes could see in these mid-infrared wavelengths, the night sky would look a lot more like this picture, which I think would be spectacular, maybe a little terrifying,” says Brammer.

Scientists report that damage to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) caused by a micrometeoroid impact in late May 2022 may be more severe than previously believed.

A group of scientists evaluated the performance of the space telescope throughout its commissioning phase in a new report released last week following Webb’s amazing first photographs.

VIDEO: If the history of Earth was on a timeline from Los Angeles to New York, the American Revolution would have been fought 8 inches ago.

Researchers at Rice University have shown how they can hack the brains of fruit flies to make them remote controlled. The flies performed a specific action within a second of a command being sent to certain neurons in their brain.

The team started by genetically engineering the flies so that they expressed a certain heat-sensitive ion channel in some of their neurons. When this channel sensed heat, it would activate the neuron – in this case, that neuron caused the fly to spread its wings, which is a gesture they often use during mating.

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Now, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a prototype for fully scalable all–perovskite tandem solar modules. They were able to scale up individual perovskite cells with a power conversion efficiency of up to 23.5% at an aperture area of 0.1 square centimeters to all-perovskite tandem solar modules with an efficiency of up to 19.1% with an aperture area of 12.25 square centimeters.

The aperture area is the usable part of the surface that is not covered by electrodes, frames, or fasteners. At approximately five percent, the loss of efficiency when upscaling is relatively low. “This is the first report of an all-perovskite tandem solar module worldwide,” says Dr. Bahram Abdollahi Nejand, lead author of the publication and team leader for all-perovskite tandem solar modules.

The KIT researchers claimed this remarkable result is the first of its kind reported worldwide. To obtain this, the team increased the efficiency by optimizing the light path and reducing reflections in the solar cell architecture. They implemented an efficient layout for tandem solar modules using high-throughput laser scribing that enables the production of functional tandem solar mini-modules with two-terminal interconnected cell strips. Lastly, they used coating processes (blade coating and vacuum deposition) that are already established in industrial practice.

In this video, explore the various superdense remnants of massive stars, which hold between 1 and 3 times the Sun’s mass and are so dense that a teaspoon of their matter weighs about a billion tons.

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We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks—global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.

Now a Northwestern University research team has discovered a ubiquitous property of a complex network and developed a novel computational method that is the first to systematically exploit that property to control the whole network using only local information. The method considers the computational time and information communication costs to produce the optimal choice.

The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities. In such dynamic networks, gathering and processing all the information necessary to make a better decision can take too much time. The goal is to diagnose a problem and take action before it leads to a system-wide issue. This may mean having less information but being timely.