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Americium-241 emits power for more than 400 years.

The world’s first space battery fueled by Americium-241, a nuclear-based fuel, will be developed in cooperation between the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and the U.K. Space Agency.

This project will be carried out in a brand-new laboratory in Cumbria costing £19 million ($23 million) and outfitted with cutting-edge machinery and technology, according to a joint press release by NNL and the Space Agency on Friday.

“For the past 50 years space missions have used Plutonium-238 to stop spacecrafts from freezing, but it is in very limited supply,” said professor Tim Tinsley, account director at NNL.

Continue reading “World’s first space battery powered by ‘game-changing’ nuclear fuel is coming soon” | >

Ever skip stones across a pond? Imagine doing it with a spacecraft.

When NASA’s Orion returns to Earth on Dec. 11 at the end of the Artemis I mission, it will attempt a guidance and control maneuver called a skip-entry – the first time a skip entry maneuver will be attempted for a human spacecraft.

While it’s not a perfect analogy, Orion will mimic a stone skipping across a pond by dipping into the Earth’s atmosphere, skipping out, then re-entering. Performed by the crew module, this maneuver gives Orion more space to travel before splashing down, allowing it to be more precise with where it lands.

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Black holes are known as the most terrifying, mysterious, and fascinating objects in the Universe. Eternally hungry, they eat everything in their path and are constantly expanding. But how small and how big can a black hole be? Unlike stars and planets, black holes have no size restrictions. They grow when they eat the matter around them. Does it mean that they can be not only super large but super small? Let’s find out!

#brightside.

Credit:
Black Hole: By NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11108
X-ray: By NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10807
Black Holes: By NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13831
Burst: By NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle), https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13886
echoes: By NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12265
star: By NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR), https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13805
stellar: By NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR), https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13805
Suzaku: By NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11821
Star Formation: By NASA, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19412899
Flare: By NASA/JPL/Caltech/Abhimanyu Susobhanan.
Disk Flare: By NASA/JPL-Caltech, https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA23687
Quasar: By NASA/CXC/M. Weiss.
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0:
Supermassive: By Quantum squid88, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87860610
Ton618: By Pablo Carlos Budassi, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94445949
CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0:
Sgr A: By EHT Collaboration, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117933557
Messier 87: By Event Horizon Telescope, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77916527
M87: By Event Horizon Telescope, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102736603
ULAS J1120+0641: By ESO/M. Kornmesser, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15700804
Jets: By ESO/WFI — https://flic.kr/p/9KgqiH, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34550695
3C 273 Jet: By Pelligton, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123362359
Animation is created by Bright Side.

Music by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com.

Continue reading “How Strong Would Be a Black Hole the Size of a Coin” | >

For years, Shepherd’s Organic Robotics Lab has used stretchable fiber-optic sensors to make soft robots and related components – from skin to wearable technology – as nimble and practical as possible.

In fiber-optic sensors, light from a LED is sent through an optical waveguide, and a photodiode detects changes in the beam’s intensity to determine when the material is being deformed. One of the virtues of the technology is that waveguides are still able to propagate light if they are punctured or cut.

The researchers combined the sensors with a polyurethane urea elastomer that incorporated hydrogen bonds, for rapid healing, and disulfide exchanges, for strength.

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Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.

But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.

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Responsive material changes its behavior based on earlier conditions.

Inspired by living systems, a new material has been developed that changes its electrical behavior based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces. The breakthrough was achieved by researchers at Aalto University in Finland.

Responsive materials have become common in a range of applications, from glasses that darken in sunlight to drug delivery systems. However, existing materials always react in the same way each time. Their response to a change doesn’t depend on their history, nor do they adapt based on their past.

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You can buy Universe Sandbox 2 game here: http://amzn.to/2yJqwU6

Hello and welcome to What Da Math!
In this video, we will talk about the planets we discovered in 2018 that seem to be in a galaxy far away.

The article is here: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb/meta.

Support this channel on Patreon to help me make this a full time job:

Continue reading “We Just Discovered Planets in Another Galaxy” | >

Logic gates are the fundamental components of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic—they work by shuffling around electrons—but scientists have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing.

New optical chirality developed by researchers at Aalto University operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds.

The new approach uses circularly polarized light as the . The logic gates are made from crystalline materials that are sensitive to the handedness of a circularly polarized light beam—that is, the light emitted by the crystal depends on the handedness of the input beams. This serves as the basic building block for one type of logic gate (XNOR), and the remaining types of logic gates are built by adding filters or other optical components.

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A galaxy that has taunted astronomers since they first detected a hint of its presence more than 20 years ago has finally emerged from hiding.

It’s called HIPASS J1131-31, or Peekaboo, and it is located just 22 million light-years away. And it was so hard to see because it’s teeny tiny and obscured by a bright star in the Milky Way that sits almost directly in front of it.

Through a collaborative effort that involved space-and ground-based telescopes, scientists have learned that the extremely small Peekaboo is also extremely young and close – offering a snapshot of galactic infancy.

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