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The partnership aims at building infrastructures, such as landing pads, habitats, and roads on the lunar surface.

In a quest to find practical solutions to build sustainable structures on the moon, NASA has furthered its partnership with ICON, a construction technologies company based in Austin, Texas. The firm is known for building the first-ever habitable 3D-printed home in the United States in 2018.

The space agency has now awarded a $57.2 million contract to ICON to devise solutions that “could help build infrastructure such as landing pads, habitats, and roads on the lunar surface,” according to the press release.

The organization says the machines would only be used in extreme situations where lives are at stake.

Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to allow city police to use potentially lethal remote-controlled robots in emergency situations, according to a report by Mission Local.

A dystopian future?


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Artificial intelligence would be used to detect changes in the vocals of each patient after a laryngectomy.

Researchers from Kaunas University of Technology Faculty of Informatics (KTU IF) and Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU) in Lithuania have created a new substitute voice evaluation index that can detect pathologies in patients’ voices more quickly and efficiently. Voice pathologies include a variety of disorders such as growths on the vocal cords, spasms, swelling or paralysis in the vocal cords.

AI could be used to determine changes in voice after laryngectomy.

Laryngectomy is a surgery that requires the removal of the larynx.


It is the first ever commercial partnership between Google Health and the medical company iCAD.

Google recently announced that it licensed its AI research prototype to a medical company called iCAD. The AI research model can be used for breast cancer screening. iCAD is a company that creates innovative medical equipment for cancer detection.

ICAD made the announcement about the collaboration yesterday, Nov. 28, on its website.

It is the first time ever that Google Health has licensed this specific artificial intelligence technology in a commercial partnership for breast cancer screening and personalized risk assessment of the disease, to iCAD.


Interesting Engineering sighted ‘Spot the Dog’ with construction group Balfour Beatty. Naturally, we had a chat with one of their technicians.

‘Spot the dog,’ Balfour Beatty’s first robotic employee, was sighted by Interesting Engineering (IE) at the ‘Brooklands Science Summer School event’ yesterday (Nov. 29).

Spot delivers CAT designs for derelict buildings and nuclear power plants.


The solution to our carbon problem is floating in the oceans.

Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms (can be bacteria, algae, or plants) that perform photosynthesis in oceans and eliminate excess carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere. They sequester about 40 percent of the total carbon produced every year globally and, therefore, also play a major role in mitigating global warming.

A team of researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has proposed that by feeding engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) as fertilizers to phytoplankton. Humans can increase the growth of these microorganisms in oceans and eventually fix more CO2 from Earth than ever.

It will take 1.5 years to reach its final destination far beyond the moon.

In a world first, Japan’s space agency announced it successfully used steam to propel a spacecraft toward the Moon. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) water-powered CubeSat spacecraft, EQUilibriUm Lunar-Earth point 6U (EQUULEUS), was launched on its way by NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which recently broke a record for the farthest distance traveled by a human-rated spacecraft.

“This is the world’s first successful orbit control beyond low-Earth orbit using water propellant propulsion system,” JAXA said in a statement on Saturday.


JAXA / University of Tokyo.

NASA’s Discover supercomputer simulated the extreme conditions of the distant cosmos.

A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the U.S. space agency’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer to run 100 simulations of jets emerging from supermassive black holes.

The scientists set out to better understand these jets — massive beams of energetic particles shooting out into the cosmos — as they play a crucial role in the evolution of the universe.

This could help us probe into the lesser-known field of quantum gravity.

A collaborative team of researchers in the U.S. created a holographic wormhole and sent a message through it. This is the first known report of a quantum simulation of a holographic wormhole on a quantum processor.

However, the two theories are fundamentally incompatible and the holographic principle is a guide that can help us combine the two.


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