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SpaceX Dragon demonstrated its capability to reboost the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time on Friday, with the spacecraft’s Draco thrusters adjusting the station’s orbit.

What Happened: The spacecraft adjusted the station’s orbit through a reboost of altitude by 7/100 of a mile at apogee and 7/10 of a mile at perigee, NASA said. The Dragon spacecraft fired its Draco thrusters for about 12 minutes and 30 seconds in the process.

The Roscosmos Progress spacecraft and the Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft also provide reboost for the space station now.

Scientists have developed an AI-based authentication scheme to enhance vehicle security in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV).


Scientists claim to have developed an artificial intelligence tool to consolidate the privacy of vehicles and their drivers.

How to preserve the privacy of the so-called Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has emerged as a major challenge due to geographical mobility of vehicles and insufficient resources, the scientists say.

The problem has been aggravated, according to the scientists, due to the “limited resources of onboard units (OBUs)” and the shortcomings of embedded sensors installed in vehicles, which “lure the adversaries to launch various types of attacks.”

Researchers at Tufts University have identified root causes for AI’s poor conversational timing.


When you have a conversation today, notice the natural points when the exchange leaves open the opportunity for the other person to chime in. If their timing is off, they might be taken as overly aggressive, too timid, or just plain awkward.

The back-and-forth is the social element to the exchange of information that occurs in a , and while humans do this naturally—with some exceptions—AI language systems are universally bad at it.

Linguistics and computer science researchers at Tufts have now discovered some of the root causes of this shortfall in AI conversational skills and point to possible ways to make them better conversational partners. Their study results will be presented at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024) conference, held in Miami from November 12 to 16, and are posted to the arXiv preprint server.

Polyethylene (PE) is one of the most widely used and versatile plastic materials globally, prized for its cost-effectiveness, lightweight properties and ease of formability. These characteristics make PE indispensable across a broad spectrum of applications, from packaging materials to structural plastics.

A new statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that evolved in animals around 500 million years ago, long before the evolution of colorful fruits and flowers, which started sprouting 200 to 350 million years ago. The researchers focused on what they term “conspicuous colors”—basically, the ones kids are likeliest to select in a 16 pack of Crayolas—red, orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Around 150 million years ago, presumably to capitalize on the well-established prevalence of color vision, species began evolving warning coloration. And 50 million years later, there was an evolutionary explosion of both warning and sexual coloration. Although the reasons behind this evolutionary burst are still unclear, the researchers identified three warning signal animal vectors behind it: ray-finned fishes, birds and lizards.

Additionally, warning coloration is much more widespread among species than sexual coloration, likely because colorful animals do not themselves need to have color vision to signal the danger they pose to other, color-sensitive species. Sexual color signals, on the other hand, are confined to vertebrate and arthropod species that have well-developed color vision.

When light hits the surface of some materials, namely those exhibiting a property known as photoresistance, it can induce changes in their electrical conductivity. Graphene is among these materials, as incident light can excite electrons within it, affecting its photoconductivity.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore report a deviation from standard photoresistive behaviors in doped metallic . Their paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology, shows that when exposed to continuous-wave terahertz (THz) radiation, Dirac electrons in this material can be thermally decoupled from the lattice, prompting their hydrodynamic transport.

“Our research has emerged from the growing recognition that traditional models of electron behavior don’t fully capture the properties of certain advanced materials, particularly in the ,” Denis Bandurin, Assistant Professor at NUS, lead of the experimental condensed matter physics lab and senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

The authors demonstrate optical tweezing of microparticles and cells using an integrated optical phased array for the first time, increasing the standoff distance of integrated optical tweezers by over two orders of magnitude compared to prior work.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation offers rapid depression relief for patients unresponsive to conventional treatments.

Accelerated over just five days, this therapy targets key brain areas to adjust imbalances linked to depression, demonstrating significant effectiveness.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat depression.