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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will fly for a record-breaking 14th time on Saturday night (Sept. 10), launching 34 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites and a huge direct-to-smartphone connectivity test spacecraft to orbit, and you can watch it live.

The two-stage Falcon 9, topped with the Starlinks and AST SpaceMobile’s Blue Walker 3 test satellite, is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida Saturday at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 GMT on Sept. 11). Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company (opens in new tab).

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One of the biggest contributions in the near future could come from smaller, more compact reactors. Several microreactor designs are currently under development in the United States that will be smaller in size, more flexible to operate and versatile enough to provide energy to end users for a variety of services ranging from electricity production to water purification.

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A group of University of Texas at Dallas researchers and their colleagues have made significant improvements to energy-harvesting yarns they invented called twistrons, which are made from carbon nanotubes and produce electricity when repeatedly stretched.

The researchers describe the improved twistrons and some potential applications of the technology in an article published in the July 7 print issue of Advanced Materials.

In a proof-of-principle experiment, Zhong Wang, Ph.D., lead author of the article and a research associate in the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas, sewed the new twistron yarns into a glove. As someone wearing the glove formed different letters and phrases in American Sign Language, the hand gestures generated electricity.

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“Neuromorphic computing could offer a compelling alternative to traditional AI accelerators by significantly improving power and data efficiency for more complex AI use cases, spanning data centers to extreme edge applications.”

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

Can computer systems develop to the point where they can think creatively, identify people or items they have never seen before, and adjust accordingly — all while working more efficiently, with less power? Intel Labs is betting on it, with a new hardware and software approach using neuromorphic computing, which, according to a recent blog post, “uses new algorithmic approaches that emulate how the human brain interacts with the world to deliver capabilities closer to human cognition.”

While this may sound futuristic, Intel’s neuromorphic computing research is already fostering interesting use cases, including how to add new voice interaction commands to Mercedes-Benz vehicles; create a robotic hand that delivers medications to patients; or develop chips that recognize hazardous chemicals.

Continue reading “Is Intel Labs’ brain-inspired AI approach the future of robot learning?” | >

Our bodies are home to hundreds or thousands of species of microbes — nobody is sure quite how many. That’s just one of many mysteries about the so-called human microbiome.

Our inner ecosystem fends off pathogens, helps digest food and may even influence behavior. But scientists have yet to figure out exactly which microbes do what or how. Many studies suggest that many species have to work together to do each of the microbiome’s jobs.

To better understand how microbes affect our health, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic human microbiome, combining 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. When the researchers gave the concoction to mice that did not have a microbiome of their own, the bacterial strains established themselves and remained stable — even when the scientists introduced other microbes.

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Drake’s equation may look complicated, but its principles are really rather simple. It states that, in a galaxy as old as ours, the number of civilizations that are detectable by virtue of them broadcasting their presence must equate to the rate at which they arise, multiplied by their average lifetime.

Putting a value on the rate at which civilizations occur might seem to be guesswork, but Drake realized that it can be broken down into more tractable components.

He stated that the total rate is equal to the rate at which suitable stars are formed, multiplied by the fraction of those stars that have planets. This is then multiplied by the number of planets that are capable of bearing life per system, times the fraction of those planets where life gets started, multiplied by the fraction of those where life becomes intelligent, times the fraction of those that broadcast their presence.

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Even in the driest climates, though, there is a considerable amount of moisture in the air. The researchers note that even in places like the Sahel desert, relative humidity is still around 20 percent on average. So they set about finding a way to use this untapped water resource to produce hydrogen.

Their device consists of a water harvesting unit that houses a sponge soaked in a water-absorbing liquid that can pull moisture from the air. On either side of this reservoir are electrodes that can be powered by any renewable energy source. When a current runs through the circuit, the water is split via electrolysis into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which can then be collected as gas.

The team showed that the device could run efficiently for 12 consecutive days and produced hydrogen with 99 percent purity. What’s more, the device continues to work in relative humidity as low as four percent.

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Astronauts on the space station may seem distant, but they’re only 248 miles from Earth: a little more than the drive from New York City to Washington DC. Everything they need can be delivered in relatively short order. Astronauts visiting Mars won’t have such easy access. The red planet’s average distance from Earth is 140 million miles.

We can plan supply missions, but taking everything along for the ride would be expensive and impractical. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, explorers will have to live off the land too.

There’ve been plenty of proposals for how astronauts might produce the essentials, but until recently no technology had been field tested. Now, thanks to a machine called MOXIE, built by MIT and stowed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover, we can definitively say humans will be able to make oxygen on Mars.

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