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Scientists might have just discovered a pinch of ocean inside the Earth.

A rare diamond found in the mines of Botswana has provided more details about the region between the Earth’s upper and lower mantle. Also called the transition zone or the 660 km discontinuity, the region is likely to be rich in water, according to a recent study.

Finding large amounts of water underground on a planet whose 71 percent surface is water may not sound like a big revelation. Yet it is. Liquid water on the Earth’s surface may seem like a lot but it is merely a puddle when compared to the water content under the crust.

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Mars isn’t going anywhere.

Seeing as Venus has a hellish surface temperature, hot enough to melt lead, you wouldn’t think scientists would be clamoring to send humans to the fiery planet. Then there’s the crushing atmospheric pressure.

Still, as per a report by The Guardian, a group of space experts is campaigning to shift the focus away from human exploration of Mars and towards first sending a crewed mission to our nearest neighbor, Venus.

The case for a crewed Venus flyby.

Continue reading “Scientists say we should prioritize a human mission to Venus before Mars” | >

There are many ways one can hurt themselves.

When we feel lonely or sad, we may tend to retreat to our shelves or surround ourselves with the people we trust just to put a temporary band-aid on the sorrow we experience. However, finding no cure to being actually alone and unhappy for a long time can have devastating effects not only on our mental health but also on our physical health, hence our appearance.

Scientists just confirmed that prolonged loneliness and unhappiness could accelerate the aging process of an individual, according to a study published in the journal Aging-US.

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The AWWA Sky Whale concept represents luxurious and greener aviation.

AWWA Sky Whale, a large, intriguing-looking flying machine, is meant to represent the pinnacle of luxury, performance, and sustainability.

At a recent exhibition on future transportation hosted at Kuwait’s Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Center, the design of Oscar Vinals was on display.

The Sky Whale concept focuses on the “green” aircraft designs of the future for the ordinary airliner planes of the twenty-first century, which might profit from technological solutions that are more eco-friendly, most efficient, and offer maximum performance.

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Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist.

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Continue reading “Will Ray Kurzweil live forever? | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips” | >

Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more.

Astronomers on a small slice of our planet’s surface, extending from southern and eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could actually watch it live with their telescopes. Among those were a half dozen stations joined together for a dedicated observing campaign organised by ESA’s Planetary Defence Office and coordinated by the team of observers of the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC). As usual, when such a timely astronomical event happens, not all stations were successful in their observations: clouds, technical problems and other issues always affect real-life observations.

However, a few of ESA’s collaborating stations could immediately report a successful direct confirmation of DART’s impact. Among them was the team of the Les Makes observatory, on the French island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The sequence of images they provided in real time was impressive: the asteroid immediately started brightening upon impact, and within a few seconds it was already noticeably brighter. Within less than a minute a cloud of ejected material became visible and could be followed while it drifted eastwards and slowly dissipated.

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In a new paper published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, scientists have estimated the conservation status of nearly 1,900 palm species using artificial intelligence, and found more than 1,000 may be at risk of extinction.

The international team of researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the University of Zurich, and the University of Amsterdam, combined existing data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List with novel machine learning techniques to paint a clearer picture of how palms may be threatened. Although popular and well represented on the Red List, the threat to some 70% of these plants has remained unclear until now.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is widely considered to be a gold standard for evaluating the conservation status of animal, plant, and . But there are gaps in the Red List that need to be addressed, as not all species have been listed and many of the assessments are in need of an update. Conservation efforts are further complicated by inadequate funding, the sheer amount of time needed to manually assess a species, and public perception favoring certain over plants and fungi.

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Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich to develop a technology that produces more than 100 microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body.

Microrobots aiming at minimal invasive targeted precision therapy can be manufactured in various ways. Among them, ultra-fine 3D called two-photon polymerization method, a method that triggers polymerization by intersecting two lasers in synthetic resin, is the most used. This technology can produce a structure with nanometer-level precision. However, a disadvantage exists in that producing one microrobot is time consuming because voxels, the pixels realized by 3D printing, must be cured successively. In addition, the magnetic nanoparticles contained in the robot can block the light path during the two-photon polymerization process. This process result may not be uniform when using magnetic nanoparticles with high concentration.

To overcome the limitations of the existing microrobot manufacturing method, DGIST Professor Hongsoo Choi’s research team developed a method to create microrobots at a high speed of 100 per minute by flowing a mixture of magnetic nanoparticles and gelatin methacrylate, which is biodegradable and can be cured by light, into the microfluidic chip. This is more than 10,000 times faster than using the existing two-photon polymerization method to manufacture microrobots.

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