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The launch of Artemis I is within touching distance.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is almost ready for launch. The U.S. space agency’s big new rocket reached Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at approximately 07:30 am EDT after a 10-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

NASA recently announced an August 29 launch date for its Artemis I mission, which will see SLS launch the agency’s Orion capsule on a trip to the moon and back. This came after the space agency successfully completed a much-delayed wet dress rehearsal in June, during which it filled SLS with fuel and performed a simulated countdown that stopped just short of launch.

Around 7:30 a.m. EDT the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission arrived atop Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after a nearly 10-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Continue reading “Artemis I Moon Rocket Arrives at Launch Pad Ahead of Historic Mission” | >

Saccorhytus is not our grandpa anymore.

Scientists from Bristol University have solved a mystery of a 500 million-year-old microscopic creature with a mouth but no anus. The study reveals that the spiny creature is not the earliest human ancestor, after all.

This creature — called Saccorhytus — was first discovered in 2017. The study found that a wrinkly sack with a vast mouth entwined by spines and holes is a primitive feature of the deuterostome group from which our ancestors emerged.

Saccorhytus coronarius are millimetric fossils from the early Cambrian period in China that are proposed to represent the most basal known deuterostomes.

Continue reading “Meiofaunal deuterostomes from the basal Cambrian of Shaanxi (China)” | >

And these miniaturized brains could save regular-sized brains.

Electroencephalography (EEG) caps are medical devices doctors use to diagnose brain disorders like epilepsy and seizures in patients. In the past decade, scientists have created 3D mini-brains called brain organoids from human-derived stem cells that mimic some aspects of brain development. A team of researchers at John Hopkins University has recently developed the world’s smallest EEG caps to study these more efficiently. The micro EEG caps can be used on a brain organoid the size of a pen dot.

Brain organoids can mimic some key features of the human brain. Scientists create them to understand the human brain’s development process and the factors leading to various neural disorders. Moreover, such mini-brains can also be used to perform experiments that researchers would have to otherwise perform on a real brain. Thus, eliminating the need to conduct tests on live human and animal subjects. has long been the stuff of science fiction but now mind-reading machines may actually be here and they may not be invasive. Researchers from the Russian corporation Neurobotics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have found a way to visualize a person’s brain activity as actual images without the use of invasive brain implants.

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Does that then prove he is a robot?

Close to a year after social media giant Facebook rebranded itself as Meta — to reflect its new strategy and vision to build the new version of the internet — its primary product, the famous metaverse, looks mediocre at best. But that is something CEO Mark Zuckerberg is failing to see, a Forbes.

Last October, when Facebook’s intent for a major rebranding was revealed, many questioned its timing. The company was going through a tough phase as whistleblowers revealed incriminating details of the company’s practices and regulators pushed for breaking up the company that also owns WhatsApp and Instagram.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg once again made the rounds being roasted on Twitter, not due to barbeque sauce or surfing, but because of yet another screenshot he posted from Horizon Worlds, this one a Facebook post celebrating the game coming to France and Spain.

Continue reading “Does Mark Zuckerberg Not Understand How Bad His Metaverse Looks?” | >

How intelligent can robots get?

Robots are getting smarter, which means they are better able to execute our commands. A number of different companies worldwide focus their attention on creating robots but one company in particular is really taking the lead on this lofty goal: Google.

A new language modelAccording to Fast Company, Google is achieving this feat through its latest milestone in robot software research — a new language model called PaLM-SayCan (Pathways Language Model).

Continue reading “Rise of the Machines: One of These Advanced Robots May Soon Take Over the World” | >

For many processes important for life such as cell division, cell migration, and the development of organs, the spatially and temporally correct formation of biological patterns is essential. To understand these processes, the principal task consists not in explaining how patterns form out of a homogeneous initial condition, but in explaining how simple patterns change into increasingly complex ones. Illuminating the mechanisms of this complex self-organization on various spatial and temporal scales is a key challenge for science.

So-called “coarse-graining” techniques allow such multiscale systems to be simplified, such that they can be described with a reduced model at large length and time scales. “The price you pay for coarse-graining, however, is that important information about the patterns on small scales—like the pattern type—is lost. But the thing is that these patterns play a decisive role in . To give one example, they control important cellular processes,” explains Laeschkir Würthner, member of the team led by LMU physicist Prof. Erwin Frey and lead author of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that overcomes this issue.

In collaboration with the research group of Prof. Cees Dekker (TU Delft), Frey’s team has developed a new coarse-graining approach for so-called mass-conserving reaction-diffusion systems, in which the large-scale analysis of the total densities of the particles involved enables the prediction of patterns on small scales.

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The oscillations in binary neutron stars before they merge could have big implications for the insights scientists can glean from gravitational wave detection.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated the way in which these unique vibrations, caused by the interactions between the two stars’ tidal fields as they get close together, affect gravitational-wave observations. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

Taking these movements into account could make a huge difference to our understanding of the data taken by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo instruments, set up to detect —ripples in time and space—produced by the merging of black holes and neutron stars.

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