Earth’s Crust Elements
The crust is a rigid surface containing both the oceans and landmasses. Most elements are found in only trace amounts within the Earth’s crust, but several are abundant.
The Earth’s crust comprises about 95% igneous and metamorphic rocks, 4% shale, 0.75% sandstone, and 0.25% limestone.
Summary: A new machine-learning algorithm could help practitioners identify autism in children more effectively.
Source: USC
For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), receiving an early diagnosis can make a huge difference in improving behavior, skills and language development. But despite being one of the most common developmental disabilities, impacting 1 in 54 children in the U.S., it’s not that easy to diagnose.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have shown that a jet of material propelled from the core of a giant galaxy is channeled by a corkscrew-shaped magnetic field out to nearly 3,300 light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. That is much farther than such a magnetic field previously had been detected in a galactic jet.
“By making high-quality VLA images at several different radio wavelengths of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), we were able to reveal the 3-dimensional structure of the magnetic field in this jet for the first time,” said Alice Pasetto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leader of the team. “The material in this jet traces a double helix, similar to the structure of DNA,” she added.
M87 is a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole some 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun lurks at the center of M87. That black hole is the first one ever to be imaged—an achievement done with the world-wide Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and announced in 2019. Earlier this year, new EHT images traced the magnetic field in the vicinity of the black hole event horizon.
The James Webb Space Telescope was fuelled inside the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its launch on Ariane 5.
Webb’s thrusters will use this propellant to make critical course-corrections after separation from Ariane 5, to maintain its prescribed orbit about one and a half million kilometers from Earth, and to repoint the observatory and manage its momentum during operations.
Fuelling any satellite is a particularly delicate operation requiring setup of the equipment and connections, fuelling, and then pressurization.
Physical exercise is great for a mouse’s brain, and for yours. Numerous studies conducted in mice, humans and laboratory glassware have made this clear. Now, a new study shows it’s possible to transfer the brain benefits enjoyed by marathon-running mice to their couch-potato peers.
Stanford School of Medicine researchers have shown that blood from young adult mice that are getting lots of exercise benefits the brains of same-aged, sedentary mice. A single protein in the blood of exercising mice seems largely responsible for that benefit.
The discovery could open the door to treatments that—by taming brain inflammation in people who don’t get much exercise—lower their risk of neurodegenerative disease or slow its progression.
More than a score of companies are pushing to be early winners in the race for self-driving taxis — robotaxis — with the potential that brings to capture the entire value chain of car transport from your riders. They are all at different stages, and they almost all want to convince the public and investors that they are far along.
To really know how far along a project is, you need the chance to look inside it. To see the data only insiders see on just how well their vehicle is performing, as well as what it can and can’t do. Most teams want to keep those inside details secret, though in time they will need to reveal them to convince the public, and eventually regulators that they are ready to deploy.
Because they keep them secret, those of us looking in from the outside can only scrape for clues. The biggest clues come when they reach certain milestones, and when they take risks which tell us their own internal math has said it’s OK to take that risk. Most teams announce successes and release videos of drives, but these offer us only limited information because they can be cherry picked. The best indicators are what they do, not what they say.
Unlike Hubble, which orbits Earth and was visited by NASA astronauts for fixes and upgrades, Webb is going a million miles away to Lagrange Point 2—so Webb almost certainly can’t be fixed if anything goes wrong (though never write-off NASA).
NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) is due to go skywards—at long, long last—on December 18, 2021.
And he will also be the first space tourist to go to the moon in 2023.
Japanese billionaire and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa is on his way to the International Space Station (ISS), after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-20 crew ship today, December 8, at 2:38 am ET (07:38 GMT).
“Dream come true,” the entrepreneur tweeted before boarding the three-seat Soyuz spacecraft that would launch him up into orbit. He is joined by Russian cosmonaut and pilot Alexander Misurkin and film producer Yozo Hirano, who will document the expedition for Maezawa’s YouTube channel.
Continue reading “Japanese Billionaire Launches to the ISS Aboard a Soyuz Rocket” »
A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.
Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.
Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.
Imagine windows that can easily transform into mirrors, or super high-speed computers that run not on electrons but light. These are just some of the potential applications that could one day emerge from optical engineering, the practice of using lasers to rapidly and temporarily change the properties of materials.
“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a light switch,” says Caltech Professor of Physics David Hsieh. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”
In a new study in Nature, Hsieh and his team, including lead author and graduate student Junyi Shan, report success at using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of any excess damaging heat.
