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NASA has launched the first ever spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

The Lucy mission successfully blasted off at 5:34 a.m. EDT (9:34 a.m. UCT) this morning on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. An hour later, it returned its first signal to Earth, sent from its own antenna to NASA’s Deep Space Network. Lucy is now travelling at 108,000 kph (67,000 mph) on a trajectory that will orbit the Sun and bring it back toward Earth in October 2022 for a gravity assist.

Over the next 12 years, it will fly past a total of seven different asteroids – a main belt asteroid, along with six Jupiter Trojans. The latter type are asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the gas giant.

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Many people reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. Lee McIntyre argues that anyone can and should fight back against science deniers.
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/2jTiXCLzMv4
Lee’s book “How to Talk to a Science Denier” is out now: https://geni.us/leemcintyre.

“Climate change is a hoax—and so is coronavirus.” “Vaccines are bad for you.” Many people may believe such statements, but how can scientists and informed citizens convince these ‘science deniers’ that their beliefs are mistaken?

Join Lee McIntyre as he draws on his own experience, including a visit to a Flat Earth convention as well as academic research, to explain the common themes of science denialism.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Continue reading “How to Talk to a Science Denier — with Lee McIntyre” | >

This week, Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they trained what they claim is one of the largest and most capable AI language models to date: Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP). MT-NLP contains 530 billion parameters — the parts of the model learned from historical data — and achieves leading accuracy in a broad set of tasks, including reading comprehension and natural language inferences…

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Similar to the relationship between an engine and oil, data and artificial intelligence (AI) are symbiotic. Data fuels AI, and AI helps us to understand the data available to us. Data and AI are two of the biggest topics in technology in recent years, as both work together to shape our lives on a daily basis…

This content isn’t available right now.

When this happens, it’s usually because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.

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This is a #robot that walks, flies, #skateboards, #slacklines, and might do much more one day. A portion of this video was sponsored by Bluehost. Start building a website with Bluehost today. Use my link to receive more than 65% off: https://bluehost.com/track/veritasium #Bluehost #BHcreator.

Thanks to Prof. Soon-Jo Chung and everyone at the Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab at Caltech for the tour!
https://aerospacerobotics.caltech.edu/

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References:
Kim, K., Spieler, P., Lupu, S., Ramezani, A., Chung, S. (2021). A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard. Science Robotics. — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abf8136

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Continue reading “This Robot Walks, Flies, Skateboards, Slacklines” | >

AI can detect signals that are informative about mental health from questionnaires and brain scans.

A study published today by an interdisciplinary collaboration, directed by Denis Engemann from Inria, demonstrates that machine learning from large population cohorts can yield “proxy measures” for brain-related health issues without the need for a specialist’s assessment. The researchers took advantage of the UK Biobank, one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive biomedical databases, that contains detailed and secure health-related data on the UK population. This work is published in the open access journal GigaScience.

Mental health issues have been increasing worldwide, with the WHO determining that there has been a 13% increase in mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders between 2007 and 2017. The burden these diseases place on society is extensive, negatively impacting nearly every area of life: school, work, family, friends, and community engagement. Among the many issues impeding the ability of society to address these disorders is that diagnoses of such health issues requires specialists; the availability of which ranges drastically across the globe. The development of machine learning methodology for the purposes of facilitating mental-health assessments could provide a much needed additional means to help detect, prevent and treat such health issues.

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Latest scientific findings suggest the ancestral Native American population does not originate in Japan, as believed by many archaeologists.

A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology “simply does not match-up.”

The findings, published on October 12 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal PaleoAmerica, are likely to have a major impact on how we understand Indigenous Americans’ arrival to the Western Hemisphere.

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Last year Chinese fishing vessels sailed to the edge of the Galapagos Islands’ territorial waters. This summer, the Associated Press and Spanish language broadcaster Univision documented the scale of Chinese fishing off the coast of South America.

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#Galapagos #Fishing

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I think we should approach from two angles: 1. encourage and fund through government to have everyone who can to put solar on their home/building/whatever. 2. Also have the massive sites dedicated to solar and wind harvesting. Seems we could be totally solar by mid 2030s.

Rooftop solar panels are up to 79% cheaper than they were in 2010. These plummeting costs have made rooftop solar photovoltaics even more attractive to households and businesses who want to reduce their reliance on electricity grids while reducing their carbon footprints.

But are there enough rooftop surfaces for this technology to generate affordable, low-carbon energy for everyone who needs it? After all, it’s not just people who own their own houses and want to cut their bills who are in need of solutions like this. Around 800 million people globally go without proper access to electricity.

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Energy giant National Grid is using Spot to keep employees safe and ensure uptime at a critical facility.

National Grid introduced Spot into the thyristor hall at Sandy Pond Converter Station just a few days before the facility’s shutdown period. The inspection robot was equipped with both a high-resolution 30X optical zoom pan/tilt/zoom camera and an infrared (IR) thermal camera to detect signs of potential problems.

A top priority at the facility is the monitoring of equipment conditions. Because the valve hall is water-cooled, any leaks could cause issues leading to equipment overheating and malfunction. While stationary cameras could detect signs of water leaks in certain locations, there’s no way for those cameras to cover every angle of the valve hall.

With the optical zoom camera, Spot was able to inspect the equipment during operation. Just as importantly, the IR camera allowed the robot to detect “hot spots,” where the equipment is hotter in some areas than others.

Continue reading “High Voltage Spot Inspections at National Grid” | >