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BepiColombo will fly by the planet’s night side, so images during the closest approach wouldn’t be able to show much detail.

The mission team anticipates the images will show large impact craters that are scattered across Mercury’s surface, much like our moon. The researchers can use the images to map Mercury’s surface and learn more about the planet’s composition.

Some of the instruments on both orbiters will be turned on during the flyby so they can get a first whiff of Mercury’s magnetic field, plasma and particles.

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Looks kind of like a computer printer on big wheels.

We got to see Amazon’s latest gadget early — it’s the long-rumored robot.

We spent about 50 minutes with Astro. Like robots of the past (some have fizzled out; others have gone extinct like Anki’s Vector and Cozmo robots), it focuses on peace of mind in the likes of home monitoring and checking in on household members, along with providing entertainment. At the heart of Astro is Amazon’s smart assistant and artificial intelligence chops — so, yes, Alexa is on board just with an “Astro” wake word so that you can ask for the weather, a question or to go to a specific room.

So let’s break down Astro, what it can do and what we think after seeing this unique robot up close.

Continue reading “Amazon’s Astro home robot puts Alexa on wheels — but is it worth

Looks kind of like a computer printer on big wheels.

We got to see Amazon’s latest gadget early — it’s the long-rumored robot.

We spent about 50 minutes with Astro. Like robots of the past (some have fizzled out; others have gone extinct like Anki’s Vector and Cozmo robots), it focuses on peace of mind in the likes of home monitoring and checking in on household members, along with providing entertainment. At the heart of Astro is Amazon’s smart assistant and artificial intelligence chops — so, yes, Alexa is on board just with an “Astro” wake word so that you can ask for the weather, a question or to go to a specific room.

So let’s break down Astro, what it can do and what we think after seeing this unique robot up close.,000?” | >

What’s so special about this artificial kidney? The device was engineered to sustainably support a culture of human kidney cells without provoking an immune response.

This means that kidney failure patients can forgo the often painful and uncomfortable dialysis procedures and the lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs that are taken when a kidney transplant is performed and which can have severe side effects. project just earned a $650,000 prize from KidneyX for its first-ever demonstration of a functional prototype.

According to kidney.org, kidney disease causes more deaths than breast cancer or prostate cancer, affecting an estimated 37 million people in the U.S. or 15% of the adult population; more than 1 in 7 adults.

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As 5G is deployed in the next several years, engineers and policymakers must start thinking about a 6G in the decade ahead. For example, the Center for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue is launching a task force on “Roadmap to 6G” in October, with participation from Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, and other partners. We don’t know exactly how 6G will turn out, but we get to shape it today.

With the current speed of 5G phones not quite as advertised — and it will take some time to get even close — some may wonder why we need to already think about the next generation.

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Google announced today it will be applying AI advancements, including a new technology called Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to improve Google Search. At the company’s Search On event, the company demonstrated new features, including those that leverage MUM, to better connect web searchers to the content they’re looking for, while also making web search feel more natural and intuitive.

One of the features being launched is called “Things to know,” which will focus on making it easier for people to understand new topics they’re searching for. This feature understands how people typically explore various topics and then shows web searchers the aspects of the topic people are most likely to look at first.

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How close is nuclear fusion to break-even? If you trust the headlines we’re getting close and the international project ITER is going to be the first to produce energy from fusion power. But not so fast. Scientists have, accidentally or deliberately, come to use a very misleading quantity to measure their progress. Unfortunately we’re much farther away from generating fusion power than the headlines suggest.

Phillip Ball’s article in the Guardian is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/27/nuclear-…s-johnson.

Continue reading “How close is nuclear fusion power?” | >

A comet so massive that it was initially misidentified as a dwarf planet is on its way in from the outer Solar System.

There’s no need to be concerned; C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), as the comet is known, will pass just outside Saturn’s orbit. However, its large size and close proximity will provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a pristine object from the Oort Cloud and learn more about the formation of the Solar System.

“We have the privilege of having discovered perhaps the largest comet ever seen – or at least larger than any well-studied one – and caught it early enough for people to watch it evolve as it approaches and warms up,” co-discoverer and astronomer Gary Bernstein from the University of Pennsylvania said earlier this year.

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The future of package delivery, taxis, and even takeout in cities may be in the air—above the gridlocked streets. But before a pizza-delivery drone can land safely on your doorstep, the operators of these urban aircraft will need extremely high-resolution forecasts that can predict how weather and buildings interact to create turbulence and the resulting impacts on drones and other small aerial vehicles.

While scientists have been able to run simulations that capture the bewilderingly complex flow of air around buildings in the urban landscape, this process can take days or even weeks on a supercomputing system—a timeline far too slow (and a task far too computationally expensive) to be useful to daily weather forecasters.

Now, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have demonstrated that a new kind of built entirely to run on graphical processing units, or GPUs, has the potential to produce useful, street-level forecasts of atmospheric flow in urban areas using far fewer computing resources and on a timeline that makes real-time weather forecasting for drones and other urban aircraft plausible.

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SAN FRANCISCO – Launchspace Technologies Corp., a company developing technology to capture orbital debris, is the latest space startup to seek funding on an equity crowdfunding platform.

As of Oct. 2 LaunchSpace had raised $58,351 at a valuation of nearly $49 million on Netcapital.

On the Netcapital site, LaunchSpace is heralding its recent grant from the nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to support its plan to test technology for collecting orbital debris on the International Space Station.

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