The size of a grain of sand, dispersed microfliers could monitor air pollution, airborne disease, and environmental contamination.
Northwestern University engineers have added a new capability to electronic microchips: flight.
About the size of a grain of sand, the new flying microchip (or “microflier”) does not have a motor or engine. Instead, it catches flight on the wind — much like a maple tree’s propeller seed — and spins like a helicopter through the air toward the ground.
Microglia immune cells can join together to form networks when needed, a new study reports. However, certain mutations associated with Parkinson’s disease can impair this process.
Posted in space
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a cluster of distant galaxies surrounded in reflected light — an illusion first predicted by Einstein over a century ago.
They’re just the size of a grain of sand, but the microfliers can carry data-collecting sensors.
In a new study, a team of researchers proposed that Dark Matter detectors could also search for the elusive force that is causing our Universe to expand (Dark Energy)!
About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster!
This has led to the theory that the Universe is filled with an invisible and mysterious force, known as Dark Energy (DE). Decades after it was proposed, scientists are still trying to pin down this elusive force that makes up about 70% of the energy budget of the Universe. According to a recent study by an international team of researchers, the XENON1T experiment may have already detected this elusive force, opening new possibilities for future DE research.
A new paper takes a deep dive into primordial black holes that were formed as a part of the early universe when there were still no stars or galaxies. Such black holes could account for strange cosmic possibilities, including baby universes and major features of the current state of the cosmos like dark matter.
To study the exotic primordial black holes (PBHs), physicists employed the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) of the huge 8.2m Subaru Telescope operating near the 4,200 meter summit of Mt. Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This enormous digital camera can produce images of the entire Andromeda galaxy every few minutes, helping scientists observe one hundred million stars in one go.
Israel’s Urban Aeronautics is the latest to enter the growing Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) airspace with an aircraft that, at the very least, has a pretty cool name.
The “CityHawk” has been referred by Autoevolution as the “world’s first wingless” eVTOL vehicle. The rotors of other flying EVs like the Volocopter 2X and New Future Transportation ASKA protrude from body. But the CityHawk’s “Fancraft” system features two, counter-rotating ducted rotors partially enclosed behind and in front of the cockpit.
The NASA VIPER rover – a precursor mission to human landings in the south polar region of the Moon, and a mission started in 2019 under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program – has had its landing site selected for its 2023 mission. The rover, known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is now scheduled to land west of Nobile Crater in the lunar south polar region sometime in late 2023 after its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
This mission, costing $660 million, is one of several that will launch to the Moon in the next two years and is notable for being the first NASA rover to launch as a customer aboard a commercial lander.
The golf cart-sized VIPER rover will be mounted onto a Griffin lunar lander built by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company developing various lunar spacecraft that can carry payloads into lunar orbit or onto the lunar surface. After landing, VIPER will roll out onto the lunar surface with the help of a pair of ramps mounted on the lander and conduct checkouts before starting its surface mission.
This void spans across nearly 500 light years.
Although space is vast, it mostly teems with gas, dust, rocky objects, or stars. But this region wedged between the star-forming clouds was bare, puzzling the astronomers.
“What we see is the cavity, which means that there was some powerful mechanism to excavate this region,” Bialy says.
