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Alphabet’s Wing drone company allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch.

Alphabet’s drone company Wing delivered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs and 1,200 roast chickens to customers in Logan, Australia, over the last year, the company said Wednesday in a blog post outlining its progress.

Wing was initially launched in 2019 in Australia, following a series of drone tests that began in 2014. The service, which was initially part of Alphabet’s experimental research division, allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch.

Wing hopes to one day deliver products to people all over the world without having to rely on drivers or delivery trucks like other companies. It’s the reason UPS, Uber and Amazon are also working on drone delivery.

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During an upcoming NASA mission, currently scheduled for an October lift-off, a spacecraft called Lucy will be the first to visit a fleet of primordial bodies trailing behind Jupiter. It will launch on the Atlas V 401 rocket.

The Lucy mission will be the first to explore the Trojan asteroids, a large group of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.

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Okay, maybe not as big as the one in the picture.

Potatoes are my favorite vegetable; you can turn them into fries, bake them for an exquisite dish or mash them and eat them as a side dish. There are endless possibilities to cook a potato and what can be better than adding human fat gene in them to make them bigger and juicier?

Scientists have been experimenting with growing larger crops and it seems like they found the perfect solution; adding the human gene related to obesity and fat mass into the plants to yield super crops. The potato plants were inserted with a fat-regulating protein called FTO which changed the genetic code into producing extra proteins which resulted in large potatoes that were almost twice the size of regular ones grown from the same plant crop. “It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea. To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects,” said Chuan He, a chemist at University of Chicago.

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Circa 2020 o.o!

Researchers have created a miniature version of supernova shock waves in a lab here on Earth to solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

When stars die and explode in supernovas, they create shock waves that emanate across the surrounding plasma. These powerful shock waves blast out cosmic rays, or highly energetic particles, out into the universe. The waves act almost like particle accelerators, pushing these particles out so fast that they approach the speed of light. However, scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how and why the shock waves accelerate these particles.

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Magnetic excitations in multiferroic materials accompany electric polarization, known as electromagnons. The authors develop here a general framework to study electric polarization and nonlinear optical responses of noncentrosymmetric magnets based on spin models. They theoretically demonstrate the optical excitation of electromagnon-induced dc current generation (i.e., a photovoltaic effect) from the so-called shift current mechanism.

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Israel-based AI healthtech company, DiA Imaging Analysis, which is using deep learning and machine learning to automate analysis of ultrasound scans, has closed a $14 million Series B round of funding.

Backers in the growth round, which comes three years after DiA last raised, include new investors Alchimia Ventures, Downing Ventures, ICON Fund, Philips and XTX Ventures — with existing investors also participating, including CE Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Defta Partners, Mindset Ventures, and Dr Shmuel Cabilly. In total, it has taken in $25 million to date.

The latest financing will allow DiA to continue expanding its product range and go after new and expanded partnerships with ultrasound vendors, PACS/Healthcare IT companies, resellers and distributors while continuing to build out its presence across three regional markets.

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Water is the most abundant yet least understood liquid in nature. It exhibits many strange behaviors that scientists still struggle to explain. While most liquids get denser as they get colder, water is most dense at 39 degrees Fahrenheit, just above its freezing point. This is why ice floats to the top of a drinking glass and lakes freeze from the surface down, allowing marine life to survive cold winters. Water also has an unusually high surface tension, allowing insects to walk on its surface, and a large capacity to store heat, keeping ocean temperatures stable.

Now, a team that includes researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and Stockholm University in Sweden have made the first direct observation of how in water tug and push neighboring water molecules when they are excited with laser light. Their results, published in Nature today, reveal effects that could underpin key aspects of the microscopic origin of water’s strange properties and could lead to a better understanding of how water helps proteins function in living organisms.

“Although this so-called nuclear quantum effect has been hypothesized to be at the heart of many of water’s strange properties, this experiment marks the first time it was ever observed directly,” said study collaborator Anders Nilsson, a professor of chemical physics at Stockholm University. “The question is if this quantum effect could be the missing link in theoretical models describing the anomalous properties of water.”

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