This is some real sci-fi stuff.
Beaming solar power from outer space sounds like a Marvel movie plot, but space could remove barriers to solar acceptance that dominate the Earthbound discourse.
The Gaia space telescope has measured the acceleration of the Solar System when it orbits the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Solar System motion relative to the stars agrees with the results by Finnish astronomers in the 19th century. Moreover, the observational data by Gaia improves satellite navigation.
Earlier this month, the European Space Agency (ESA) released observational data from the Gaia telescope (Gaia Early Data Release 3 or EDR3), in continuation to the DR1 and DR2 releases of the years 2016 and 2018. Gaia accrues accurate knowledge about, for example, the Milky Way stars, distant extragalactic quasars, and the asteroids of our Solar System.
Continue reading “Acceleration of the Solar System Measured by the Gaia Space Telescope” »
Simulations rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts as the source of lunar magnetism, supporting the proposal that the ancient moon generated a core dynamo.
Today, the moon lacks a global magnetic field, but this wasn’t always the case. Spacecraft measurements of the moon’s crust and lunar rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions contain remnant magnetization that formed 4 to 3.5 billion years ago in a magnetic field comparable in strength to that of the Earth. Scientists have argued that the source of this was a dynamo — a magnetic field generated by the moon’s churning, molten, metal core. However, research indicates that the moon’s suspected small core may not have been able to generate enough energy to sustain the ancient magnetic field that planetary scientists have inferred from in its rocks.
Boston Dynamics’ robots dance to “Do you love me”
Boston Dynamics, already well known for its cutting-edge robotics technology, has released a new video in which its latest machines can be seen dancing to the classic song “Do You Love Me” by the Contours.
This line-up includes the bipedal humanoid Atlas, the four-legged canine-inspired Spot, and the two-wheeled Handle. The robots’ moves appear eerily human-like as they strut their stuff – an effect known as the uncanny valley.
This is another example of how autism is now being used as an advantage in business. What people previously saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength. 😃
Gordon Douglas struggled to find work because of his “differences”. Now his neurodiversity is making him a sought-after employee.
Genies like Adam are busy.
HIAS is an open-source Hospital Intelligent Automation System designed to control and manage an intelligent network of IoT connected devices. The network server provides locally hosted and encrypted databases, and a secure proxy to route traffic to the connected devices.
This will help ensure that SSDs don’t suddenly just stop working one day. 😃 At least you get to back up your data.
It’s only available for data centers for now though. In the future, we may get our own when they perfect the technology.
If a NAND chip fails, these new SSDs detect it, move the data somewhere else on the drive, and keep on functioning.
Experts first floated immunity passports as something to give people who had recovered from COVID-19, but the idea was laden with ethical and logistical concerns — especially since scientists weren’t sure how long coronavirus antibodies lasted after a patient recovered.
But instead of the immune system’s response to COVID-19, this new system built by the medical testing platform startup Healthvana would show whether someone had been vaccinated, likely a more robust indicator that they’re no longer infectious.
After vaccination, you’d be able to take out your smartphone and show you’d been inoculated “to prove to airlines, to prove to schools, to prove to whoever needs it,” Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani told Bloomberg.
Digital data storage is a growing need for our society and finding alternative solutions than those based on silicon or magnetic tapes is a challenge in the era of “big data.” The recent development of polymers that can store information at the molecular level has opened up new opportunities for ultrahigh density data storage, long-term archival, anticounterfeiting systems, and molecular cryptography. However, synthetic informational polymers are so far only deciphered by tandem mass spectrometry. In comparison, nanopore technology can be faster, cheaper, nondestructive and provide detection at the single-molecule level; moreover, it can be massively parallelized and miniaturized in portable devices. Here, we demonstrate the ability of engineered aerolysin nanopores to accurately read, with single-bit resolution, the digital information encoded in tailored informational polymers alone and in mixed samples, without compromising information density. These findings open promising possibilities to develop writing-reading technologies to process digital data using a biological-inspired platform.
DNA has evolved to store genetic information in living systems; therefore, it was naturally proposed to be similarly used as a support for data storage (1–3), given its high-information density and long-term storage with respect to existing technologies based on silicon and magnetic tapes. Alternatively, synthetic informational polymers have also been described (5–9) as a promising approach allowing digital storage. In these polymers, information is stored in a controlled monomer sequence, a strategy that is also used by nature in genetic material. In both cases, single-molecule data writing is achieved mainly by stepwise chemical synthesis (3, 10, 11), although enzymatic approaches have also been reported (12). While most of the progress in this area has been made with DNA, which was an obvious starting choice, the molecular structure of DNA is set by biological function, and therefore, there is little space for optimization and innovation.
