Terrain-relative navigation helped Perseverance land – and Ingenuity fly – autonomously on Mars. Now it’s time to test a similar system while exploring another frontier.
Latest GitLab survey finds one-year surge in automated aspects of DevOps. But is there a risk of over-automating?
We think of earthly life as evolving from the sea. But newly discovered microscopic “ball” fossils — found in ancient lake sediments in Scotland — suggest that evolution from single-celled to multicellular organisms might have occurred in lakes.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot ignore the warning signs for future catastrophes.
NASA Goddard
The most striking aspect of the approach—for our money, anyway—is the way Bennu feels like a small world; rather than just a 1600-foot-wide hunk of rock. There’s plenty of space on Bennu’s surface to jump around. And one could even leap off the surface, enter into orbit around the asteroid, and then touch back down. The space probe, in fact, captured rocks doing just that.
Got milk?
Hoping to capitalise on a surge in demand for home deliveries, a Singapore technology company has deployed a pair of robots to bring residents their groceries in one part of the city state.
Developed by OTSAW Digital and both named “Camello”, the robots’ services have been offered to 700 households in a one-year trial.
Users can book delivery slots for their milk and eggs, and an app notifies them when the robot is about to reach a pick-up point — usually the lobby of an apartment building.
A “four-legged fossil fish” predating dinosaurs has been recently rediscovered by groups hunting sharks with deep-sea nets.
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to product delays, companies redesigning their parts, and higher device prices. But over the long term, it could usher in a complete rethink of the way electronics parts are designed.
Peggy Carrieres, VP of global sales development and supplier enablement at Avnet, told me she expects the shortage to contribute to engineers reducing the number of physical components used and turning instead to software to handle functions that had historically been done in hardware. The shortages tied to the pandemic are an accelerator for this shift, but it has been happening for years as the industry adjusts to the end of Moore’s Law and the ability to eke out more performance at lower costs.
I had reached out to Avnet because I was interested in what it was seeing from its customers as the chip shortage dragged on. Avnet is a distributor, so it acts as a middleman between electronics components suppliers and the end customers of those parts. Someone building a new electronic device could work with Avnet to source the parts from an existing design, for example, or to build a design out of available parts that fit within a specific price.
A lava flow from Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano enters the ocean near Isaac Hale Beach Park on August 5, 2018. The volcano’s 2018 eruption was its largest in over 200 years. Credit: USGS
Scientists have figured out what triggers large-scale volcanic eruptions and what conditions likely lead to them.
Hawaii’s Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Because of this and its relative ease of accessibility, it is also among the most heavily outfitted with monitoring equipment – instruments that measure and record everything from earthquakes and ground movement to lava volume and advancement.