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For decades, people undergoing radiotherapy, which is used to treat cancer, have reported a bizarre phenomenon: Seeing flashes of light in their eyes, even when their eyes are closed.

Patients documented in the medical literature have described a ‘‘ray of blue light” and ‘‘seeing a blue neon light”, sometimes accompanied by a “white smell” during the delivery of radiation, lasting for a fraction of a second. There have been several theories for why this could be happening, including retinal pigments inside patients’ eyes being stimulated during the therapy, or that Cherenkov light or Cherenkov radiation – the same effect that makes nuclear reactors glow blue when they’re underwater – is produced inside the eyeball itself.

Now scientists have captured this strange light for the first time, producing the first photographic evidence that the phenomenon is in fact Cherenkov light.

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1.2 billion pixel panorama of Mars by Curiosity rover at Sol 3060 (March 152021)

🎬 360VR video 8K: 🔎 360VR photo 85K: http://bit.ly/sol3060

NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Source images credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS Stitching and retouching: Andrew Bodrov / 360pano.eu.

Music in video Song: Gates Of Orion Artist: Dreamstate Logic (http://www.dreamstatelogic.com​)

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There are some tasks that traditional robots — the rigid and metallic kind — simply aren’t cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able to interact with people more safely or slip into tight spaces with ease. But for robots to reliably complete their programmed duties, they need to know the whereabouts of all their body parts. That’s a tall task for a soft robot that can deform in a virtually infinite number of ways.

MIT researchers have developed an algorithm to help engineers design soft robots that collect more useful information about their surroundings. The deep-learning algorithm suggests an optimized placement of sensors within the robot’s body, allowing it to better interact with its environment and complete assigned tasks. The advance is a step toward the automation of robot design. “The system not only learns a given task, but also how to best design the robot to solve that task,” says Alexander Amini. “Sensor placement is a very difficult problem to solve. So, having this solution is extremely exciting.”

The research will be presented during April’s IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics and will be published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Co-lead authors are Amini and Andrew Spielberg, both PhD students in MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Other co-authors include MIT PhD student Lillian Chin, and professors Wojciech Matusik and Daniela Rus.

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Sustainable and responsible lunar services and transportation — yoav landsman, co-founder, moonscape.

Yoav Landsman is the Co-founder of Moonscape (https://www.moonscape.space/), a lunar services and payload transportation company, that is focused on providing necessary services like communication relay and cutting-edge imaging, while delivering payloads to the Moon.

Moonscape’s vision is to support humankind’s effort of reaching the Moon in a sustainable and responsible manner, as humanity’s first step towards the rest of the solar system and beyond.

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For 50 years, the research community has been hunting unsuccessfully for the so-called Odderon particle. Now, a Swedish-Hungarian research group has discovered the mythical particle with the help of extensive analysis of experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

In 1973, two French particle physicists found that, according to their calculations, there was a previously unknown quasi-particle. The discovery sparked an international hunt.

The Odderon particle is what briefly forms when protons collide in high-energy collisions, and in some cases do not shatter, but bounce off one another and scatter. Protons are made up of quarks and gluons, that briefly form Odderon and Pomeron particles.

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