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The toilet could turn roughly a pound of solid human waste, the average amount a human poops in a day, into an impressive 50 liters of methane gas, according to Cho. That means it can generate half a kilowatt hour of electricity, enough to drive an electric car for three quarters of a mile.

And because its 2021 — a day and age in which nothing is safe from the world of cryptocurrencies — Cho came up with a virtual currency called Ggool, or “honey” in Korean. Every use of the toilet scores you 10 Ggool per day, which can be used to buy stuff on the university’s campus.

“I had only ever thought that feces are dirty, but now it is a treasure of great value to me,” a postgraduate student Heo Hui-jin who’s both earned and spent Ggool, told Reuters. “I even talk about feces during mealtimes to think about buying any book I want.”

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A research team has solved a decades-old mystery as to how Jupiter produces a spectacular burst of X-rays every few minutes.

A research team co-led by UCL (University College London) has solved a decades-old mystery as to how Jupiter produces a spectacular burst of X-rays every few minutes.

The X-rays are part of Jupiter’s aurora — bursts of visible and invisible light that occur when charged particles interact with the planet’s atmosphere. A similar phenomenon occurs on Earth, creating the northern lights, but Jupiter’s is much more powerful, releasing hundreds of gigawatts of energy, enough to briefly power all of human civilization.*.

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Two things capture your attention in this spectacular Picture of the Week, which was taken using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3): the two enormous galaxies that flank the left and right sides of the image. The galaxy on the left is a lenticular galaxy, which rejoices in the name of 2MASX J03193743+4137580. The side-on spiral galaxy on the right is more simply named UGC 2665. Both galaxies lie approximately 350 million light-years from Earth, and they both form part of the enormous Perseus galaxy cluster.

Perseus is an important figure in Greek mythology, renowned for slaying Medusa the Gorgon — who is herself famous for the unhappy reason that she was cursed to have living snakes for hair. Given Perseus’s impressive credentials, it seems appropriate that the eponymous galaxy cluster is one of the biggest objects in the known Universe, consisting of thousands of galaxies, only a few of which are visible in this image.

The wonderful detail in the image is thanks to the WFC3’s powerful resolution and high sensitivity. The WFC3 is sensitive to both visible and infrared light, so those are the wavelengths that are captured in this image. The Perseus supercluster looks very different at other wavelengths. Whilst in this image the spaces between the galaxies appear dark and peaceful, when the X-ray emission is observed the Perseus cluster appears to be burning with bright intense light.

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Robots have a hard time improvising, and encountering an unusual surface or obstacle usually means an abrupt stop or hard fall. But researchers have created a new model for robotic locomotion that adapts in real time to any terrain it encounters, changing its gait on the fly to keep trucking when it hits sand, rocks, stairs and other sudden changes.

Although robotic movement can be versatile and exact, and robots can “learn” to climb steps, cross broken terrain and so on, these behaviors are more like individual trained skills that the robot switches between. Although robots like Spot famously can spring back from being pushed or kicked, the system is really just working to correct a physical anomaly while pursuing an unchanged policy of walking. There are some adaptive movement models, but some are very specific (for instance this one based on real insect movements) and others take long enough to work that the robot will certainly have fallen by the time they take effect.

The team, from Facebook AI, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, call it Rapid Motor Adaptation. It came from the fact that humans and other animals are able to quickly, effectively and unconsciously change the way they walk to fit different circumstances.

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Circa 2020 o.o…

Google’s Sycamore used to be the world’s fastest quantum computer on the planet, with 54 cubits of quantum computational power. Google declared Quantum Supremacy with Sycamore in October 2019 by running a calculation in 200s that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10000 years the execute. (in case you’re wondering; Quantum Supremacy is when a quantum computer can complete a task that no supercomputer could achieve.)

The research team at the University of Science and Technology of China ran a similar simulated comparison to its quantum calculation. China’s top quantum computer, dubbed Jiuzhang, completed a calculation in 3 minutes that would have taken TaihuLight, the country’s fastest supercomputer, and third fastest in the world, 2 billion years to complete.

Google and China did not run the same calculations on their systems, so a direct comparison is impossible, but the research team estimates that its quantum computer is 100 trillion times faster than Googles.

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Zoledronate is a biophosphonate, a drug used to strengthen bones and reduce the risk of osteoporosis-related bone fractures. It is well-absorbed into the bones, so it only needs to be administered through infusion once a year.

A 2010 study had found that people who were given zoledronate after experiencing hip fractures showed slightly reduced all-cause mortality compared to a control group. Patients who took the drug were at significantly lower risk for heart arrhythmias and pneumonia.

As this is a drug that is already being given to people, the choice to go back to genetically modified fruit flies, a much simpler model of aging, may seem counterintuitive. The team chose to test these insects for two principal reasons. The first is that Drosophila flies are a common subject of studies on basic aging pathways, which the researchers wished to explore. The second is simpler: Drosophila flies lack bones, making the bone-affecting properties of zoledronate irrelevant to the study.

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The smart farm: To show just how much these technologies could help farmers, CSU and Food Agility have partnered to create the Global Digital Farm (GDF).

The smart farm will be built at CSU’s Wagga Wagga campus, and it will feature autonomous tractors, harvesters, and other farming robots, as well as AI programs designed to help with farm management and more.

Teachable moments: The plan isn’t for the GDF to simply demonstrate what a smart farm can look like — CSU and Food Agility want to use it to teach Australia’s farmers how to take advantage of all the tech that will be on display.

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