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China has hinted before that it would like to send missions to the outer planets. Chinese scientists, working with European collaborators, are now solidifying plans for two distinct Jupiter mission concepts, one of which will likely move forward. Both seek to unravel mysteries behind the planet’s origins and workings using a main spacecraft and one or more smaller vehicles.

The competing missions are called the Jupiter Callisto Orbiter and the Jupiter System Observer, or JCO and JSO, respectively. Both would launch in 2029 and arrive in 2035 after one Venus flyby and two Earth flybys. JCO and JSO would study the size, mass, and composition of Jupiter’s irregular satellites—those captured by Jupiter rather than formed in orbit, and often in distant, elliptical and even retrograde orbits—complementing science conducted by NASA’s Europa Clipper and Lucy missions, as well as the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission.

Both JCO and JSO would possibly include CubeSats with particle and field detector payloads to perform the first multi-point study of Jupiter’s magnetic field.

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Science Mission Directorate

What is dark energy? More is unknown than is known — we know how much there is, and we know some of its properties; other than that, dark energy is a mystery — but an important one. Roughly 70% of the Universe is made of dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest — everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be called “normal” matter since it is a small fraction of the Universe!

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Researchers have found a simple way to eliminate almost all sequencing errors produced by a widely used portable DNA sequencer, potentially enabling scientists working outside the lab to study and track microorganisms like the SARS-CoV-2 virus more efficiently.

Using special molecular tags, the team was able to reduce the five-to-15 percent error rate of Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ MinION device to less than 0.005 percent—even when sequencing many long stretches of DNA at a time.

“The MinION has revolutionized the field of genomics by freeing DNA sequencing from the confines of large laboratories,” says Ryan Ziels, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia and the co-lead author of the study, which was published this week in Nature Methods. “But until now, researchers haven’t been able to rely on the device in many settings because of its fairly high out-of-the-box error rate.”

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Invasive round goby fish have impacted fisheries in the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes by competing with native species and eating the eggs of some species of game fish.

But the camouflaged bottom dwellers can be difficult to find and collect—especially when they first enter a new body of water and their numbers are low and they might be easier to remove.

In a proof-of-principle study, Cornell researchers describe a new technique in which they analyzed environmental DNA—or eDNA—from in Cayuga Lake to gather nuanced information about the presence of these invasive fish.

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You can buy Universe Sandbox 2 here: http://amzn.to/2yJqwU6
Or get a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about some of the recent discoveries in regards to our own evolution in the last 250 years.
Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.

Support this channel on Patreon to help me make this a full time job:
https://www.patreon.com/whatdamath.

Space Engine is available for free here: http://spaceengine.org.

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ABC News: German authorities accuse Australian man of running DarkMarket, the world’s largest illegal online marketplace.

An Australian is allegedly at the centre of what German authorities believe was the biggest illegal marketplace on the darknet where more than $220 million was transacted over sales of drugs, forged money, SIM cards and bogus credit cards.

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Circa 2020 o.o

Researchers in China claim to have achieved quantum supremacy, the point where a quantum computer completes a task that would be virtually impossible for a classical computer to perform. The device, named Jiuzhang, reportedly conducted a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a regular supercomputer a staggering 2.5 billion years to complete.

Traditional computers process data as binary bits – either a zero or a one. Quantum computers, on the other hand, have a distinct advantage in that their bits can also be both a one and a zero at the same time. That raises the potential processing power exponentially, as two quantum bits (qubits) can be in four possible states, three qubits can be in eight states, and so on.

That means quantum computers can explore many possibilities simultaneously, while a classical computer would have to run through each option one after the other. Progress so far has seen quantum computers perform calculations much faster than traditional ones, but their ultimate test would be when they can do things that classical computers simply can’t. And that milestone has been dubbed “quantum supremacy.”

Continue reading “Chinese quantum computer completes 2.5-billion-year task in minutes” | >