The secrets of the solar system can drive economic return for all.
The launch of NASA’s fifth Mars rover marks a new milestone in the era of space exploration. It puts focus on the need for greater collaboration, equity and inclusion among international partners to ensure the sustainable, peaceful and fair use of resources. Guidelines for interacting and norms of behaviour are as essential to ensure success in space as on Earth.
The Artemis Accords: a framework for cooperation
The study of the brain of extinct organisms sheds lights on their behaviors. However, soft tissues, like the brain, are not usually preserved for long periods. Hence, researchers reconstruct the brains of dinosaurs by analyzing the cranial cavities under computed tomography. It demands well-preserved braincases, which is the region that envelops the brain tissues. To date, complete and well-preserved neurocrania from the oldest dinosaurs worldwide have not been found.
In 2015, a Brazilian paleontologist from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Dr. Rodrigo Temp Müller, unearthed an exceptionally well-preserved skeleton from a fossiliferous locality in southern Brazil. The skeleton, approximately 233 million years old (Triassic period), belongs to a small carnivorous dinosaur named Buriolestes schultzi and the entire braincase was preserved. Now, Brazilian researchers have reconstructed the first complete brain of one of the oldest dinosaurs worldwide.
The study was published in Journal of Anatomy and performed by Rodrigo T. Müller, José D. Ferreira, Flávio A. Pretto, and Leonardo Kerber from the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria and Mario Bronzati from the Universidade de São Paulo.
After a long, seven-year development, an experimental fusion reactor in the UK has been successfully powered on for the time, achieving ‘first plasma’: confirmation that all its components can work together to heat hydrogen gas into the plasma phase of matter.
This transition – achieved last week by a machine called MAST Upgrade in Culham, Oxfordshire – is the fundamental ingredient of a working nuclear fusion reactor, a dream scientists have been trying to realise for decades.
In nuclear fusion, the nuclei of two or more lighter elements fuse into a heavier nucleus, and release energy. This phenomenon is what goes on in the heart of the Sun, and if we can recreate and maintain the same reactions on Earth at sufficient scale, we stand to reap the rewards of clean, virtually limitless, low-carbon energy.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have gained a better understanding of a promising method for improving the confinement of superhot fusion plasma using magnetic fields. Improved plasma confinement could enable a fusion reactor called a spherical tokamak to be built smaller and less expensively, moving the world closer to reproducing on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.
The improved confinement is made possible by the so-called enhanced pedestal (EP) H-mode, a variety of the high performance, or H-mode, plasma state that has been observed for decades in tokamaks around the world. When a fusion plasma enters H-mode, it requires less heating to get to the superhot temperatures necessary for fusion reactions.
The new understanding reveals some of the underlying mechanics of EP H-mode, a condition that researchers discovered more than a decade ago. Scientists led by physicists at PPPL have now found that the EP H-mode improves upon H-mode in spherical tokamaks by lowering the density of the plasma edge.
Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said the system has dramatically reduced toxic chat and repeating offenses.
In April 2019, Blizzard shared some insights into how it was using machine learning to combat abusive chat in games like Overwatch. It’s a very complicated process, obviously, but it appears to be working out: Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a new Fireside Chat video that it has resulted in an “incredible decrease” in toxic behavior.
“Part of having a good game experience is finding ways to ensure that all are welcome within the worlds, no matter their background or identity,” Brack says in the video. “Something we’ve spoken about publicly a little bit in the past is our machine learning system that helps us verify player reports around offensive behavior and offensive language.”
A new $32,000 electric camper is getting some hype this week, but we are highly skeptical about the vehicle. Is it a scam?
Electric Brands, a Germany-based startup, has been taking reservations and investments for what it calls the eBussy, a modular electric vehicle platform that can be configured in different vehicles, including an electric camper.
Several media outlets have been reporting on the project this week, resulting in thousands of reservations for the vehicle.
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Cosmic Loners
The problem with the GEODE hypothesis is that the strange objects need to resemble but not act like black holes. The only way that GEODEs could expand the universe without destroying everything around them is if they were isolated in empty pockets of the cosmos. But black holes often sit smack dab in the middle of galaxies.
“This becomes a problem if you want to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe,” lead author Kevin Croker said in a press release. “If they moved like black holes, staying close to visible matter, galaxies like our own Milky Way would have been disrupted.”
Right now it looks like the graphics from Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but the engineers want to add full color.
