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ANN ARBOR—The most violent solar weather—coronal mass ejections—can flood space with high-energy particle radiation that would harm astronauts and damage spacecraft in its path..

A new $62.6 million NASA mission led by the University of Michigan aims to provide better information on how the sun’s radiation affects the space environment that our spacecraft and astronauts travel through.

The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, or SunRISE, consists of miniature satellites called cubesats that form a “virtual telescope” in space to detect and study the radio waves that precede major solar events. The waves can’t be detected on Earth’s surface due to interference from the region of Earth’s upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere.

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Alongside the news that Boston Dynamics is going to let its robot dog, Spot, out of its laboratory for the first time, the company has released a new video of Atlas, its spectacular bipedal robot that’s previously been seen doing everything from parkour to backflips. In this latest video, Atlas does a small gymnastics routine, consisting of a number of somersaults, a short handstand, a 360-degree spinning jump, and even a balletic split leap.

What’s most impressive is seeing Atlas tie all these moves together into one pretty cohesive routine. In the video’s description, Boston Dynamics says that it’s using a “model predictive controller” to blend from one maneuver to the next. Presumably each somersault gives the robot a fair amount of forward momentum, but at no point in the video does it seem to lose its balance as a result. Amazingly, Atlas is able to roll gracefully along its back without any of its machinery getting squashed or tangled.

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A team of Stanford researchers may have found a way to use heat to disinfect N95 respirators, potentially enabling reuse of the single-use masks that are running dangerously low nationwide as the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. continues to grow.

The team’s research, based on experiments on a type of fabric commonly used in respirators and industrial-grade respirators, found that a 30-minute exposure to 75 °C could be used up to 20 times to disinfect N95 respirators without a loss of filtration efficiency and mechanical deformation.

These findings could be game-changing for both hospitals and individuals due to the method’s ease of use, said materials science and engineering professor Yi Cui, who led the research at 4C Air along with physics and molecular biology professor Steven Chu.

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The first patient who recovered from coronavirus donated plasma on Wednesday that will be used to create a “passive vaccine” to treat Israelis who are severely ill with COVID-19.

This assumes that those who have recovered from COVID-19 have developed special anti-virus proteins or antibodies in their plasma, which could therefore help sick patients cope with the disease.

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Defining our “New Normal” in the Age of Coronavirus — Amanda Christensen, ideaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) guest interviewer, interviews Ben Hammersley, one of the world’s leading futurists to answer questions about how we are going to work, live, thrive, and innovate in the coming years — #Ideaxme #BenHammersley #Innovation #Futurist #Futurism #Covid19 #Coronavirus #Science #Longevity #Health #Medicine #Environment #Space #Oceans #Literature #Music #Food #Future #Entertainment #Sports #Fashion Awesome Foundation European University Institute United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) UNAOC Fellowship Program Goldsmiths, University of London WIRED UK The Brookings Institution European Commission.

Amanda Christensen, ideaXme guest interviewer, interviews Ben Hammersley, one of the world’s leading futurists and founder of international Strategic Foresight agency Hammersley Futures.

Amanda Christensen Comments:

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