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For a personal sense of wellness, we may still be better off thinking of aging as an inevitable process with certain positive aspects—like additional wisdom accumulated through experience—rather than a sickness we hope to eradicate. If the many startups working on extended youth and anti-aging endeavors actually manage to create a magic potion that keeps us forever young, then someday we may get the chance to think about what, if anything, humanity loses when it finally finds the fountain of youth.


Aging has come to be seen as a disease we should be preventing.

Nanosized robots capable of crawling around on a person’s brain or underneath the skin may sound like a nightmare to some, but researchers suggest the mini machines could serve medical purposes such as gathering data on the brain or the spinal column.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University recently announced they have built nanosized, solar-powered robots made from silicon. One million such robots can fit on a 4-inch silicon wafer. “These robots are built massively in parallel, so I don’t build just one robot, I build a million robots, which is awesome,” declares Marc Miskin, an assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

The microscopic machines can carry up to 30 times their own weight, travel at about the speed of biological cells, survive temperatures up to 400 degrees, live unscathed in battery acid or other harsh chemicals, and can be injected with a hypodermic needle.

You’d be hard-pressed to find more opposite opposites than jellyfish and robots. Jellyfish pump through the oceans with effortless grace, while robots struggle to not fall on their faces—and that’s when they’re not catching on fire.

Now, though, those two worlds are merging, with a tiny, exceedingly simple robot modeled after larval jellyfish that can scoot around untethered like the real thing. At less than a quarter inch across, the magnetically activated robot mimics the entrancing locomotion of a jellyfish and can use the resulting disruption of water flow to manipulate objects or burrow into the ground.

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What is today’s NASA’s Orion Spacecraft ascent abort test all about? We’re verifying the Orion capsule’s launch abort system, a tower on top of the crew module, can steer the capsule and astronauts inside it to safety in the event of an issue after liftoff. The test is quick, fast and high, lasting less than three minutes with the test crew module reaching an average speed of Mach 1.5, roughly 1020 miles per hour, at approximately 32,000 feet in altitude.

Live coverage: https://go.nasa.gov/323AaQO Latest updates: https://go.nasa.gov/323AbnQ