With nothing but a smartphone and some clever computation, researchers can exploit ambient signals to track individuals in their own homes.
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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — An astrophysicist from the University of Minnesota who has spent 14 winters in Antarctica tending to a telescope plans to step away from his research after the instrument is replaced.
Minnesota Public Radio reports that the university will begin the replacing the telescope and mount at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station this month.
University astrophysicist Robert Schwarz says he’ll stay through the replacement process but doesn’t plan to return. He’s overseen the telescope maintenance, trekking out in temperatures as low as minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit to check on the instrument.
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We already know that orangutans are some of the smartest land animals on Earth. Now, researchers have found evidence that these amazing apes can communicate about past events—the first time this trait has been observed in a non-human primate.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances revealed that when wild Sumatran orangutan mothers spotted a predator, they suppressed their alarm calls to others until the threat was no longer there.
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NASA’s InSight mission aims to send a lander to Mars to study the crust, mantle, and core of the red planet. Launched in May this year, InSight is now nearly at its destination and will soon be touching down on the surface of Mars.
NASA has shared details on how it will monitor the touching down of the lander at the end of its 91 million mile journey. The first tools it will use are radio telescopes, which can pick up simple radio signals. As the lander descends into the Mars atmosphere, it will send out radio signals that researchers back home at NASA can pick up. Two locations will be listening out for the signal: one at the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia and one at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy’s facility at Effelsberg, Germany. These radio signals cannot give data about what the lander finds, but they can be used to work out basic information like what at speed the lander is descending thanks to the Doppler effect in which the frequency of a sound wave is affected by the movement of the source relative to the observer.
More detailed information about the lander will be gathered using two small spacecraft called Mars Cube One (MarCO). The MarCOs are each about the size of a briefcase and are an experimental technology that should fly behind the InSight lander and relay data back to Earth in real-time. They may even be able to capture an image of the surface of Mars as soon as the lander touches down.
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How Europe Will Save Space Travel
Posted in futurism
The new service lets consumers contribute to medical research, but still poses privacy concerns.
- By Karen Weintraub on November 17, 2018
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