What Actually Changed (Architecturally) Between Llama-3 and Muse
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Station Crew Gears Up for Next Spacewalk, Keeps Up Microgravity Research
The next spacewalk outside the International Space Station is set to take place on Tuesday, Aug. 18. Two Expedition 75 astronauts will work in the vacuum of space to replace a space-to-ground antenna to maintain high-speed data and communication transmissions between the orbital outpost and mission controllers.
Flight engineers Anil Menon of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) are gearing up for next week’s spacewalk that will see the duo spend about six-and-a-half hours swapping an antenna on the orbital outpost’s Z1 truss segment. Menon and Adenot worked together on Monday inside the Quest airlock and organized the tools they will carry outside of the space station for the replacement job. Station commander Jessica Meir and flight engineer Jack Hathaway, both from NASA. studied the Canadarm2 robotic arm maneuvers they will use to assist next week’s spacewalkers. Hathaway and Adenot also took turns cleaning the cooling systems in a pair of spacesuits. The quartet wrapped up Monday’s shift reviewing procedures for the upcoming spacewalk.
The most recent spacewalk took place on Aug. 6 to augment the space station’s power system. Meir and Menon spent six hours and 27 minutes building a modification kit on the station’s Starboard 6 truss segment where a roll out solar array is slated to be installed later this year.
For roughly a billion years of Earth’s deep past, the Moon’s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sundriven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch
Calling this a tug-of-war makes the mechanism vivid, but there was no rope, no conscious contest and perhaps no clean moment when one side “won”. There were two transfers of angular momentum whose strengths depended on a planet that was itself continually changing.
That is the version I find most persuasive to hold lightly. Earth’s day may have remained near 19 hours for an interval longer than complex animals have existed, because sunlight organised the air in just the right rhythm to counter the Moon’s pull on the sea. The evidence is suggestive, the mechanism is physically plausible, and neither is final.
Scientists turn sheep’s wool into a material that helps regrow bone
Keratin extracted from sheep’s wool helped damaged bone regenerate in animals, producing tissue that was more organized and structurally similar to healthy bone than tissue grown with conventional collagen scaffolds. The discovery could turn an abundant agricultural byproduct into a promising new material for regenerative medicine.
Virtuix’s Tesla Optimus Teleoperation Deal: What 75% Stock Actually Sold
teleoperation deal with Tesla is being read across investor media as validation of the humanoid robotics market — this teleoperation deal deserves closer scrutiny than that. Austin-based Virtuix Holdings (NASDAQ: VTIX) confirmed that Tesla purchased one Omni One Enterprise system for its Optimus humanoid robot division — the company’s first disclosed enterprise sale into humanoid robotics, announced July 27, 2026. It is worth reading as something narrower than “validation”: a single, financial-terms-undisclosed unit sale from a company whose stock has lost roughly 75% of its value since its January 2026 IPO.
The Omni One Enterprise is an omni-directional treadmill that lets a human operator walk, run, and turn while remaining in a fixed physical footprint, translating that movement into a remote robot in real time. Inside Tesla’s Optimus program, the terms of the teleoperation deal describe a “low-latency, human-in-the-loop interface” for remote control — engineers physically walking a course to train or calibrate a robot’s motion remotely. That is a legitimate, useful tool for robot development. It is not, by itself, evidence that Optimus performs autonomous factory work.
Virtuix did not disclose the value of the teleoperation deal, and that omission is itself part of the story. For a company this size, that matters more than usual.
New Chip Uses Quantum Effects To Control Light Beams Dynamically
Alternatively, when circularly polarized OAM states carry different topological charges, the resulting hybrid-order Poincaré sphere can describe full Poincaré beams or C-point singularities. The system’s ability to generate arbitrary structured light fields on diverse Poincaré spheres is crucial for unlocking their full potential in various applications, a need previously unmet by existing free-space optical setups or limited metasurface – and fiber-based schemes.
On-Chip Meta-Generator: Eight-Channel Silicon Photonics
A new silicon photonic integrated circuit dynamically controls light’s properties across multiple dimensions, offering an advance for applications requiring precise beam manipulation. The device, fabricated with a space-multiplexed silicon photonic integrated circuit, overcomes limitations of traditional free-space optics by integrating key components onto a single chip. The researchers highlight the potential for mapping the angular momentum of light onto these high-order spheres, providing a powerful framework for describing structured light beams.
This Deadly Brain Cancer Hijacks Brain Activity to Fuel Its Growth, Study Reveals
Of all the many forms cancer can take, those that arise in the brain can be among the hardest to treat.
A type of tumor known as glioma is a particularly formidable example. These malignant growths arise from glial cells or their precursors in the brain or spinal cord; the worst form – glioblastoma – has a 5-year survival rate of just 5 to 7 percent.
Part of the reason gliomas are so insidiously difficult to treat is that they actively exploit the brain’s crucial functions to feed their growth.