Wednesday - October 25 2023, 04:13 UTC - 1 year ago

NASA's VIPER mission is set to explore the Moon's South Pole in late 2024, with the aim to assess available resources that may support future human exploration. It is equipped with three instruments and a 3.28-foot drill, enabling it to traverse up to 0.6 miles per day at extreme temperatures. The mission is expected to mark a critical step forward for NASA's Artemis missions and pave the way for a long-term human presence on the Moon.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 23:49 UTC - 1 year ago

Quantum computing is the new field of computing in which specialized computers use light and matter to quickly solve tasks such as cryptography, material science, optimization, and machine learning. Australia is the first country to develop silicon-based quantum computers, ushering in the quantum computing era.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 19:13 UTC - 1 year ago

Paleoecologists studied how high-elevation forests in the Rocky Mountains have changed over the past 2,500 years. Despite record-setting warm, dry summers like in 1910, the Northern Rockies show resilience - but similar research in the Southern Rockies warns of potential changes to the forests if fire activity remains frequent and core-exit events, like the heat wave in 2010, keep happening.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 15:12 UTC - 1 year ago

Tachyum is making Prodigy processors which are going to be used in data centers and Condor Galaxy is a 4 exaFLOP, 54 million core, cloud-based AI supercomputer. Together, these two technologies will make AI computing much faster and more energy efficient, paving the way for a better future.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 11:01 UTC - 1 year ago

A group of researchers and engineers from the University of Sharjah have developed a deep learning system to utilize the Arabic language and its varieties in applications related to Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on addressing the limitations NLPs encounter with languages of the right-to-left script such as Arabic. Once launched, the system is expected to improve performance for applications such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition, thereby contributing to cultural preservation, accessibility, and more effective cross-cultural communication.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 06:45 UTC - 1 year ago

Last week, I published a story about government and technology, and this article summarizes the main points. Government employees aren't typically empowered to shape how citizens interact with policies, but Boston is leading the way in changes like user experience research and human-centric design. This has helped them streamline digital services like the Common Housing Application for Massachusetts Program (CHAMP). Massachusetts is highly educated and well-resourced, which has allowed the city to build up an internal tech talent pool. These changes allow the American public to see government deliver and avoid being driven away from it altogether.

Tuesday - October 24 2023, 02:15 UTC - 1 year ago

A study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI suggests there could be potential downsides when robots and humans form a team. The study found that when humans were asked to spot defects, they did worse when they thought a robot had already checked the same images - an effect which can be seen among humans too, known as social loafing. The cause of the decrease in performance is related to lack of motivation and identification with the task.

Monday - October 23 2023, 21:16 UTC - 1 year ago

An international team of scientists has developed a novel type of nano engine made of DNA that is powered by a clever mechanism, replicating how RNA polymerases copy DNA strands. It has similar form to a hand grip strength trainer, with two handles connected by a spring, however is much smaller with almost 14,000 nucleotides. The results were published on October 19 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Monday - October 23 2023, 17:09 UTC - 1 year ago

iGreen gadgets is a company offering a variety of products which have a seed inside them, allowing them to sprout into flowers or plants after their primary use is complete. The most well known product is the iPhone cover which has three colors and uses biodegradable materials. The company has been providing environmentally friendly products and raising awareness for their mission of respect for nature since 2008.

Monday - October 23 2023, 12:56 UTC - 1 year ago

Seawater intrusion is the movement of saline water from the ocean or estuaries into freshwater systems which can potentially contaminate drinking water sources, kill crops and cause soil salinization. Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of seawater intrusion events, making it a major threat to coastal communities in the future.

Monday - October 23 2023, 08:05 UTC - 1 year ago

Computer scientists, mathematicians, and cryptographers have been on a quest to find new encryption algorithms that can withstand attacks from both classical and quantum computers. No one has yet found a type of problem that is provably hard for classical or quantum computers to solve, and if true one-way functions don't exist, cryptographers may still be in danger of attack from unknown hackers. Rafael Pass and Leslie Valiant are working on mathematical models to establish one-way functions but to date nothing has been developed.

Monday - October 23 2023, 03:13 UTC - 1 year ago

This cutting-edge technology, free-space optical communication (FSO), has developed a miniaturized FSO system that achieves up to 9.27 Gbps of bidirectional data rate over a wireless link of 1 km. This system is capable of portable mobility and portability in various deployments scenarios, with precision of 3 microradians and no need of optical amplification.

Sunday - October 22 2023, 22:45 UTC - 1 year ago

Horseshoe crabs are an important part of modern medicine. Their blood is used to produce a substance called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) which is used to test intravenous drugs for toxins. While this is a 20th-century medical safety breakthrough, there are now criticisms of the process, primarily concerning environmental impacts and the process for reviewing and approving alternatives to horseshoe crab blood.

Sunday - October 22 2023, 18:30 UTC - 1 year ago

A team led by Tappei Mishina at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research has published a paper showing how horsehair worms manipulate their hosts using stolen genes acquired through a process known as horizontal gene transfer. Through analyzing gene expression in horsehair worms and their mantis hosts, researchers were able to identify over 3,000 hairworm genes that were expressed more when hosts were being manipulated, and 1,400 hairworm genes that match those in mantises, suggesting they could have been acquired through horizontal gene transfer.

Sunday - October 22 2023, 13:47 UTC - 1 year ago

Everyone has a different tolerance for spicy food, and the scientific consensus on whether spicy food can have an effect — positive or negative — on your health is mixed. In September 2023, a 14-year-old died after doing the Paqui One Chip Challenge, which uses Carolina Reaper and Naga Viper peppers, leading to some of the spicy chips being removed from stores. Nutritional epidemiologists have been studying the potential risks and benefits of long-term spicy food consumption for many years, but there is still no consensus on the effects on health.

Sunday - October 22 2023, 08:55 UTC - 1 year ago

Recent observations that combine both gravitational waves and visible light have pointed to neutron star mergers as the major site of heavy element production. An advanced new three-dimensional (3D) computer simulation of the light emitted following a merger of two neutron stars has produced a similar sequence of spectroscopic features to an observed kilonova, indicating that the origin of heavy elements is correctly understood. Future progress in this area will enable the detection of mergers between two neutron stars in the nearby universe with sufficient precision to test this process.

Sunday - October 22 2023, 04:05 UTC - 1 year ago

Mercedes' Drive Pilot Level 3 self driving is a highly sophisticated system designed to be used on well-marked highways in suitable weather at speeds below 40 km/h. It is not equipped for city driving and requires the driver to pay attention and be ready to take control at all times.

Saturday - October 21 2023, 23:27 UTC - 1 year ago

Director Martin Scorsese's new movie, "Killers of the Flower Moon," tells the true story of a string of murders on the Osage Nation's land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The US was built on stolen lands and wealth that was taken from Native Americans. Starting in the 1830s, the US government placed pressure on Native American tribes to remove them from their ancestral homes in the east to reservations in the west, and the General Allotment Act of 1887 sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into the national population by transitioning communal systems of land ownership.

Saturday - October 21 2023, 18:41 UTC - 1 year ago

Egbert Edelbroek founded biotech startup SpaceBorn United with the goal of understanding the effects of space on human reproduction. The startup developed a mini lab to explore in-vitro fertilization beyond Earth and test the possibility of space settlements in the distant future. Studies on animals have suggested that our reproductive processes may be affected by potentials of lower gravity, higher radiation exposure and other conditions in space.