Credit: NASA
It could be this Sunday that NASA attempts the first powered, controlled flight on another planet with the Ingenuity helicopter. NASA will livestream coverage of the confirmation of Ingenuity's first flight starting around 12:30 a.m. PT on Monday. This won't be like watching a sporting event with live footage, but the NASA team hopes to get results back indicating a successful hover operation, CNET reports. NASA has emphasized that Ingenuity is a high-risk, high-reward...
Emily Conover takes us on a fascinating examination of the history of nuclear physics in ScienceNews. "The neutron and positron were both found in laboratories that are small in comparison with today’s, and each discovery was attributed to a single physicist, relatively soon after the particles had been proposed," Conover writes. "Those discoveries kicked off frantic developments that seemed to roll in one after another."
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physics-atom-matter-particle-nuclear-power-neutron
Whitney Wolfe Herd, 31, became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire when she took Bumble public in February. The central focus of dating app Bumble is that only women can initiate a conversation in heterosexual matches. Wolfe Herd owns a 11.6% stake in Bumble, giving her an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. She also heads Badoo. The two apps have a combined 40 million users, 2.4 million of whom pay a subscription, reports the BBC. Wolfe...
2020 was an amazing year for the world's wealthiest, as you will see in facts and figures from Forbes' 35th annual World's Billionaires List. Jeff Bezos ($177 billion) and Elon Musk ($151 billion) top a list that added a record 493 new members. The total of 2,755 billionaires saw a $5-trillion boost in their collective wealth. Well, there is your silver (and gold, platinum, and Bitcoin) lining for what was a difficult year for...
A new study indicates that mines in China powering nearly 80 percent of the global trade in cryptocurrencies risk undercutting the country's climate goals, reports Tech Xplore. The Nature Communications study found that unchecked, China's bitcoin mines will generate 130.50 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2024 – close to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from Italy or Saudi Arabia. About 40 percent of China's bitcoin mines are powered with coal, while the rest use renewables, the study...
Scientists from MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras have grown small amounts of self-organizing brain tissue, known as organoids, in a tiny 3D-printed system that allows observation while they develop, Tech Xplore reports. The investigators tested their device with organoids derived from human cells. They observed the growing brain organoids with a microscope and were able to successfully follow their development for seven days. The small bit of brain tissue developed a cavity or ventricle...
Tim Cook on Monday hinted at Apple's vision for augmented reality tech, telling Sway's Kara Swisher that charts and other visual elements could enhance conversation, CNET reports. "When I think about that in different fields, whether it's health, whether it's education, whether it's gaming, whether it's retail, I'm already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone," he said on the podcast. "And I think the promise is even greater in the future."
https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-acknowledges-ars-importance-in-apples-future/
A new MIT study points to significant uncertainty in the way the ocean's "biological pump", which takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transports it deep into the ocean, is represented in climate models, phys.org reports. Researchers found that the "gold standard" equation used to calculate the pump's strength has a larger margin of error than thought, and that predictions of how much atmospheric carbon the ocean will pump to various depths could be off by 10...
Credit: NASA
The Ingenuity mini-helicopter has been dropped on the surface of Mars in preparation for its first flight, NASA says. "Its 293 million mile (471 million km) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 cm) from the rover's belly to the surface of Mars today," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tweeted. "Next milestone? Survive the night." Ingenuity had been feeding off the Perseverance's power system but will now have to use...
Sophia, the creation of Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, speaks, jokes, sings, and makes art. Last month, a digital work she created as part of a collaboration was sold at an auction for $688,888 in the form of a non-fungible token, Tech Xplore reports. "As an artist, I have computational creativity in my algorithms, creating original works," Sophia said. "But my art is created in collaboration with my humans in a kind of collective intelligence like a...
