[embedded content] As many folks continue to look skyward in expectation of drone delivery services, they’re missing the development of an increasingly popular delivery technology back on terra firma. Wheel-based delivery robots may not be quite as sexy as their flying counterparts, but with fewer regulatory hoops to jump through than drone services, the technology […]
[embedded content] Thanks to major advances in technology, we’ve now managed to log the existence of more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system. That’s pretty darn impressive, especially when you consider that pre-1992 we couldn’t identify any. To celebrate the recent discovery of the 4,000th exoplanet, as these celestial bodies are called, science-art outreach […]
Japan’s space agency (JAXA) believes it has successfully collected the first-ever subsurface samples from an asteroid. The update came via Kyodo News at shortly before 8 p.m. PT on Wednesday, just 90 minutes after JAXA’s Hayabusa2 satellite made its second landing on the Ryugu asteroid some 200 million miles from Earth, five months after the […]
Virgin Orbit launched a rocket from a specially modified Boeing 747 on Wednesday, clearing the way for the company to launch a similar rocket into space later this year. A spinoff of Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit plans to launch small satellites into low-Earth orbit from a plane instead of from the ground. Wednesday’s test flight […]
[embedded content] Most cameras capture visible light, but researchers at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have just concocted a camera that can see what humans can’t — and it’s about as simple as the one inside a smartphone. The thumb-sized polarization camera captures the way light bounces and […]
[embedded content] Your side salad could be about to get a whole lot more high-tech, thanks to researchers at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge, who have developed an A.I.-powered robot that’s able to identify and pick iceberg lettuce. In doing so, it joins a growing (no pun intended) number of robots designed to help harvest […]
Amazon is moving forward with a plan to launch thousands of satellites into space in order to bring broadband internet service to the nearly all of the United States. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday to obtain permission to launch 3,236 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit. […]
[embedded content] Did you ever make sculptures out of found objects like driftwood? Researchers at the University of Tokyo have taken this same idea and applied it to robots. In doing so, they’ve figured out a way to take everyday natural objects like pieces of wood and get deep reinforcement learning algorithms to figure out […]
Image showing the galaxy cluster Abell1689. The novel deep learning tool Deep-CEE has been developed to speed up the process of finding galaxy clusters such as this one, and takes inspiration in its approach from the pioneer of galaxy cluster finding, George Abell, who manually searched thousands of photographic plates in the 1950s. NASA/ESA Galaxy […]
This is jellyfish galaxy JO201. Callum Bellhouse and the GASP collaboration Out in the depths of space, you can find strange things. One example of such oddities are “jellyfish galaxies,” which have tendrils of stars that stream away from the main body of the galaxy like the tentacles of a jellyfish. When a galaxy passes […]
Telescopes, including Hubble, have monitored the Eta Carinae star system for more than two decades. It has been prone to violent outbursts, including an episode in the 1840s during which ejected material formed the bipolar bubbles seen here. NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson), and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute, New York) This Hubble […]
In this image taken June 25, 2019, engineers install the SuperCam instrument on Mars 2020’s rover. This image was taken in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Mars 2020 rover reached another milestone this week, when technicians installed its mast, the SuperCam Mast Unit. The rover already has […]
[embedded content] With its Watson technology, IBM has helped create a pretty convincing artificial brain. But now it’s seemingly ready to move onto other body parts as well — and it’s settled on the tongue as a next step. As developed by computer scientists at IBM Research, the A.I.-assisted e-tongue is a portable device, equipped […]
The Planetary Society The LightSail 2 solar-powered spacecraft is officially operational — it’s now in orbit and made its first contact with Earth on Tuesday. You’ll now be able to track the ship live using an online dashboard. The LightSail 2 is the result of a $ 1 million Kickstarter campaign organized and led by […]
The theory behind machine learning tools that are like neural networks is that they function and, more specifically, learn in a similar way to the human brain. Just as we discover the world through trial and error, so too does modern artificial intelligence. In practice, however, things are a bit different. There are aspects of […]