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Jun 23, 2023

Rocket Lab will recover rocket booster from ocean after next mission

Posted by in category: satellites

The space firm, which has previously plucked a rocket booster out of the sky, will also launch NASA’s ‘swarm’ satellite, Starling.

Rocket Lab’s upcoming Electron mission, called “Baby Come Back”, will see the US and New Zealand-based company perform another marine recovery attempt of its rocket booster.

Rocket Lab announced in a press statement it will lift a number of satellites to low Earth orbit before attempting to retrieve its rocket booster from the ocean. The company is developing two reusability methods, one that plucks boosters out of the sky using a helicopter and the marine recovery method.

Jun 23, 2023

Flow of water on a carbon surface is governed by quantum friction, says study

Posted by in categories: computing, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum physics, sustainability

Water and carbon make a quantum couple: the flow of water on a carbon surface is governed by an unusual phenomenon dubbed quantum friction. A new work published in Nature Nanotechnology experimentally demonstrates this phenomenon—which was predicted in a previous theoretical study—at the interface between liquid water and graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms. Advanced ultrafast techniques were used to perform this study. These results could lead to applications in water purification and desalination processes and maybe even to liquid-based computers.

For the last 20 years, scientists have been puzzled by how water behaves near carbon surfaces. It may flow much faster than expected from conventional flow theories or form strange arrangements such as square ice. Now, an international team of researchers from the Max Plank Institute for Polymer Research of Mainz (Germany), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2, Spain), and the University of Manchester (England), reports in the study published in Nature Nanotechnology on June 22, 2023, that water can interact directly with the carbon’s electrons—a quantum phenomenon that is very unusual in .

A liquid, such as water, is made up of that randomly move and constantly collide with each other. A solid, in contrast, is made of neatly arranged atoms that bathe in a cloud of electrons. The solid and the liquid worlds are assumed to interact only through collisions of the liquid molecules with the solid’s atoms—the liquid molecules do not “see” the solid’s electrons. Nevertheless, just over a year ago, a paradigm-shifting theoretical study proposed that at the water-carbon interface, the liquid’s molecules and the solid’s electrons push and pull on each other, slowing down the liquid flow: this new effect was called quantum friction. However, the theoretical proposal lacked experimental verification.

Jun 23, 2023

Alien life may be possible even at the Milky Way’s edges

Posted by in category: alien life

Phosphorus detected far from the Milky Way’s center seems to extend the zone where life could exist in the galaxy by thousands of light-years.

Jun 23, 2023

Cutting-Edge Nasal Tech Could Usher in a New Era of Medicine

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

But recently, the nose has gained scientific attention as a gateway to the rest of the body — even the brain, a notoriously difficult target.

The upshot: Someday, inhaling therapies could be as routine as swallowing pills.

The nasal route is quick, needle-free, and user-friendly, and it often requires a smaller dose than other methods, since the drug doesn ’ t have to pass through the digestive tract, losing potency during digestion.

Jun 23, 2023

Just hours into sub’s journey, Navy detected sound “consistent with an implosion.” Experts explain how it can happen

Posted by in category: futurism

At 12,500 feet, every square inch of an object’s surface experiences the equivalent of 5,500 pounds of force.


One expert said implosion would have happened in a “thousandth of a second” — so fast that passengers didn’t have “time to realize what happened.”

Jun 23, 2023

Computer scientists sequence cotton genome

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, economics, food

Cotton is the primary source of natural fiber on Earth, yet only four of 50 known species are suitable for textile production. Computer scientists at DePaul University applied a bioinformatics workflow to reconstruct one of the most complete genomes of a top cotton species, African domesticated Gossypium herbaceum cultivar Wagad. Experts say the results give scientists a more complete picture of how wild cotton was domesticated over time and may help to strengthen and protect the crop for farmers in the U.S., Africa and beyond.

The findings are published in the journal G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics. Thiru Ramaraj, assistant professor of computer science in DePaul’s Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, is lead author on the publication. Leaps in technological advancement in the past decade made it possible for Ramaraj to analyze the in his Chicago lab.

“The power of this technology is it allows us to create high-quality genomes that supply a level of detail that simply wasn’t possible before,” says Ramaraj, who specializes in bioinformatics. “This opens up the possibility for more researchers to sequence many crops that are important to the and to feeding the population.”

Jun 23, 2023

Can AI Create its Own Information?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

AI is amazing. It is all the rage these days. Companies everywhere are jumping on the AI bandwagon. No one wants to be left behind when true believers are raptured to the mainframe in the sky.

What makes the AI work?

The AI works because of information it gained from a human generated dataset. Let’s label the dataset D.

Jun 23, 2023

US approves chicken made from cultivated cells, the nation’s first ‘lab-grown’ meat

Posted by in category: futurism

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.

Jun 23, 2023

Google’s Duet AI can generate custom templates in Sheets

Posted by in categories: internet, robotics/AI

Google testers now have the chance to check out another new Duet AI feature in Google Workspace. Starting today, they’ll see a new sidebar for Google Sheets. They can describe what they want to do and Duet AI can create a custom template to help them get the ball rolling.

According to Google, this could come in useful for those looking to carry out tasks that involve complex organization and tracking. The company suggests product roadmaps, company retreats and team budgets as potential use cases. If the feature works as intended, it could help save users a ton of time. It’s available in Workspace Labs for the time being.

Google has been quickly expanding the AI’s toolset since it announced Duet for Workspace at its I/O conference last month. When testers enter a prompt in the web version of Docs, Duet can generate text for them. It can automatically insert smart chips too.

Jun 23, 2023

Green Bolt of Lightning Captured on Jupiter

Posted by in categories: climatology, space

NASA’s JunoCam captured green lightning near Jupiter’s north pole. See the spectacular image and learn why lighting on the Gas Giant is green.