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Jul 9, 2021

Australia’s First Fully Automated Smart Farm Will Use Only Robots For Field Work

Posted by in categories: food, robotics/AI, sustainability

The smart farm: To show just how much these technologies could help farmers, CSU and Food Agility have partnered to create the Global Digital Farm (GDF).

The smart farm will be built at CSU’s Wagga Wagga campus, and it will feature autonomous tractors, harvesters, and other farming robots, as well as AI programs designed to help with farm management and more.

Teachable moments: The plan isn’t for the GDF to simply demonstrate what a smart farm can look like — CSU and Food Agility want to use it to teach Australia’s farmers how to take advantage of all the tech that will be on display.

Jul 9, 2021

Quantum laser turns energy loss into gain

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

Scientists at KAIST have fabricated a laser system that generates highly interactive quantum particles at room temperature. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to a single microcavity laser system that requires lower threshold energy as its energy loss increases.

The system, developed by KAIST physicist Yong-Hoon Cho and colleagues, involves shining through a single hexagonal-shaped microcavity treated with a loss-modulated silicon nitride substrate. The system design leads to the generation of a polariton at , which is exciting because this usually requires cryogenic temperatures.

The researchers found another unique and counter-intuitive feature of this design. Normally, energy is lost during laser operation. But in this system, as energy loss increased, the amount of energy needed to induce lasing decreased. Exploiting this phenomenon could lead to the development of high efficiency, low threshold lasers for future quantum optical devices.

Jul 9, 2021

Meet the ‘zombie frog,’ a new species found in the Amazon

Posted by in category: futurism

The spooky-looking amphibian is less scary than it appears to be. But it might already be endangered, as deforestation rates continue to go up.

Jul 9, 2021

Facebook teaches AI-powered robot to adapt while walking

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Researchers tested a four-legged robot on sand, oil, rocks and other tricky surfaces.

Jul 9, 2021

Match matters: The right combination of parents can turn a gene off indefinitely

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Evidence suggests that what happens in one generation—diet, toxin exposure, trauma, fear—can have lasting effects on future generations. Scientists believe these effects result from epigenetic changes that occur in response to the environment and turn genes on or off without altering the genome or DNA sequence.

But how these changes are passed down through generations has not been understood, in part, because scientists have not had a simple way to study the phenomenon. A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland provides a potential tool for unraveling the mystery of how experiences can cause inheritable changes to an animal’s biology. By mating nematode worms, they produced permanent epigenetic changes that lasted for more than 300 generations. The research was published on July 9, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications.

“There’s a lot of interest in heritable epigenetics,” said Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD and senior author of the study. “But getting clear answers is difficult. For instance, if I’m on some diet today, how does that affect my children and grandchildren and so on? No one knows, because so many different variables are involved. But we’ve found this very simple method, through mating, to turn off a for multiple generations. And that gives us a huge opportunity to study how these stable epigenetic changes occur.”

Jul 9, 2021

NASA Space Lasers Discover New Lakes Under Antarctic Ice

Posted by in categories: mapping, space

From above, the Antarctic Ice Sheet might look like a calm, perpetual ice blanket that has covered Antarctica for millions of years. But the ice sheet can be thousands of meters deep at its thickest, and it hides hundreds of meltwater lakes where its base meets the continent’s bedrock. Deep below the surface, some of these lakes fill and drain continuously through a system of waterways that eventually drain into the ocean.

Now, with the most advanced Earth-observing laser instrument NASA has ever flown in space, scientists have improved their maps of these hidden lake systems under the West Antarctic ice sheet—and discovered two more of these active subglacial lakes.

The new study provides critical insight for spotting new subglacial lakes from space, as well as for assessing how this hidden plumbing system influences the speed at which ice slips into the Southern Ocean, adding freshwater that may alter its circulation and ecosystems.

Jul 9, 2021

Methane Detected at Enceladus May Be of Biological Origin

Posted by in category: biological

Methane at Enceladus: biotic or abiotic origin?


Here we go again: biology or unknown abiotic process?

Jul 9, 2021

Einstein’s “Time Dilation” Prediction Verified

Posted by in categories: mathematics, particle physics, quantum physics

Circa 2014


Physicists have verified a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity with unprecedented accuracy. Experiments at a particle accelerator in Germany confirm that time moves slower for a moving clock than for a stationary one.

The work is the most stringent test yet of this ‘time-dilation’ effect, which Einstein predicted. One of the consequences of this effect is that a person travelling in a high-speed rocket would age more slowly than people back on Earth.

Continue reading “Einstein’s ‘Time Dilation’ Prediction Verified” »

Jul 9, 2021

Scientists Discovered A 2D Material That Is 10X Tougher Than Graphene

Posted by in category: materials

Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is officially the iron man of two-dimensional materials, beating graphene in toughness by 10 times.

Jul 9, 2021

Dopamine Makes You Feel Good. Are You Getting Enough? Hack Your Dopamine. Naturally

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, neuroscience