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Apr 29, 2021

What Voyager 2 Learned After Spending a Year in Interstellar Space

Posted by in category: space travel

Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 outside the heliosphere one year ago. Now, five new papers reveal what it has found out there.


Only two of humanity’s spacecraft have left the Solar System: NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere behind in 2012, while Voyager 2 did the same on Nov. 5th, 2018. Now Voyager 2 has been in interstellar space for one year, and five new papers are presenting the scientific results from that one year.

The heliosphere is a bubble-shaped region of space with our Sun in the center. Think of it as an inflated cavity full of plasma that comes from the Sun. The edge of the bubble is where the plasma from our Sun gives way to the interstellar medium (ISM.) Voyager 2 left the heliosphere behind and entered interstellar space at about 18 billion km (11 billion miles) from Earth.

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Apr 29, 2021

Efficient Quantum-Mechanical Interface Leads to a Strong Interaction Between Light and Matter

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

Circa 2020 o.o!


Researchers have succeeded in creating an efficient quantum-mechanical light-matter interface using a microscopic cavity. Within this cavity, a single photon is emitted and absorbed up to 10 times by an artificial atom. This opens up new prospects for quantum technology, report physicists at the University of Basel and Ruhr-University Bochum in the journal Nature.

Quantum physics describes photons as light particles. Achieving an interaction between a single photon and a single atom is a huge challenge due to the tiny size of the atom. However, sending the photon past the atom several times by means of mirrors significantly increases the probability of an interaction.

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Apr 29, 2021

Hackers use a bug to evade macOS defenses

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, robotics/AI

Lauded for years as the system able to best prevent malware infection, macOS recently fell victim to an operating system vulnerability that hackers used to circumvent all of Apple’s system defenses.

Security researcher Cedric Owens discovered this bug in March 2021 while assessing Apple’s Gatekeeper mechanism, a safeguard that will only allow developers to run their on Macs after registering with Apple and paying a fee. Moreover, the company requires that all applications undergo an automated vetting process to further protect against malicious software.

Unfortunately, Owens uncovered a logic flaw in the macOS itself, rather than the . The bug allowed attackers to develop able to deceive the operating system into running their malware regardless of whether they passed Apple’s safety checks. Indeed, this flaw resembles a door that has been securely locked and bolted but still has a small pet door at the bottom through which you can break in or insert a bomb.

Apr 29, 2021

Mechanical engineer offers perspective on the maturation of the field of soft robotics

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

The field of soft robotics has exploded in the past decade, as ever more researchers seek to make real the potential of these pliant, flexible automata in a variety of realms, including search and rescue, exploration and medicine.

For all the excitement surrounding these new machines, however, UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes wants to ensure that research is more than just a flash in the pan. “Some new, rapidly growing fields never take root, while others become thriving disciplines,” Hawkes said.

To help guarantee the longevity of soft robotics research, Hawkes, whose own robots have garnered interest for their bioinspired and novel locomotion and for the new possibilities they present, offers an approach that moves the field forward. His viewpoint, written with colleagues Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon University and Michael T. Tolley of UC San Diego, is published in the journal Science Robotics.

Apr 29, 2021

Jetoptera VTOL aircraft design features “bladeless fans on steroids”

Posted by in categories: energy, transportation

Seattle-based company Jetoptera says its air-accelerating Fluidic Propulsive System, which works a lot like a Dyson “bladeless” fan, produces thrust for half the fuel of a small turbojet while being the “most silent propulsion system in the skies.”

Apr 29, 2021

Using AI to gauge the emotional state of cows and pigs

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

An animal scientist with Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands has created an artificial-intelligence-based application that can gauge the emotional state of farm animals based on photographs taken with a smartphone. In his paper uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server, Suresh Neethirajan describes his app and how well it worked when tested.

Prior research and anecdotal evidence has shown that are more productive when they are not living under stressful conditions. This has led to changes in , such as shielding cows’ eyes from the spike that is used to kill them prior to slaughter to prevent stress hormones from entering the meat. More recent research has suggested that it may not be enough to shield from stressful situations—adapting their environment to promote peacefulness or even playfulness can produce desired results, as well. Happy cows or goats, for example, are likely to produce more milk than those that are bored. But as Neethirajan notes, the emotional state of an animal can be quite subjective, leading to incorrect conclusions. To address this problem, he adapted human face recognition software for use in detecting emotions in cows and pigs.

The system is called WUR Wolf and is based on several pieces of technology: the YOLO Object Detection System, the YOLOv4 that works with a convolution and Faster R-CNN, which also allows for detection of objects, but does so with different feature sets. For training, he used the Nvidia GeForece GTX 1080 Ti GRP running on a CUDA 9.0 computer. The data consisted of thousands of images of cows and pigs taken with a smartphone from six farms located in several countries with associated classification labels indicating which could be associated with which mood—raised ears on a cow, for example, generally indicate the animal is excited.

Apr 29, 2021

Toyota Shows Off Its First Electric Car | EV News

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Toyota finally unveils its first EV, an all electric SUV called bZ4x but it also responded to pressure of some investors to cut out the anti-EV lobbying. InsideEVs and Forbes contributor Tom Moloughney will be here to weigh in, plus other EV news of the week.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdX0BJNon1c6GfOdeS3pyDw.

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Apr 29, 2021

Blue Origin will start selling seats on its New Shepard spacecraft next week

Posted by in category: space travel

No word on price yet.


Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is about to start selling seats on its New Shepard spacecraft, which is designed to people on brief trips to suborbital space.

Apr 29, 2021

Electric vehicles could number 230 million worldwide by 2030

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, sustainability

Electric vehicles by 2030 – Future Timeline. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has today released its Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2021. The report shows that, despite the pandemic, growth in electric vehicle sales has remained strong and will likely continue to boom in the coming decade.

Apr 29, 2021

The U.S. Navy’s New Unhackable GPS Alternative: The Stars

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

GPS is a world-changing technology. It’s also incredibly fragile, easily spoofable, and consistently hackable. That’s why the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are looking to the stars for a navigational Plan B.