Launched into space in 2004, Rosetta embarked on a 10-year journey through the cosmos. By 2014, the spacecraft reached its destination, made orbit, and successfully landed its lander module Philae.
A short film cataloging the Rosetta mission to comet 67P, providing a visual spectacle of its landing on the comet’s surface.
Saturn is so beautiful that astronomers cannot resist using Hubble to take yearly snapshots of the ringed world when it is at its closest distance to Earth.
These images, however, are more than just beauty shots. They reveal a planet with a turbulent, dynamic atmosphere. This year’s Hubble offering, for example, shows that a large storm visible in the 2018 Hubble image in the north polar region has vanished. Smaller storms pop into view like popcorn kernels popping in a microwave oven before disappearing just as quickly. Even the planet’s banded structure reveals subtle changes in color.
But the latest image shows plenty that hasn’t changed. The mysterious six-sided pattern, called the “hexagon,” still exists on the north pole. Caused by a high-speed jet stream, the hexagon was first discovered in 1981 by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.” Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.
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Researchers at Google claim they’ve developed a skin condition-diagnosing AI that’s on par with dermatologists in terms of accuracy.
A mathematician has shared some of the brain exercises he uses to help people with dementia.
Gareth Rowlands, from St Albans, runs memory workshops at dementia cafes and care homes in Hertfordshire.
He became passionate about helping those with memory loss after he visited a care home which he wife ran in Barnet.
Researchers have, for the first time, detected the gravitational waves from a newly born black hole, and found that the ringing pattern of the waves predicts the cosmic body’s mass and spin, providing more evidence for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
The study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, increases the possibility that black holes exhibit only three observable properties – mass, spin, and electric charge.
All other properties, the study noted, could be swallowed up by the black hole itself, and are unobservable.
“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Bill Gates wrote this in 1995, long before synthetic biology – a scientific discipline focused on reading, writing, and editing DNA – was being harnessed to program living cells. Today, the cost to order a custom DNA sequence has fallen faster than Moore’s law; perhaps that’s why the Microsoft founder is turning a significant part of his attention, and wallet, towards this exciting field.
Bill Gates is not the only tech founder billionaire that sees a parallel between bits and biology, either. Many other tech founders – the same people that made their money programming 1s and 0s – are now investing in biotech founders poised to make their own fortunes by programming A’s, T’s, G’s and C’s.
The industry has raised more than $12.3B in the last 10 years and last year, 98 synthetic biology companies collectively raised $3.8 billion, compared to just under $400 million total invested less than a decade ago. Synthetic biology companies are disrupting nearly every industry, from agriculture to medicine to cell-based meats. Engineered microorganisms are even being used to produce more sustainable fabrics and manufacture biofuels from recycled carbon emissions.
Life.
Making the world kinder.
🔎 Learn more about this year’s Technology Pioneers: https://wef.ch/2xlRxOX
Life.
MIT has created this new aerogel which can produce large amounts of heat just from sunlight and could heat buildings free of electricity and fossil fuels.
