Tag Archives: Science

The best images from Artemis so far. More spacecraft are going to the Moon. Researchers have simulated a wormhole. China now has six people on board its space station. All this and more space news in this week’s Space Bites. Stunning Images from Artemis I As the Artemis I mission continues on its journey around the Moon, NASA releases new ...

Do you have a few minutes to spare and a thirst for knowledge about one of the greater mysteries of the Universe? Then head on over to ArsTechnica and check out the new series they’re releasing titled Edge of Knowledge, starring none other than Dr. Paul Sutter. In what promises to be an enlightening journey, Dr. Sutter will guide viewers ...

Outer space is a great place to go if you want to study the Earth. Although outward-looking spacecraft like Hubble and the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope garner most of the attention from the public – understandably, given their spectacular imagery of distant astronomical phenomena – the large majority of satellite infrastructure in orbit is actually focused back on ...

Despite all its wonderful properties, water isn’t the only resource needed for space exploration.  Carbon is another important ingredient for many necessary materials, such as steel, rocket fuel, and biomaterials.  Therefore, proponents of lunar exploration should be excited by a recent study led by Dr. Norbert Schorghofer of the Planetary Science Institute that found natural “cold traps” for carbon dioxide ...

Looking to the future, astronomers are excited to see how machine learning – aka. deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) – will enhance surveys. One field that is already benefitting in the search for extrasolar planets, where researchers rely on machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between faint signals and background noise. As this field continues to transition from discovery to characterization, ...

Biped robots are good candidates for collaborating with humans due to their locomotion mode that is similar to the human gait. However, in real conditions, factors such as low-value friction coefficient or surface irregularities increase the likelihood of slippery and stumbling. Image credit: Pxhere, CC0 Public Domain A recent paper on arXiv.org proposes a discrete event-based gait longitudinal motion controller ...

A research team at Lehigh University, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, developed and effectively taught an artificial neural network to sense symmetry and structural similarities in materials and to create similarity projections. The researchers published their findings in the journal npj Computational Materials. Image credit: Pixabay via Wikimedia The team developed an artificial neural network and used machine learning to train ...

A lack of effective radiation shielding is one of the biggest challenges still to be overcome if humans are to embark on long-term voyages into deep space. On Earth, the planet’s powerful magnetosphere protects us from the deadliest forms of radiation – those produced by solar flares, and galactic cosmic rays arriving from afar – that stream through the Solar ...

In-hand object reorientation, i.e., picking an object, reorienting it in hand, and then placing it or using it as a tool, is a common maneuver for humans. However, this task in robotics remains an active area of research due to several unsolved issues. Object re-orientation is a difficult task for machines. Image credit: Jeremy Tarling via Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-2.0 A recent ...

We don’t know what dark matter is. We do know the characteristics of dark matter, and much of how it behaves, so we know what physical properties dark matter must have, but no known matter has all the necessary characteristics of dark matter. So we’re stumped. The closest thing we have is neutrinos. They only interact weakly with other matter ...