Vice President Kamala Harris will today award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for the first time since 2006. The recipients are Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, who became the first astronauts to fly to space on a crewed SpaceX mission in 2020. The pair, who traveled to the International Space Station and stayed there for almost two months, will receive the honor for their bravery.
Hurley and Behnken were part of the first crewed spaceflight from US soil since the last Space Shuttle mission in 2011. They both also flew on the Space Shuttle, and Hurley was on the program's final flight.
Hurley and Behnken's Demo-2 mission was the first crewed flight under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Five other SpaceX crews have since flown to the ISS.
The Congressional Space Medal of Honor is typically given to mark a first in space travel, as The Washington Post notes. Previous recipients include Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard (the first American to travel to space), John Glenn (the first American in orbit) and Frank Borman (commander of Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission). The award was also granted posthumously to the crew of Apollo 1 and those who died aboard the Challenger and Columbia shuttles.
Swiss scientists have developed a proof-of-concept method to collect environmental DNA (eDNA) from high-arching forest canopies, an under-observed habitat. Rather than hiring skilled climbers to risk their lives to grab a little bug and bird DNA, the team flew a collection drone into the trees to capture genetic material — giving them a clearer picture of the area’s organic breakdown.
The researchers used a quadcopter equipped with a sticky collection cage. But since tree branches can bend at the slightest touch — and the drone needs to touch the branches to collect DNA — it has a haptic-based control scheme using force sensors to measure the pressure between the drone and the branch. Then, it adjusts its landing accordingly, leaning against the branch gently enough to avoid flinging valuable material to the ground.
The drone’s cage then grabs samples with a sticky surface made from “adhesive tape and a cotton gauze humidified with a solution of water and DNA-free sugar.” The cage spends around 10 seconds leaning on each branch and collecting eDNA before zipping back to the base, where the scientists retrieve the samples and ship them to a lab. The experiment’s drone successfully collected enough genetic material to identify 21 animal classes ranging from insects and mammals to birds and amphibians.
Science
However, the scientists make it clear this is a work in progress. For example, on the last research day, the team noticed a drop in eDNA detection because of rainfall the night before — suggesting the method only tells them which creatures visited since the last downpour. Additionally, they noted unexplained differences in the performance of their two collectors, highlighting the need for more research on equipment variations.
The researchers hope their work will make it easier and cheaper for environmental biologists to learn which critters live in some of the hardest-to-reach places. The approach could eventually help the scientific community understand how environmental changes affect biodiversity, perhaps helping identify endangered or vulnerable species before it’s too late.
NASA is going back to an old idea as it tries to get humans to Mars. It is teaming up with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space with the aim of using the technology for crewed missions to the red planet. The agencies hope to "demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion technology as soon as 2027," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said. "With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever — a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars."
Under the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate will take the lead on technical development of the engine, which will be integrated with an experimental spacecraft from DARPA. NASA says that nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) could allow spacecraft to travel faster, which could reduce the volume of supplies needed to carry out a long mission. An NTD engine could also free up space for more science equipment and extra power for instrumentation and communication.
As far back as the 1940s, scientists started speculating about the possibility of using nuclear energy to power spaceflight. The US conducted ground experiments on that front starting in the '50s. Budget cutbacks and changing priorities (such as a focus on the Space Shuttle program) led to NASA abandoning the project at the end of 1972 before it carried out any test flights.
There are, of course, risks involved with NTP engines, such as the possible dispersal of radioactive material in the environment should a failure occur in the atmosphere or orbit. Nevertheless, NASA says the faster transit times that NTP engines can enable could lower the risk to astronauts — they could reduce travel times to Mars by up to a quarter. Nuclear thermal rockets could be at least three times more efficient than conventional chemical propulsion methods.
NASA is also looking into nuclear energy to power related space exploration efforts. In 2018, it carried out tests of a portable nuclear reactor as part of efforts to develop a system capable of powering a habitat on Mars. Last year, NASA and the Department of Energy selected three contractors to design a fission surface power system that it can test on the Moon. DARPA and the Defense Department have worked on other NTP engine projects over the last few years.
Meanwhile, the US has just approved a small modular nuclear design for the first time. As Gizmodoreports, the design allows for a nuclear facility that's around a third the size of a standard reactor. Each module is capable of producing around 50 megawatts of power. The design, from a company called NuScale, could lower the cost and complexity of building nuclear power plants.
Researchers say they have determined a way to make agrivoltaics — the process of growing crops underneath solar panels — more efficient. They found that red wavelengths are more efficient for growing plants, while the blue part of the spectrum is better for producing solar energy. Solar panels that only allow red wavelengths of light to pass through could enable farmers to grow food more productively while generating power at the same time.
Previous studies have found that agrivoltaics can reduce the amount of water required for crops, since they're shaded from direct sunlight. Researchers at Michigan Technological University determined in 2015 that shading can reduce water usage by up to 29 percent. Majdi Abou Najm, an associate professor at University of California, Davis' department of land, air and water resources, told Modern Farmer that by splitting the light spectrum, crops can get the same amount of carbon dioxide with less water while shielding them from heat.
The researchers put the idea to the test by growing tomatoes under blue and red filters, as well as a control crop without any coverings. Although the yield for the covered plots was about a third less than the control, the latter had around twice the amount of rotten tomatoes. Abou Najm noted that the filters helped to reduce heat stress and crop wastage.
Majdi Abou Najm/UC Davis
For this approach to work in practice, though, manufacturers would need to develop translucent solar panels that capture blue light and allow red light to pass through. Matteo Camporese, an associate professor at the University of Padova in Italy and lead author of a paper on the topic, suggested that translucent, carbon-based organic solar cells could work. These cells could be applied onto surfaces such as glass.
There are other issues, including the fact wavelength-selective agrivoltaic systems may need to account for different crop types. Harvesting those crops efficiently might require some out-of-the-box thinking too. Still, the research seems promising and, with a growing global population, it's important to consider different approaches to using our resources more productively.
“We cannot feed 2 billion more people in 30 years by being just a little more water-efficient and continuing as we do,” Abou Najm said. “We need something transformative, not incremental. If we treat the sun as a resource, we can work with shade and generate electricity while producing crops underneath. Kilowatt hours become a secondary crop you can harvest.”
In 2023, there are cameras and microphones that match and surpass the capabilities of human sight and sound. But for all of our technological advancements, humans haven’t quite managed to build a better nose. After all, evolution has had millions of years to perfect the receptors humans, animals and inspects use to identify odors. But, with the help of nature, scientists may have made a breakthrough on that front.
In a study published Monday in the journal Biosensor and Bioelectronics, a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University (via Neuroscience News) said they recently created a robot that can identify a handful of smells with 10,000 times more sensitivity than some specialized electronics. They describe their robot as a bio-hybrid platform (read: cyborg). It features a set of antennae taken from a desert locust that is connected to an electronic system that measures the amount of electrical signal produced by the antennae when they detect a smell. They paired the robot with an algorithm that learned to characterize the smells by their signal output. In this way, the team created a system that could reliably differentiate between eight “pure” odors, including geranium, lemon and marzipan, and two mixtures of different smells. The scientists say their robot could one day be used to detect drugs and explosives.
A YouTube video from Tel Aviv University claims the robot is a “scientific first,” but last June researchers from Michigan State University published research detailing a system that used surgically-altered locusts to detect cancer cells. Back in 2016, scientists also tried turning locusts into bomb-sniffing cyborgs. What can I say, after millennia of causing crop failures, the pests could finally be useful for something.
Lightning rods have been used to safely guide strikes into the ground since Benjamin Franklin's day, but their short range (roughly the same radius as the height) and fixed-in-place design makes them ineffective for protecting large areas. The technology may finally be here to replace them in some situations. European researchers have successfully tested a system that uses terawatt-level laser pulses to steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod. It's not limited by its physical height, and can cover much wider areas — in this case, 590 feet — while penetrating clouds and fog.
The design ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules, releasing electrons and creating a plasma that conducts electricity. As the laser fires at a very quick 1,000 pulses per second, it's considerably more likely to intercept lightning as it forms. In the test, conducted between June and September 2021, lightning followed the beam for nearly 197 feet before hitting the rod.
Researchers have been exploring laser lightning guides for years. However, experiments have typically been limited to much shorter distances and relatively slow pulses that were more likely to miss lighting as it formed. Dr. Aurélien Houard, who helped lead the project, told the Wall Street Journal that this laser shot 100 times more pulses per second than in previous attempts.
It could be a long while before lasers are used beyond experiments. The University of Glasgow's Matteo Clerici, who didn't work on the project, noted to The Journal that the laser in the experiment costs about $2.17 billion dollars. The discoverers also plan to significantly extend the range, to the point where a 33-foot rod would have an effective coverage of 1,640 feet.
If the scientists succeed, the breakthrough could make lightning protection viable across large areas. This would be particularly useful for safeguarding rocket launchpads, where lightning strikes can force mission delays if they're too close to the flight path. They could also be helpful for protecting airports, power plants, forests and other sprawling locations where a strike could prove catastrophic.
“We are now at the dawn of the age of infinitely connected music,” the data alchemist announced from beneath the Space Needle. Glenn McDonald had chosen his title himself, preferring “alchemy,” with its esoteric associations, over the now-ordinary “data science.” His job, as he described it from the stage, was “to use math and typing and computers to help people understand and discover music.”
McDonald practiced his alchemy for the music streaming service Spotify, where he worked to transmute the base stuff of big data — logs of listener interactions, bits of digital audio files, and whatever else he could get his hands on — into valuable gold: products that might attract and retain paying customers. The mysterious power of McDonald’s alchemy lay in the way that ordinary data, if processed correctly, appeared to transform from thin interactional traces into thick cultural significance.
It was 2014, and McDonald was presenting at the Pop Conference, an annual gathering of music critics and academics held in a crumpled, Frank Gehry–designed heap of a building in the center of Seattle. I was on the other side of the country, and I followed along online. That year, the conference’s theme was “Music and Mobility,” and Mc Donald started his talk by narrating his personal musical journey, playing samples as he went. “When I was a kid,” he began, “you discovered music by holding still and waiting.” As a child at home, he listened to the folk music his parents played on the stereo. But as he grew up, his listening expanded: the car radio offered heavy metal and new wave; the internet revealed a world of new and obscure genres to explore. Where once he had been stuck in place, a passive observer of music that happened to go by, he would eventually measure the progress of his life by his ever broadening musical horizons. McDonald had managed to turn this passion into a profession, working to help others explore what he called “the world of music,” which on-demand streaming services had made more accessible than ever before.
Elsewhere, McDonald (2013) would describe the world of music as though it were a landscape: “Follow any path, no matter how unlikely and untrodden it appears, and you’ll find a hidden valley with a hundred bands who’ve lived there for years, reconstructing the music world in methodically- and idiosyncratically-altered miniature, as in Australian hip hop, Hungarian pop, microhouse or Viking metal.”
Travelers through the world of music would find familiarity and surprise — sounds they never would have imagined and songs they adored. McDonald marveled at this new ability to hear music from around the world, from Scotland, Australia, or Malawi. “The perfect music for you may come from the other side of the planet,” he said, but this was not a problem: “in music, we have the teleporter.” On-demand streaming provided a kind of musical mobility, which allowed listeners to travel across the world of music instantaneously.
However, he suggested, repeating the common refrain, the scale of this world could be overwhelming and hard to navigate. “For this new world to actually be appreciable,” McDonald said, “we have to find ways to map this space and then build machines to take you through it along interesting paths.” The recommender systems offered by companies like Spotify were the machines. McDonald’s recent work had focused on the maps, or as he described them in another talk: a “kind of thin layer of vaguely intelligible order over the writhing, surging, insatiably expanding information-space-beast of all the world’s music.”
Although his language may have been unusually poetic, McDonald was expressing an understanding of musical variety that is widely shared among the makers of music recommendation: Music exists in a kind of space. That space is, in one sense, fairly ordinary — like a landscape that you might walk through, encountering new things as you go. But in another sense, this space is deeply weird: behind the valleys and hills, there is a writhing, surging beast, constantly growing and tying points in the space together, infinitely connected. The music space can seem as natural as the mountains visible from the top of the Space Needle; but it can also seem like the man-made topological jumble at its base. It is organic and intuitive; it is technological and chaotic.
Spatial metaphors provide a dominant language for thinking about differences among the makers of music recommendation, as they do in machine learning and among Euro-American cultures more generally. Within these contexts, it is easy to imagine certain, similar things as gathered over here, while other, different things cluster over there. In conversations with engineers, it is very common to find the music space summoned into existence through gestures, which envelop the speakers in an imaginary environment populated by brief pinches in the air and organized by waves of the hand. One genre is on your left, another on your right. On whiteboards and windows scattered around the office, you might find the music space rendered in two dimensions, containing an array of points that cluster and spread across the plane.
In the music space, music that is similar is nearby. If you find yourself within such a space, you should be surrounded by music that you like. To find more of it, you need only to look around you and move. In the music space, genres are like regions, playlists are like pathways, and tastes are like drifting, archipelagic territories. Your new favorite song may lie just over the horizon.
But despite their familiarity, spaces like these are strange: similarities can be found anywhere, and points that seemed far apart might suddenly become adjacent. If you ask, you will learn that all of these spatial representations are mere reductions of something much more complex, of a space comprising not two or three dimensions but potentially thousands of them. This is McDonald’s information-space-beast, a mathematical abstraction that stretches human spatial intuitions past their breaking point.
Spaces like these, generically called “similarity spaces,” are the symbolic terrain on which most machine learning works. To classify data points or recommend items, machine-learning systems typically locate them in spaces, gather them into clusters, measure distances among them, and draw boundaries between them. Machine learning, as the cultural theorist Adrian Mackenzie (2017, 63) has argued, “renders all differences as distances and directions of movement.” So while the music space is in one sense an informal metaphor (the landscape of musical variation) in another sense it is a highly technical formal object (the mathematical substrate of algorithmic recommendation).
Spatial understandings of data travel through technical infrastructures and everyday conversation; they are at once a form of metaphorical expression and a concrete computational practice. In other words, “space” here is both a formalism — a restricted, technical concept that facilitates precision through abstraction — and what the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2016, 468) calls an informalism — a less disciplined metaphor that travels alongside formal techniques. In practice, it is often hard or impossible to separate technical specificity from its metaphorical accompaniment. When the makers of music recommendation speak of space, they speak at once figuratively and technically.
For many critics, this “geometric rationality” (Blanke 2018) of machine learning makes it anathema to “culture” per se: it quantifies qualities, rationalizes passions, and plucks cultural objects from their everyday social contexts to relocate them in the sterile isolation of a computational grid. Mainstream cultural anthropology, for instance, has long defined itself in opposition to formalisms like these, which seem to lack the thickness, sensitivity, or adequacy to lived experience that we seek through ethnography. As the political theorists Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh (2015, 361) suggest, such analytics “reduce heterogeneous forms of life and data to homogeneous spaces of calculation.”
To use the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1992) terms, similarity spaces are clear examples of “abstract space” — a kind of representational space in which everything is measurable and quantified, controlled by central authorities in the service of capital. The media theorist Robert Prey (2015, 16), applying Lefebvre’s framework to streaming music, suggests that people like McDonald — “data analysts, programmers and engineers” — are primarily concerned with the abstract, conceived space of calculation and measurement. Conceived space, in Lefebvrian thought, is parasitic on social, lived space, which Prey associates with the listeners who resist and reinterpret the work of technologists. The spread of abstract space under capitalism portends, in this framework, “the devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived” (Wilson 2013).
But for the people who work with it, the music space does not feel like a sterile grid, even at its most mathematical. The makers of music recommendation do not limit themselves to the refined abstractions of conceived space. Over the course of their training, they learn to experience the music space as ordinary and inhabitable, despite its underlying strangeness. The music space is as intuitive as a landscape to be walked across and as alien as a complex, highly dimensional object of engineering. To use an often- problematized distinction from cultural geography, they treat “space” like “place,” as though the abstract, homogeneous grid were a kind of livable local environment.
Similarity spaces are the result of many decisions; they are by no means ``natural,” and people like McDonald are aware that the choices they make can profoundly rearrange them. Yet spatial metaphorizing, moving across speech, gesture, illustration, and computation, helps make the patterns in cultural data feel real. A confusion between maps and territories— between malleable representations and objective terrains— is productive for people who are at once interested in creating objective knowledge and concerned with accounting for their own subjective influence on the process. These spatial understandings alter the meaning of musical concepts like genre or social phenomena like taste, rendering them as forms of clustering.
Russia is prepping a 'rescue' mission following a coolant leak on a Soyuz capsule docked with the International Space Station. NASA said in a media briefing that Russia's Roscosmos agency will send an empty Soyuz to the station on February 20th as a replacement for the damaged spacecraft. The vehicle was originally supposed to launch in March.
The leaking capsule is expected to return to Earth without a crew sometime in March. It will still carry experiments and other cargo. Cosmonauts Dmitriy Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will now remain in orbit for several months longer rather than departing in March as planned.
The affected craft started spraying particles December 14th. The ISS team quickly noticed that an external radiator cooling loop was to blame, and investigators later determined that a micrometeoroid struck the radiator. Roscosmos soon decided the Soyuz was too dangerous to use for a standard crew return. Temperatures would have climbed past 100F on reentry, threatening both occupants and computer equipment. An in-space repair would be impractical as the procedure would be too difficult, according to the agency's Sergei Krikalev.
The ISS crew is still prepared to use the broken Soyuz to evacuate in an emergency. However, that's not ideal when three of the seven people aboard the ISS would likely have to accept elevated risks to come home. A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule is also docked, but it normally only takes four occupants. NASA's ISS program head Joel Montalbano said at the briefing that there had been talks with SpaceX to see if one of the Soyuz passengers could travel aboard the Crew Dragon if necessary.
Relations between NASA and Roscomos are strained following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russia said last summer that it would leave the ISS after 2024 to work on its own space station, and the US has been preparing for a possible Russian withdrawal since 2021. However, the capsule leak has effectively forced the two to work closely together — if only briefly.
Everything was going great until it wasn't in the skies over Cornwall, UK on Monday. Virgin Orbit, the space launch division of Sir Richard Branson's sprawling commercial empire, was in the midst of setting a major milestone for the country and the nation: to be the first orbital launch from European soil. The carrier aircraft, Cosmic Girl, had successfully taken off from Spaceport Cornwall, LauncherOne had cleanly separated from the modified 747 and properly ignited its first stage rocket, blasting it and its payload of satellites into space. But before they could be pushed into their proper orbit by the rocket's second stage, something went wrong. On Thursday, Virgin Orbit leaders provided a preliminary explanation as to just what happened.
"At an altitude of approximately 180 km, the upper stage experienced an anomaly. This anomaly prematurely ended the first burn of the upper stage," the company told Engadget via email. "This event ended the mission, with the rocket components and payload falling back to Earth within the approved safety corridor without ever achieving orbit."
Virgin Orbit has also announced a "formal" investigation into the root causes of the anomaly which will be led by Jim Sponnick, who developed the Atlas and Delta launch systems, and Chad Foerster, Virgin Orbit's Chief Engineer. Despite the setback, the company is already in contact with UK officials to reschedule the launch for as soon as late 2023.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has recorded another inaugural milestone: its first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet. LHS 475 b is just 41 light years away and has a diameter 99 percent of Earth’s. But there’s more work to be done. The JWST should be able to figure out the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The research team is still working to determine what, if any, sort of atmosphere the rocky mass may have. However, the planet's surface appears to be around 300 Celsius, more than a little warmer than Earth, so don’t expect colonies. If they discover cloud cover, it could mean a greenhouse world climate closer to our neighboring planet Venus.
– Mat Smith
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Apple may start replacing its mobile devices' displays with in-house screen technology as soon as next year. The tech giant will reportedly start with its highest-end Apple Watches in late 2024 and will swap the devices' current OLED screens with its own microLED technology. Bloomberg says Apple's homegrown display tech will also make its way to its other devices, including the iPhone.
Apparently, Apple was originally working to introduce its technology in 2020, but it was hampered by development costs and technical challenges. Back then, those same concerns also prevented the company from including larger displays in its plans.
It ordered airlines to pause all domestic flights until 9 AM ET.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures in the US, stopping all flights until 9 AM ET, because it had to restore its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. On early Wednesday morning, the agency issued a notice through an Air Traffic Control System Command Center Advisory that the US NOTAM system had failed. "Operations across the National Airspace System are affected," the FAA said in a tweet, then announced it was working to fix the outage. It’s the first time the US NOTAM system has failed.
OpenAI has shared a waitlist for an experimental ChatGPT Professional service that, for a fee, would effectively remove limits on the advanced chatbot. The AI tool would always be available, with no throttling and as many messages as necessary. The startup hasn't said when the pilot program might launch, and it's asking would-be participants for feedback on pricing.
As TechCrunch noted, the company said on its Discord server it's "starting to think" about how it will make money from ChatGPT and keep the technology viable in the "long-term." CEO Sam Altman recently pointed out that ChatGPT costs OpenAI a few cents for every chat.
Windows Central sources claim Microsoft has canceled a twin-screen Surface Duo 3, which was allegedly meant to launch late this year. The company has apparently switched to focus on a "true" foldable phone. The new device's specs and name aren't known, but it would have a 180-degree hinge with an outside cover display, like the Vivo X Fold. The canceled Surface Duo 3 was "finalized," according to the sources. It would have supposedly addressed some of its predecessor's shortcomings with narrower edge-to-edge screens and wireless charging. But now, we’ll probably never know.
