News Feeds

Engineers have developed a new system for full-body motion capture -- and it doesn't require specialized rooms, expensive equipment, bulky cameras or an array of sensors. Instead, it requires only a smartphone, smartwatch or earbuds.

Experts have announced that the Sun has reached its solar maximum period, which could continue for the next year. Scientists will not be able to determine the exact peak of this solar maximum period for many months because it's only identifiable after they've tracked a consistent decline in solar activity after that peak. However, scientists have identified that the last two years on the Sun have been part of this active phase of the solar cycle, due to the consistently high number of sunspots during this period.

A new analysis leverages machine learning to help answer a thorny question: where should new protected bike lanes be placed to provide maximum benefit? The research team use machine learning and optimization to help inform such decisions. It's a challenge that required new computational approaches.

A new analysis leverages machine learning to help answer a thorny question: where should new protected bike lanes be placed to provide maximum benefit? The research team use machine learning and optimization to help inform such decisions. It's a challenge that required new computational approaches.

A new study suggests that large-scale adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could lead to significant population-level health benefits. The research team used computer simulations to show that aggressive electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet, coupled with an ambitious rollout of renewable electricity generation, could result in health benefits worth between US$84 billion and 188 billion by 2050. Even scenarios with less aggressive grid decarbonization mostly predicted health benefits running into the tens of billions of dollars.

A new study suggests that large-scale adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could lead to significant population-level health benefits. The research team used computer simulations to show that aggressive electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet, coupled with an ambitious rollout of renewable electricity generation, could result in health benefits worth between US$84 billion and 188 billion by 2050. Even scenarios with less aggressive grid decarbonization mostly predicted health benefits running into the tens of billions of dollars.

Jupiter is well known for its Great Red Spot, a feature that was discovered by Galileo over 400 years ago! Astronomers have been tracking the size and shape of it for over a century but the most accurate measurements have come from the Hubble Space Telescope. Every time Earth and Jupiter are at their closest, Hubble takes a series of images and it’s these images that have detected that the spot jiggles from day to day. Not only does it change size but length and width too leaving astronomers baffled.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System and, like the other outer planets is a giant ball of gas. It’s so large all the other planets in the Solar System can be fitted inside with plenty of room to spare. Composed mostly of hydrogen and helium it can be seen as a colourful disk through amateur telescopes with belts, storms and of course the Great Red Spot. The spot was first discovered by Galileo in around 1610 when he became the first person to turn a telescope on the distant planet. 

Side-by-side images show the opposite faces of Jupiter. The largest storm, the Great Red Spot, is the most prominent feature in the left bottom third of this view. Credit: NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC).

The Great Red Spot is a storm which has been raging for over 400 years. It’s large enough that Earth could easily fit inside more than once and is an anticyclone system similar to those seen here on Earth. It rotates in a counterclockwise direction with speeds reaching in excess of 640 km per hour. Over the years, it seems to have been generally decreasing in size albeit not as quickly as expected. 

“Great Red Spot from P7 Flyover”. Credit: NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Jason Major © public domain

Images taken by Hubble of the storm were collected over a 90 day period between December 2023 and March 2024 when the Jupiter was at its closest to Earth. Its high resolution cameras showed that it is jiggling like a bowl of jelly and certainly not as stable as we once thought. Previous studies showed that there is an amount of movement along the longitudinal axis but no suggestion it’s changing in size. 

The team of astronomers led by Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland published their findings in the Planetary Science Journal. Simon’s said “This is really the first time we’ve had the proper imaging cadence of the GRS. With Hubble’s high resolution we can say that the GRS is definitively squeezing in an out at the same time as it moves faster and slower. That was very unexpected, and at present there are no hydrodynamic explanations.”

The study was a part of NASA’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program (OPAL) whose aim is to obtain a long time series of observations of the outer planets to understand their evolution and atmosphere. These recent observations though were purely to explore and analyse the GRS. Extrapolating forward in time the team think that the GRS will keep shrinking before it stabilises in a less elongated shape than we see today. Currently it’s particularly ‘wide’ in latitude but once it shrinks it will likely stabilise with the winds holding it in place. 

The team hope that to understand the GRS was to understand the mechanisms of the largest storms in the Solar System which would ultimately help us to learn more about hurricane systems on Earth.

Source : NASA’s Hubble Watches Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Behave Like a Stress Ball

The post Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Jiggles appeared first on Universe Today.

A mathematical study finds that three definitions of what it means for entropy to increase, which have previously been considered equivalent, can produce different results in the quantum realm

China’s space program has advanced considerably since the turn of the century. In addition to developing heavy-launch vehicles like the Long March 5 and building a modular space station in orbit, China has also embarked on an ambitious program of lunar exploration (Chang’e) – which has launched six robotic missions to explore the Moon’s surface since 2007. These missions are paving the way for crewed missions to the Moon by 2030 and creating a permanent habitat around the Moon’s southern polar region – the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

They also plan to send crewed missions to Mars by 2033, which will culminate in the creation of a permanent base there too. Earlier today, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the China National Space Administration (CNSA), and the China Manned Space Agency (CMSE) jointly released the country’s first long-term scheme for space science and exploration. Titled “National Medium—and Long-Term Development Plan for Space Science (2024-2050),” this plan elaborated on the basic principles, development goals, and roadmap for the country’s space science and exploration through 2050.

Tiangong Chinese space station. Credit: China Manned Space Agency.

The plan revealed five major scientific themes it hopes to accomplish in three developmental stages between now and mid-century. These five themes contain 17 priority areas for future breakthroughs, outlined by CAS Vice President Ding Chibiao at a press conference earlier today. According to statements released by The State Council of the People’s Republic of China and shared via the China Global Television Network (CGTN), they include:

• Extreme Universe: Exploring the origin and evolution of the Universe and revealing the physical laws under extreme cosmic conditions. Key areas under this theme include dark matter and extreme Universes, the origin and evolution of the Universe, and the detection of baryonic matter.
• Space-time Ripples: Detecting low-frequency and primordial gravitational waves and uncovering the nature of gravity and space-time. The priority is space-based gravitational wave detection.
• Panorama of the Earth and Sun: The exploration of the Sun, the Earth, and the heliosphere to unravel the physical processes and laws governing the complex interactions within the Sun-Earth system. Priority areas include Earth’s cycle systems, comprehensive observations of the Earth-Moon system, space weather observations, three-dimensional solar exploration, and heliosphere exploration.
• Habitable Planets: Exploring the habitability of celestial bodies in the Solar System and exoplanets. Key priorities include sustainable development, the origin and evolution of the Solar System, characterization of planetary atmospheres, the search for extraterrestrial life, and exoplanet detection.
• Biological and Physical Space Science: Revealing the laws of matter movement and life activities under space conditions to deepen our understanding of fundamental physics. Key areas include microgravity science, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and space life sciences.

The plan also outlined a three-stage development roadmap between 2024 and 2050. For the first stage (2024-2027), China will focus on maintaining the operation of the Tiangong space station, carrying out crewed missions to the Moon, and commencing the fourth phase of its Chang’e program – which includes the launch of the Chang’e-7 and -8 missions in 2026 and 2028, respectively – as well as its planned missions to Mars. According to the program, five to eight space science satellite missions will also be approved during the period.

Visualization of the ILRS from the CNSA Guide to Partnership (June 2021). Credit: CNSA

The second stage (2028 to 2035) will consist of the continued operation of the Tiangong space station (and expanding it to twice its current size), crewed missions to the Moon, and the construction of the ILRS. China is also expected to deploy about 15 space satellite missions during this phase. The third and final stage (2036 to 2050) calls for more than 30 space science missions to be implemented, with the intention of achieving “significant advancements in key areas reaching a world-leading level.”

Through this program, China hopes to address some of the most challenging fundamental questions and scientific issues of our time. This includes the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the origins of the Universe, extraterrestrial life (aka astrobiology), the evolution of the Solar System and its Planets, and the connections of the Sun-Earth system. Given the ambitious nature of the program and some of the wording used (“reaching a world-leading level”), it could also be seen as a declaration of intent.

For years, China has indicated its intentions to rival NASA as a major power in space. With this first-ever roadmap, it is clear that China’s long-term intentions are to replace NASA as a leader in space exploration and science.

Further Reading: CGTN, The State Council of the People’s Republic of China

The post China Releases its First Roadmap for Space Science and Exploration Through 2050. appeared first on Universe Today.

The Euclid space telescope's massive “cosmic atlas” promises to shed light on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) has been shrouded in mystery since its maiden flight in 2011. Designed by Boeing and operated by the U.S. Space Force (USSF), this remotely operated, reusable space plane is designed to operate in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), 240 to 800 km (150 to 500 mi) above the Earth, and test reusable vehicle technologies that support long-term space objectives. On December 29th, 2023, the X-37B began its seventh mission (OTV-7) and has reportedly been conducting experiments on the effects of space radiation and testing Space Domain Awareness (SDA) technologies.

As part of this mission, the X-37B will soon begin executing a series of novel maneuvers to change its orbit around Earth. These maneuvers will consist of the spacecraft brushing against Earth’s upper atmosphere to shed speed and lower its orbit without expending much fuel—a technique known as “aerobraking.” This is the first time the X-37B has performed such a maneuver, which will help it evade detection by potentially hostile nations and perform undetected low passes over Earth during future missions.

According to a statement by the USSF, this latest maneuver leverages six successful missions in LEO and decades of lessons learned from missions to the Moon and Mars. In 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) orbiter used its solar panels as “wings” to control its passage through Mars’ tenuous upper atmosphere and lower its orbit over several months. More recently, aerobraking has been used by the Mars Odyssey in 2001, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2006, and the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2017-2018.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle taxiing on the flightline on March 30th, 2010, at the Astrotech facility in Titusville, Florida. Credit: USAF

“This novel and efficient series of maneuvers demonstrates the Space Force’s commitment to achieving groundbreaking innovation as it conducts national security missions in space,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. “This first-of-a-kind maneuver from the X-37B is an incredibly important milestone for the United States Space Force as we seek to expand our aptitude and ability to perform in this challenging domain,” added Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. “The success is a testament to the dedication and perseverance of the team.”

Beyond these experiments, very little is known about the X-37B’s capabilities and purpose. However, during the Aspen Security Forum in 2019, former U.S. Air Force (USAF) Secretary Heather Wilson explained how the X-37B capabilities allow it to avoid detection, saying:

“[The X-37B is] fascinating [because it] can do an orbit that looks like an egg and, when it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is. Which means our adversaries don’t know – and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries – where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that.”

As Jonathan McDowell – an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – told Military.com in an interview at the time:

“[Wilson’s comments may shed light on] a previously secret orbit-related capability. The dip into the atmosphere causes a change in the timing of when it next comes overhead. So [trackers’] predictions are off, and [they] have to search for it all over again. Even a timing change makes more work for [adversaries] than just being able to use the existing orbital prediction.”

Once the aerobrake maneuver is complete, the X-37B will resume its tests and experiments until they are fulfilled. As the USSF indicated before the launch of the OTV-7 mission, these tests include operating in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future SDA technologies, and investigating the radiation effects on plant seeds provided by NASA – the “Seeds-2” experiment. The spacecraft will also eject some of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation. At this point, the vehicle will de-orbit and return to Earth as it has during its six previous missions.

Further Reading: Live Science, USSF

The post Space Force’s X-37B will Perform “Never Before-Seen Maneuvers” in Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

During a fight between two male mice, one will often run to a female mouse to distract their aggressor, a bait-and-switch strategy that could help abate social conflicts

A simulator for the process of scientific discovery shows that AI agents still fall short of human scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses and carrying out experiments on their own

Chemists have developed a straightforward method to convert common chemicals like carboxylic acids, alcohols, and alkanes directly into valuable alkenes.

Researchers explore how the domesticated flightless silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), a prominent insect model in olfactory research, uses wing flapping to manipulate airflow, enhancing their ability to detect distant pheromones. These findings highlight how moths guide pheromones to their odor sensors in antennae, and suggest potential applications for designing advanced robotic systems for odor source localization. This could inspire future innovations in drones and provide design guidelines for robots to locate odor sources.

Researchers explore how the domesticated flightless silkworm moth (Bombyx mori), a prominent insect model in olfactory research, uses wing flapping to manipulate airflow, enhancing their ability to detect distant pheromones. These findings highlight how moths guide pheromones to their odor sensors in antennae, and suggest potential applications for designing advanced robotic systems for odor source localization. This could inspire future innovations in drones and provide design guidelines for robots to locate odor sources.

Researchers have unveiled a vision system inspired by feline eyes to enhance object detection in various lighting conditions. Featuring a unique shape and reflective surface, the system reduces glare in bright environments and boosts sensitivity in low-light scenarios. By filtering unnecessary details, this technology significantly improves the performance of single-lens cameras, representing a notable advancement in robotic vision capabilities.

Researchers have unveiled a vision system inspired by feline eyes to enhance object detection in various lighting conditions. Featuring a unique shape and reflective surface, the system reduces glare in bright environments and boosts sensitivity in low-light scenarios. By filtering unnecessary details, this technology significantly improves the performance of single-lens cameras, representing a notable advancement in robotic vision capabilities.

Researchers produced 3D-printed, semiconductor-free logic gates, which perform computations in active electronic devices. As they don't require semiconductor materials, they represent a step toward 3D printing an entire active electronic device.

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot. No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.