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Category: space – Page 94

Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app

Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern.

Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the ability to control agents—and a new version of Project Astra, the experimental everything app that the company teased at Google I/O in May.

MIT Technology Review got to try out Astra in a closed-door live demo last week. It was a stunning experience, but there’s a gulf between polished promo and live demo.

Google just launched a ton of new products—including Gemini 2.0, which could power a new world of agents. And we got a first look.

ORCs in space! Astronomers find another vast odd radio circle in ‘completely unexpected discovery’

The newly found ORC, designated ORC J0219–0505, was discovered in data from the MIGHTEE survey conducted by the MeerKAT radio telescope located in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The 371,600 light-year-wide ORC seems to be associated with the elliptical galaxy WISEA J021912.43–050501.8. It has features that seem to set it apart from other ORCs, including the fact that it appears fainter and that details of its structure reveal it leans to one side.

“Odd Radio Circles: Circles of radio emission found around distant galaxies that we still don’t understand,” lead researcher and Western Sydney University astronomer Ray Norris told Space.com. “It’s a completely unexpected discovery, not predicted by the physics we already know, and therefore revealing a gap in our knowledge.

So we hope these will tell us something new about how galaxies form and interact.

Ingenuity’s Last Hop: Lessons from Mars’ First Aircraft

What can NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars teach us about flying on other planets? This is what engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently investigated ever since the robotic pioneer performed its last flight on the Red Planet’s surface on January 18, 2024. The purpose of the investigation was to ascertain the likely causes for Ingenuity’s final flight, as the team found damage to the helicopter’s rotor blades in images sent back to Earth. This investigation holds the potential to help scientists and engineers improve upon Ingenuity’s design for future flying robots on other worlds.

“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Dr. Håvard Grip, who is a research technologist at NASA JPL and Ingenuity’s first pilot. “While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”

The reason for Ingenuity’s “retirement” was due to damage to its rotor blades it sustained during Flight 72, which turned out to be its final flight, due to navigation system failures in identifying a safe landing spot. As a result, engineers hypothesized that Ingenuity experienced a hard landing due to insufficient navigation data, breaking the rotor blades due to higher-than-expected loads. The findings from this investigation will help engineers implement better designs for NASA’s upcoming Mars Sample Return mission, which is currently in the design phase with an anticipated launch date of 2026.

A test stand for the High-Luminosity LHC

An impressive operation recently took place in CERN’s magnet test hall. The innovative cold powering system has been successfully installed in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) Inner Triplet (IT) String test stand. This novel system comprises a long electrical transmission line, which has been specially developed to transport currents to the magnets across a wide range of temperatures. Its installation in the IT String follows on from the installation of the novel protection system and is an important milestone in the development of the HL-LHC.

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is a major upgrade of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which aims to increase the number of particle collisions (luminosity) and consequently boost the amount of physics data that can be collected, allowing further discoveries to be made.

Innovative beam-focusing magnets, known as inner triplets, are a major part of this upgrade. These magnets will be deployed on both sides of the beam interaction points at the ATLAS and CMS experiments with new powering, protection and alignment systems and – just like the LHC magnets – they will operate at 1.9 K (an extremely cold temperature, colder than deep outer space).

Mars Curiosity Rover takes a Last Look at Mysterious Sulfur

NASA’s Curiosity rover is preparing for the next leg of its journey, a months-long trek to a formation called the boxwork, a set of weblike patterns on Mars’s surface that stretches for miles. It will soon leave behind Gediz Vallis channel, an area wrapped in mystery. How the channel formed so late during a transition to a drier climate is one big question for the science team. Another mystery is the field of white sulfur stones the rover discovered over the summer.

Curiosity imaged the stones, along with features from inside the channel, in a 360-degree panorama before driving up to the western edge of the channel at the end of September.

The rover is searching for evidence that ancient Mars had the right ingredients to support microbial life, if any formed billions of years ago, when the Red Planet held lakes and rivers. Located in the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain, Gediz Vallis channel may help tell a related story: what the area was like as water was disappearing on Mars. Although older layers on the mountain had already formed in a dry climate, the channel suggests that water occasionally coursed through the area as the climate was changing.

Rehabilitation Reimagined : The power of Virtual Reality in Therapy

We can expect to see more recommendations for VR in catastrophic injury cases.

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR or VR) as a tool in rehabilitation is changing at pace and has far reaching consequences that will increasingly be seen in the claims space.

Combined with AI powered treatment planning and smart home devices for daily rehabilitation, innovative technologies are now evident in all aspects of rehabilitation.

Our Solar System’s Orbits May Have Been Arranged by an Invading Planet

The orbits of the planets around the Sun have been the source for many a scientific debate. Their current orbital properties are well understood but the planetary orbits have evolved and changed since the formation of the Solar System.

Planetary migrations have been the most prominent idea of recent decades suggesting that planetary interactions caused the young planets to migrate inwards or outwards from their original positions.

Now a new theory suggests a 2–50 Jupiter-mass object passing through the Solar System could be the cause.