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Category: space – Page 966

Laser emissions discovered emerging from the Ant Nebula

An international team of astronomers has identified a rare laser phenomenon shining from the heart of the planetary nebula Menzel 3, otherwise known as the Ant Nebula. The discovery suggests the presence of an as yet unseen companion star, hiding at the core of the chaotic cosmic structure.

Menzel 3 is located roughly 8,000 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Norma. Discovered by Donald Menzel in the 1920s, it was given the moniker of the Ant Nebula, owing to its apparent similarity to the head and thorax of a garden ant.

The striking object belongs to a specific family of diffuse bodies known as planetary nebula. Despite their suggestive name, the formation of these beautiful structures has nothing to do with planets, and is instead rooted in the demise of middleweight stars similar to our Sun.

European Space Agency receives prototype microgravity 3D printer

After two years in development, Project MELT (Manufacturing of Experimental Layer Technology) has resurfaced with a prototype microgravity 3D printer.

Made for the European Space Agency (ESA) the Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) breadboard machine is designed to 3D print high performance polymers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other off-world locations.

This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the resulting AI system have superhuman navigation capabilities, the research could provide insight into how our brains work.

Grid cells were the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside other navigation-related neurons. These cells are arranged in a lattice of hexagons, and the brain effectively overlays this pattern onto its environment. Whenever the animal crosses a point in space represented by one of the corners these hexagons, a neuron fires, allowing the animal to track its movement.

Mammalian brains actually have multiple arrays of these cells. These arrays create overlapping grids of different sizes and orientations that together act like an in-built GPS. The system even works in the dark and independently of the animal’s speed or direction.

This ‘singing’ space cloud is where stars and planets are born

Long before our Sun formed it was nothing more than a bunch of material floating listlessly in a large cloud of gas, dust, and debris. These space clouds, called nebulas, are where stars and planets are born, eventually coalescing into larger bodies which become slaves to gravity and form systems such as the one we currently reside in. But what factors affect star and planet formation, and what ultimately determines the type of stars that form? Using observations of one very special nebula, scientists now think have begun to understand.

One of the biggest hurdles in studying these molecular space clouds is that telescopes can only produce a 2D picture of them, making it impossible to model the interior structure and movements of the dust and gasses. Researchers focused on the cloud known as Musca, which lies hundreds of light years away from Earth, but is still close enough to study. The scientists discovered that this particular cloud is “singing.”

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The Flying Tesla is Coming, Sooner or Later

We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.

Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”

Carbon kinetic weapons

Future wars could be much more fierce with weapons even more powerful than nukes:

The world is progressing in many ways, but tribalism isn’t going away, so new arms races in AI, drones, bio-weapons and space weapons are already under way. Forewarned is forearmed. What sort of weaponry should we expect? I’ve discussed AI and bio approaches before on other blogs, so this one looks just at kinetic weaponry using advanced materials, coupled to EM acceleration systems.

https://carbondevices.com/2017/08/31/using-inverse-rail-guns…ce-launch/ shows a crude illustration of my invention, the inverse rail gun, which inverts the idea of using a slug on a short rail gun and uses the short rail gun to accelerate a long tape instead.

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