NASA warns SpaceX over safety issues after astronaut hospitalization

https://www.popsci.com/science/nasa-spacex-safety/

NASA is concerned SpaceX is prioritizing its mission schedule over safety after a recent ocean landing resulted in the brief hospitalizations of all four astronauts. Former astronaut Kent Rominger admonished the company during an October 31 meeting of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, citing a list of recent problems involving both SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule

“Both NASA and SpaceX need to maintain focus on safe Crew Dragon operations and not take any ‘normal’ operations for granted,” said the ASAP committee member on Thursday, as first reported by SpaceNews. Rominger also argued that safety requires increased attention on aging hardware, especially as “the pace of operations increases.”

SpaceX has documented multiple equipment malfunctions and setbacks since at least July when a Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage failed to ignite its second burn, causing it to explode roughly an hour after launch. The uncrewed mission ended a nearly eight-year success streak for the company and grounded launches for roughly two weeks. Similar issues prompted additional mission delays in both August and September.

[Related: SpaceX’s historic Falcon 9 success streak met a fiery end.]

As Gizmodo notes, the most troubling problem appears to have occurred during SpaceX’s latest International Space Station return mission. After departing the ISS on October 23, the Dragon capsule made its scheduled water landing two days later off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. NASA subsequently confirmed all four Crew-8 astronauts required transport to a nearby hospital for additional medical evaluations “out of an abundance of caution.” Although doctors soon released three crew members to continue their post-flight reconditioning at Johnson Space Center in Houston, one astronaut “in stable condition” was kept overnight at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola “as a precautionary measure.” To protect their medical privacy, NASA has not confirmed which astronaut required additional observations, or what issue prompted the prolonged hospital stay.

SpaceX has solidified itself in recent years as NASA’s primary private contractor for satellite launches, astronaut transport, ISS cargo deliveries, and other rocketry needs. Although competitors like Blue Origin seek to cut into the company’s industry share, their own setbacks indicate SpaceX will continue to be one of the agency’s primary resources—but only if NASA can continue to trust the private company’s attention to safety. At Thursday’s ASAP meeting, Rominger warned that NASA and SpaceX will need to prevent their increasingly crowded mission schedule from “clouding their judgment.”

The post NASA warns SpaceX over safety issues after astronaut hospitalization appeared first on Popular Science.

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November 1, 2024 at 02:14PM

Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS Robot Takes on Real-World Tasks Autonomously

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2024/11/04/boston-dynamics-atlas-robot-takes-on-real-world-tasks-autonomously/

Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS robot isn’t just for flashy stunts anymore—it’s rolling up its sleeves and getting down to business! In this new clip, ATLAS shows off its “intelligence” by autonomously moving engine covers from one container to another. Using a machine learning vision model, it detects objects and bins, planning each move in real-time. What’s impressive? ATLAS reacts to unexpected changes, self-correcting any slips or misses on the go. This isn’t just cool tech; it’s a glimpse into the future of robotics in practical jobs!

Click This Link for the Full Post > Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS Robot Takes on Real-World Tasks Autonomously

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November 4, 2024 at 10:18AM

Why aren’t we driving hydrogen powered cars yet? There’s a reason EVs won.

https://www.popsci.com/science/hydrogen-cars/

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles aren’t just fodder for science fiction or far-out R&D experiments. Cars fueled by hydrogen, like the Toyota Mirai and Hyundai Nexo, are already here, and fuel-cell technology is actively evolving and benefiting from billions of dollars in federal research and infrastructure funding. So then, why are hydrogen cars virtually non-existent on U.S. roads today? What happened?

“The answer is very simple: economics,” Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative told Popular Science. Politicians and automakers once held up the fuel cell, which turns the chemical energy of hydrogen into electricity to drive an electric motor, as the future of passenger automobiles, but the falling cost of batteries and the upsides of a preexisting fueling infrastructure (see: the electrical grid) have propelled battery-electric cars well into the lead.

[ Related: How some automakers are still pushing ahead for a hydrogen-powered future ]

“It’s not just the cost of the car,” explained Paltsev, who is also deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy. This is an important point, because in California, low-milage hydrogen cars sell at a steep discount

What makes hydrogen passenger cars altogether costlier than their battery-electric counterparts is the lack of fueling infrastructure, energy-conversion inefficiencies, and the price of the fuel at the pump

A big switch to hydrogen cars would require enormous infrastructure development; the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center shows 55 public hydrogen fueling station locations in the U.S. today, almost exclusively in California, next to more than 68,000 active public electric vehicle charging stations across the country. (Even in California, refueling passenger hydrogen cars can apparently be such a trial that it sparked a July class action suit against Toyota.)

In a separate call with Popular Science, Gregory Keoleian, the co-director of Sustainable Systems and MI Hydrogen at the University of Michigan, paused to double check if automakers are still releasing new hydrogen passenger cars in California. While Honda discontinued its two hydrogen passenger cars available in California in 2021, Toyota and Hyundai continue to produce new hydrogen passenger cars for sale in the state. Along with a desire for precision on professor Keoleian’s part, his pause highlights how attention on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles has shifted from passenger cars in favor of more advantageous applications, including medium- and heavy-duty trucks and aviation

“Battery-electric vehicles can be problematic when you have problems with range or fueling time,” or heavy loads, Keoleian said. “That’s where hydrogen can play a role with, for example, long-haul trucks.” 

When it comes to things like rail and commercial trucks, “your fueling stations are more dispersed. You don’t need the concentration of fueling facilities. You don’t need them on every corner. There’s really an opportunity to decarbonize with hydrogen for those applications,” he explained.

‘Brighter pathways’ for hydrogen passenger cars

“Nothing is going to change next year, or probably not in the next five years, but there are brighter pathways for hydrogen cars,” said Paltsev. For one, if hydrogen turns out to be a “much bigger source of our energy needs in other parts of the economy, like in heavy-duty transportation and industry,” then the fueling and infrastructure challenges are “going to be easier to resolve,” providing “positive spillovers and synergies for hydrogen cars.” 

Paltsev noted that the economics of hydrogen cars are already more attractive in some parts of the world than in others—citing, for example, Japan, where electricity costs are high. Several automakers are also still invested in hydrogen fuel-cell passenger cars, as evidenced by a recently announced collaboration between BMW and Toyota; the two say a BMW hydrogen production car will arrive in 2028.

The current impracticalities of hydrogen passenger vehicles in places like the U.S. are additionally not a reason to “just give up” on this particular application of fuel-cell tech, cautioned Paltsev. “We may need it for many other reasons in the future,” he added, citing geopolitical issues as a factor that could disrupt access to raw materials for batteries and make hydrogen cars suddenly more economically viable.

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why aren’t we driving hydrogen powered cars yet? There’s a reason EVs won. appeared first on Popular Science.

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October 30, 2024 at 08:02AM

Princeton 3D-Printed a Nuclear Fusion Reactor

https://gizmodo.com/princeton-3d-printed-a-nuclear-fusion-reactor-2000518328

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has constructed a fusion reactor from parts it 3D-printed and bought off the shelf. It fits on a kitchen table. It’s a simple-sounding machine—a glass tube coated in magnets—that contains the secret of the stars and it might just pave the way towards an abundant clean-energy future.

IEEE Spectrum published the story of the miraculous reactor, which PPPL built last year. Plasma-based nuclear fusion reactors have been around for a while, but they’ve long been unwieldy. PPPL’s reactor is a glass vacuum tube coated in a 3D-printed nylon shell. The hell holds in place 9,920 rare-earth magnets. The shell-like structure is called a stellarator and it’s meant to contain superheated plasma. Within the vacuum tube, directed by the magnets, atoms without electrons collide with each other. When their nuclei fuse it releases massive amounts of energy.

One of the things that’s so impressive about this reactor is its cost. One of the things that stops the construction of new nuclear power plants is the enormous time and monetary investment it takes to get them running. A comparable reactor in Germany cost $1.1 billion and took 20 years to build. Princeton’s machine cost $640,000 and was built in under a year.

The future of energy is a huge deal. Decades of industrialized society have created a world where carbon gas is spewed into the air at an alarming rate. It’s contributed to the heating of the planet and making it miserable for all of us.

And just as the world is sounding the alarm over global warming and the consequences of it are felt, billionaires are rushing headlong into an AI-powered future that will require enormous amounts of energy. The lords of Silicon Valley know they can’t power LLMs with coal plants. Sustainable sources of energy like wind and solar are wonderful but they aren’t mature enough yet to give them the brain-melting amounts of energy needed to power advanced AI systems.

So big tech has turned to nuclear energy. Microsoft is reviving Three Mile Island, Amazon is investing $500 million in small modular nuclear reactors with hopes of powering its data centers, and Google has plans to do the same. Small modular reactors are a new technology and though they’re supposed to be safer and smaller than the original gigantic cooling tower nightmares we’re familiar with, they’re still going to generate toxic waste. They’re still operating through fission.

What PPPL is pursuing is based on a fusion reaction. If they’re able to scale it up and commercialize it, it could lead to a world of clean, nearly limitless energy. Fusion reactions don’t create toxic waste. If there’s an accident then there’s no nuclear meltdown. The components required to power it can’t be repurposed into a nuclear weapon.

The world’s tech billionaires have their eyes on fusion reactors. It’s not a mature technology, but it’s one that people like Bill Gates are investing in. The Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy fund has invested cash into Type One Energy, a private startup focused on constructing stellarator-style fusion reactors.

What PPPL has done is impressive, but a fusion-based future is a long way off. The U.S. Government is partnering with a company called Type One to build a stellarator-style plant in Tennessee. It’ll be the first of its kind. It also won’t be ready until 2029 at the earliest and it won’t produce power for commercial use.

“Instead, it will allow us to retire any remaining risks and sign off on key features of the fusion pilot plant we are currently designing. Once the design validations are complete, we will begin the construction of our pilot plant to put fusion electrons on the grid,” Type One CEO Chris Mowry told IEEE Spectrum.

If all goes well we may soon live in a world where a 3D-printed nuclear fusion reactor helped save the future. For now, we dream and live with the consequences of fission.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

October 30, 2024 at 09:39AM

Reddit Finally Profits After 20 Years: Turns Out Memes Do Pay Bills!

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2024/10/30/reddit-finally-profits-after-20-years-turns-out-memes-do-pay-bills/

Snoo Dancing in Money

After almost two decades of growth and adaptation, Reddit has finally turned a profit! According to its third-quarter report, the company posted a $29.9 million profit, driven by a revenue growth of 68% year-over-year to $348.4 million. This milestone marks a major turnaround, especially since Reddit went public earlier this year. Initially, they’ve reported losses of $575 million, but with aggressive cost-cutting and revenue-boosting measures, they’re now in the green, with $10 million in losses in the previous quarter.

A big part of Reddit’s success comes from a sharp increase in daily users, up 47% from last year, reaching a regular daily user base of 97.2 million—surpassing 100 million on some days. Along with this surge, their ad revenue hit a whopping $315.1 million! And where does that money come from? That’s Reddit selling data to OpenAI and Google to teach AIs what real internet arguments look like.

CEO Steve Huffman credits some of this success to AI-powered translations. Now, users from more countries can jump in on Reddit’s best discussions and debates, as posts are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and more. And by 2025, Reddit’s aiming to have translated arguments in 30 countries worldwide—because who doesn’t want to read about pineapple pizza in five languages?

Between deals with sports leagues, spruced-up AMAs, and clamping down on bots scraping their content, Reddit’s finally making moves that seem to pay off. After all, who knew that years of memes, debates, and endless trolling would end up being… profitable?

Please note that I’ve generated the picture above using Meta AI and the generative fill feature of Photoshop. Quite fitting with the subject of the article, don’t you think?

Click This Link for the Full Post > Reddit Finally Profits After 20 Years: Turns Out Memes Do Pay Bills!

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October 30, 2024 at 12:16PM

The Physics Trick That Makes These New Super Cars So Insanely Fast

https://www.wired.com/story/the-physics-trick-that-makes-these-new-super-cars-so-fast/

People with fast street cars like to put them through their paces at the quarter-mile track. One way to get your quarter-mile time is to just buckle up and put the pedal to the metal. But if your car’s design is suboptimal, you won’t be taking home the bragging rights.

So here’s this week’s question: Can automotive engineers predict a car’s quarter-mile time using physics? And could the physics suggest some tricks to make a car faster? Yes and yes! Let’s see how.

Simple Model for an Accelerating Car

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When a car launches off the start, its increase in speed is described by its acceleration (the rate of change of velocity). But according to Newton’s second law, to increase velocity, you need a force pushing in the direction of travel.

We can model the motion of a car with just three forces. There’s the downward-pulling gravitational force (= mass, m, times the gravitational field, g). There is also the interaction between the car and the road. It’s useful to split this into two forces: One, perpendicular to the ground, is called the “normal force” (FN). It’s the resistance of the ground to gravity—what keeps a car from plunging to the center of the Earth. The other force, friction (Ff), acts parallel to the ground. Here’s a picture:

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 18, 2024 at 02:09PM

The Most Abundant Land Animal Totals 20 Quadrillion and They Thrive Everywhere

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-most-abundant-land-animals-total-20-quadrillion-worldwide-and-thrive

It can be startling to look at a world population counter. There are eight billion (and counting — fast) humans on Earth. That’s a lot. And humans, of course, have an enormous impact. However, we are far from the most abundant animal on the planet. In fact, mammals are at the bottom of the list, with only about 5,500 or so named species. 

On the other hand, scientists have identified about a million species of insects, and there are many insects that haven’t yet been identified, explains Scott Hoffman Black, entomologist and executive director of the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates. Experts estimate that anywhere from a conservative four million to possibly as many as seven million species are yet to be identified.

So yes, the most abundant land animal is definitely an insect. But which one?

The Most Populated Animal in the World

According to an oft-told anecdote, the British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what he could say about the nature of God based on his study of the natural world. Haldane responded dryly that the creator has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” The story is most likely apocryphal but so delightful that it has been repeated for decades.

And indeed, there are a lot of beetles on the planet — by some estimates, approximately 350,000 described species. But they aren’t the most abundant land animals. There are a lot of ways to break this down, but if you go by either individual animals or biomass, which is basically weight, the honor almost certainly goes to ants.

The authors of a widely cited 2022 study estimated that there were 20 quadrillion (that’s 20 followed by 15 zeros) ants on Earth — and they were being conservative. Or if this helps you get your mind around the sheer number of ants, the total biomass of ants is greater than the combined biomass of all wild birds and mammals and is about 20 percent of the biomass of all humans on the planet, according to the study. 


Read More: An Ancient Ant Army Once Raided Europe 35 Million Years Ago


Why Are There So Many Ants in the World?

Phillip Barden studies ants (and other social insects) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says the amazing success of ants is likely due to the fact that ants are social animals.

“Once you get out of this unitary system where it’s one individual collecting and foraging on its own, the race is on, and you get these massive colonies, some with tens of millions of workers,” he says.

Black adds that ants have adapted to almost all environments, from the high mountains to deserts, and have many different strategies for survival. They also have a very adaptable diet. Many ants are predators, eating other animals — and they’re good at it because they cooperate in getting food. Some ants eat seeds, and some grow a fungus they eat, basically practicing agriculture, as Barden puts it. 

This ability to adapt to whatever conditions they find themselves in is probably the reason ants have survived. Ants were present in the Cretaceous period, says Barden, but they made up no more than one percent of all the insects researchers have found in amber or fossil deposits. But after the K-T extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, some 65 million years ago, ants made up at least 10 percent and maybe as much as 30 percent of all insects.

And he adds, “If you go to a rainforest, the biomass of ants and termites today is greater than not only all insects, but all insects plus all vertebrates combined.”


Read More: 6 Unusual Traits of Animal Evolution


Could Ants Outlast Humans in a Mass Extinction?

Many experts argue that we’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. If that’s the case, how will ants fare? Almost certainly better than humans, says Black. In previous extinctions, insects have survived when many other groups didn’t, he says. And ants specifically?

Barden points out that many types of ants do exceptionally well in places that humans have disturbed, such as golf courses and lawns.

“I think we’re going to see, and will continue to see, that a handful of ant species that are really well suited to disturbed habitats are going to continue to be really successful. And so instead of finding many dozens or hundreds of species in certain places, we might find just a few, but in those places, those species will be highly abundant,” says Barden.

 So have some respect the next time you come across an ant in your cupboard. 


Read More: What Happens If a Tiny Insect Goes Extinct? Should We Even Care?


Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:


Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.

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October 25, 2024 at 01:18PM