This is a timelapse video from Xiamen, China of a bus terminal in the way of a new highspeed railway station being rotated 90-degrees to make room for the new construction. The outer ring of the terminal was moved a very impressive 288-meters (945 feet), and set a new Guinness World Record for longest arc rotation in the process. Talk about a feat of engineering. For reference, if I were in charge I would have just demolishing the bus station with the intention of building a new one but never built a new one because I misappropriated all the funds and I’m incredibly lazy. Related: do you think a person on their deathbed has ever regretted napping? Keep going for the video.
Thanks to Carmen, who informed me he saw the same thing attempted with a home once with much more disastrous results. Man, wish I could have been there.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
Google might be about to do pair up two mobile screen-related features, "Edit & Share screenshots" and the AI-powered "What’s on my Screen," according to some APK digging by 9 to 5 Google. A new feature called "Smart Screenshots," tucked into the latest version of the Google 10.61 app, brings up an updated toolbar when you take a screenshot. As before, you get edit, share and the option to use your favorite app to send the shot, but there’s a new option with the latest version: Lens.
By selecting Lens, you can perform a search, do optical character recognition (OCR) or find visually similar items. The current annotating, cropping and sharing editing tools will likely remain as they are. It’s not yet clear whether the new Lens function will work for all screenshots or just those taken in Google Search. However, it seems likely that it will eventually become a replacement for screen search, in much the same way that Lens has taken over from other Google Assistant functions.
Amazon is launching a new tier for its Music subscription service that will offer high quality, lossless audio streams and downloads, the company has announced. With Amazon Music HD, as the plan is called, Amazon says people are going to have access to over 50 million high-resolution tracks at CD quality and better, thanks to support for 16-bit files and sample rates of 44.1kHz and above. The service will also come with "millions of tracks in UHD," which includes hi-res audio streaming at up to 24-bit/48kHz (or 96 to 192kHz) — in case you’re a hardcore audiophile and need the absolute highest quality possible.
Set to live inside the existing Amazon Music app, available for iOS, Android, the web and Amazon’s Fire and Echo devices, Music HD is rolling out starting today in the US, UK, Germany and Japan. Here in the States, the streaming service will cost $12.99 per month for Amazon Prime members, or $14.99 for regular customers. If you’re one of the "tens of millions" already paying for Music Unlimited, that means you only have to shell out $5 more per month for the new hi-res, lossless audio subscription. And, for those who haven’t paid for its music-streaming service yet, Amazon is offering new subscribers a free 90-day trial to Music HD.
Steve Boom, VP of Amazon Music, told Engadget that the company wanted to launch Music HD because even though streaming services give people access to millions of songs on demand, they’re not listening these tunes as it was intended. "We’re not hearing music the way the artist records it in the studio," he said. "It means you’re missing out on highs of music, lows of music, the details in the music." He added that Amazon has spent a lot of time talking to consumers and artists, who both agree they want a better, higher quality listening experience.
At the same time, Boom knows the audience for hi-res audio streaming may be niche, but he believes that doesn’t have to be the case. That’s why Amazon wanted to price Music HD competitively, he said, noting that the company will make a major push to try to sell people on its new service. At $12.99 for Prime customers, Music HD is $7 cheaper than similar premium offerings like Tidal HiFi, which is $19.99 per month. Boom also said Amazon plans to expand outside the US, UK, Germany and Japan eventually, but right now it just wanted to focus on its biggest music markets. "Wherever the consumer demand is, we will go meet it," he said.
Adding seaweed to cows’ diet would help tamp down their methane emissions. (Credit: Jan K/ Shutterstock)
Every morning, Breanna Roque goes out to the barn to feed the cows. But this isn’t your typical farm – in fact, it’s a laboratory. The University of California, Davis graduate researcher spends her time among bovines, tweaking their diets so that they burp less. Why? Less burps means less methane. And less methane, on a global scale, could mean slowing down climate change.
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NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — NASA is kicking the tires on one of its prospective astronaut abodes.
The space agency is currently conducting a two-week ground test on Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 habitat here at the company’s headquarters. Eight NASA astronauts have participated in the trial so far, and four were on the scene Thursday (Sept. 12) to assess various aspects of the big, expandable module.
The tests, which involve two B330 test units, are part of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program. In 2016, NextSTEP awarded funding to Bigelow and five other companies to develop ground prototypes for habitats that could help NASA astronauts journey to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations.
Bigelow is the last of the awardees to go through this round of ground tests, NASA officials said. But that doesn’t mean a decision is imminent.
“The purpose of this test program is not to pick a winner or a loser but to find what we like and what we don’t like,” former NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, the principal investigator for the NextSTEP habitat-testing program, said during a media event here Thursday. (Reporters were allowed to photograph the interior of one of the test modules, the all-steel Mars Transporter Testing Unit. But the other one was off-limits for imagery.)
“And that will all be melded into requirements going forward for the final flight design,” added Gernhardt, who flew four space shuttle missions during his astronaut career.
Inside Bigelow Aerospace’s all-steel Mars Transporter Testing Unit, during a NASA ground test of the company’s B330 habitat concept on Sept. 12, 2019.
(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)
The B330 is designed to be an independent space station; it will have its own life-support and propulsion systems, for example. The module takes its name from its 330 cubic meters (11,650 cubic feet) of internal volume. That’s a lot of space. For comparison, the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station (ISS) is about 930 cubic m (32,840 cubic feet).
The B330 is designed to support four astronauts indefinitely and five “for many months,” Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow said in a statement today.
Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow (left) and former NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, the principal investigator of NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) habitat-testing program, stand outside Bigelow’s Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019.
(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)
Like Bigelow’s other habitats, the B330 is expandable; see, for example, the much smaller and more bare-bones Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, which has been attached to the ISS on a test run since 2016. At launch, the B330 will be compressed enough to fit inside a 16.5-foot-wide (5 m) payload fairing. After it reaches space, the module will be inflated using onboard gas canisters.
The module’s expandable nature is its chief selling point; the B330 will provide much more habitable volume per unit of launch mass than is available in a traditional aluminum module, Bigelow Aerospace representatives stressed.
Blair Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace’s Vice President of Corporate Strategy, gives a tour of the company’s Mars Transporter Testing Unit on Sept. 12, 2019. (The “does not exist” tags point out pieces that will not be part of the real space habitat, which won’t need walkways and other gravity-related structural elements.)
(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)
Bigelow hopes that NASA ultimately selects the B330 for use on the Lunar Gateway, the moon-orbiting space station the agency plans to begin assembling in 2022 as part of the Artemis program. (Artemis also aims to put two astronauts down near the lunar south pole by 2024 and to establish a sustainable, long-term presence on and around the moon by 2028).
Indeed, much of the current ground test is Gateway-centric, Gernhardt said. For example, one of the many test tasks involves assessing how astronauts would operate rovers on the lunar surface from the various habitats.
Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 habitat will feature two lavatories.
(Image credit: Mike Wall/Space.com)
Getting a B330 up to the Gateway is the company’s chief focus at the moment, Robert Bigelow said during Thursday’s event. If NASA does go with a B330, he added, Bigelow Aerospace could get one ready for launch within 42 months of receiving the green light.
NASA envisions the Gateway, and the lunar exploration it will help enable, as a steppingstone to the ultimate human-spaceflight destination: Mars. And the Gateway could also be the start of even bigger things for the B330, if things go according to plan for Bigelow.
“It can go anywhere,” Robert Bigelow said. “We have an architecture where we make it a lunar base.”
Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
Astronomers have discovered a bright, young star that is running away from home. Why? What did the star’s parents do to deserve this? According to a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, it’s nobody’s fault; it seems the young star simply fell in with the wrong crowd — namely, a very hungry black hole.
The star, which is named PG 1610+062, was first observed hurtling across the sky in a 1986 star survey, though little attention has been paid to the stellar renegade’s story since then. In the present study, astronomers working at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano took the closest-ever look at the runaway. They confirmed it is one of the fastest stars ever seen shooting out of the Milky Way’s galactic disk.
The team calculated the star’s velocity to be about 1.2 million mph (2 million km/h), which isn’t quite enough to escape the bonds of the galaxy’s gravity, but fast enough for it to be able to leave the star’s home solar system in the cosmic dust.
There are a few different processes that explain how a star can get booted out of its home system, and they usually involve binary partnerships — that is, two stars orbiting around a common center of mass. If one member of the pair were to theoretically disappear — say, by exploding in a supernova or getting swallowed up by a supermassive black hole —the remaining star might get such a sudden, energetic kick in the pants that it would slingshot straight out of its home system, or even out of its home galaxy entirely.
The case of PG 1610+062 may be a bit unusual though, the researchers wrote. Judging by the star’s mass, velocity and likely origin (the team traced it to the Sagittarius spiral arm of the galaxy), it seems unlikely that the star ever came close enough to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy to see its partner star gobbled up.
Rather, the star’s fast-but-not-too-fast movement seems to suggest that it had a run-in with a mid-mass black hole — that is, a black hole with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun (as opposed to a stellar black hole, which can have up to about 20 suns’ worth of mass, or a supermassive black hole, which can be millions or billions of times the sun’s mass, according to NASA).
Scientists have never found convincing evidence that mid-mass black holes exist in our galaxy. This stellar runaway still isn’t hard proof of their existence, but it does strengthen the case that mid-mass black holes could be out there, the researchers wrote. Now, “the race is on to actually find them,” lead study author Andreas Irrgang, an astronomer at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said in a statement.
Small streams could be in danger (Joao Branco/Unsplash/)
The Trump Administration just announced yet another blow to the country’s environmental protections. On Thursday, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repealed an Obama administration update to the 1972 Clean Water Act, which had expanded protection to wetlands and streams that are disconnected from navigable rivers. "They’re effectively sending us back 30 years in our protections of U.S. waters," says Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship winner for his work as a climate and water scientist.
The 2015 rule has broadened the definition of "waters of the United States," which allowed the EPA to regulate pollutants in a much greater proportion of waterways than before. Dry washes and streams may only flow intermittently, but according to an EPA report they make up about 59 percent of streams in the U.S. and 81 percent of those in the Southwest. Another EPA report, which supported the 2015 rule, reviewed more than 1,200 studies on small streams and wetlands and found that they’re critical to the health of downstream rivers: "There is ample evidence that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains, even when lacking surface water connections, provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters." And yet, many of these waters now have no protection under federal law.
The original definition of "waters of the United States" mainly covered large rivers, their tributaries, and adjacent wetlands. The Clean Water Act requires industrial and municipal polluters discharging to these rivers to obtain permits from the EPA and the 2015 update expanded those regulations to include smaller streams and wetlands. Thursday’s repeal will soon be followed by a rule change, and the replacement text would basically revert to the ’70s-level protections. Officials have stated that the change would remove a current "regulatory patchwork"—the 2015 update only applies to 22 states, Washington D.C. and U.S. territories because other states have challenged the rule in court. In a press release, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said redefining "water of the United States" would "provide greater regulatory certainty for farmers, landowners, home builders, and developers nationwide."
But despite whatever uncertainty there may have been, the 2015 update was enacted for a reason: the streams and wetlands that aren’t flowing into or right next to major rivers are still crucial for wildlife and humans. Drinking water for one in three people in the lower 48 comes from same waters that just lost their federal protection in the repeal, as PopSci has reported previously. "The weakening that we’re seeing today is really serious—It’s really cutting protection for drinking water for a lot of Americans," says Gleick. "A lot of our groundwater resources and a lot of our surface water resources are now going to be vulnerable to far more pollution."
The 2015 rule also regulated pesticides and nutrients leaching from many farmers’ fields—a diffuse but cumulatively significant source of pollution. In the Mississippi basin, for example, the pollutants from numerous farms that trickle into small streams and wetlands eventually flow into the river and then into the Gulf of Mexico, says Gleick. This impacts water quality and leads to the growth of massive algal blooms and fish die offs. “Some farmers would have had to get permits to discharge pollutants into the streams and wetlands,” says Gleick. But now that requirement has been lifted, and our waters will suffer for it.
Overall, says Gleick, “We can expect more pollution in our waterways, more threats to drinking water supplies, more court cases, and more confusion about where this country ought to go on environmental protection.”
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
