A robot fish named Belle could be the “spy on the marine life” that researchers have been looking for.
Category: science – Page 43
“I’m really into planetary defence”: Meet the 13-year-old whose science project could protect Earth from asteroids
Do you ever mesh your other hobbies with the space stuff? Yes. I once turned the results of one of my experiments into a musical. In 2020, during the lockdowns, I put a scientific instrument on my balcony to measure light, sound and pollution before and after the pandemic. I ended up with several graphs and thought, Why not turn these into a musical? So, me and my brother got several musical instruments and played notes according to how high or low each point on the graph was. We actually submitted that to the NASA SpaceApps COVID-19 Challenge and became one of the top six global winners.
Do you think you’ll study space science at university when you’re older? I think so. Either aerospace or astrophysics, or maybe both.
Any other cool projects in the pipeline? Not right now, but I’m getting ready to go to Belgium this September, to represent Canada in the EU Contest for Young Scientists, which is an international science competition. I’ll be able to showcase this project there. But before then, I need to make a 10-page project report with figures, summaries and scientific documents. And I’ll need a poster!
Boulder Bonanza! Science and Sampling Attempts at the Onahu Outcrop on Mars
Mars Perseverance Rover struggled to collect samples from a crumbly, potentially conglomerate rock at the Onahu outcrop, before exploring another location, Stone Man Pass. Meanwhile, the rover continues to analyze nearby boulders and progress towards Jezero’s inner rim, home to the anticipated carbonate-rich “margin unit,” in pursuit of insights into Mars’ geological history.
Recently on Mars, Perseverance wrestled with sampling a crumbly rock and continued the mission’s boulder-bonanza!
Perseverance spent 3 weeks exploring the Onahu outcrop, after having previously performed an abrasion named Ouzel Falls. From this abrasion, scientists saw that the rock is most likely a conglomerate worth sampling, but was also likely to be crumbly.
Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot
Harvard University plans to use an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT as an instructor on its flagship coding course.
Students enrolled on the Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science (CS50) programme will be encouraged to use the artificial intelligence tool when classes begin in September.
The AI teacher will likely be based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 or GPT 4 models, according to course instructors.
“Hydration Solids”: The New Class of Matter Shaking Up Science
For many years, the fields of physics and chemistry have held the belief that the properties of solid materials are fundamentally determined by the atoms and molecules they consist of. For instance, the crystalline nature of salt is credited to the ionic bond formed between sodium and chloride ions. Similarly, metals such as iron or copper owe their robustness to the metallic bonds between their respective atoms, and the elasticity of rubbers stems from the flexible bonds in the polymers that form them. This principle also applies to substances like fungi, bacteria, and wood.
Or so the story goes.
A new paper recently published in Nature upends that paradigm, and argues that the character of many biological materials is actually created by the water that permeates these materials. Water gives rise to a solid and goes on to define the properties of that solid, all the while maintaining its liquid characteristics.
KISS method for 2D material preparation: Unlocking new possibilities for materials science
It has almost been 20 years since the establishment of the field of two-dimensional (2D) materials with the discovery of unique properties of graphene, a single, atomically thin layer of graphite. The significance of graphene and its one-of-a-kind properties was recognized as early as 2010 when the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to A. Geim and K. Novoselov for their work on graphene. However, graphene has been around for a while, though researchers simply did not realize what it was, or how special it is (often, it was considered annoying dirt on nice, clean surfaces of metals REF). Some scientists even dismissed the idea that 2D materials could exist in our three-dimensional world.
Today, things are different. 2D materials are one of the most exciting and fascinating subjects of study for researchers from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry and engineering. 2D materials are not only interesting from a scientific point of view, they are also extremely interesting for industrial and technological applications, such as touchscreens and batteries.
We are also getting very good at discovering and preparing new 2D materials, and the list of known and available 2D materials is rapidly expanding. The 2D materials family is getting very large and graphene is not alone anymore. Instead, it now has a lot of 2D relatives with different properties and vastly diverse applications, predicted or already achieved.
Eastern philosophy says there is no “self.” Science agrees
Why does all of this matter? The unfortunate truth is that each of us will experience plenty of mental pain, misery, and frustration in our lifetimes. Mistaking the voice in our head for a thing and labeling it “me” brings us into conflict with the neuropsychological evidence that shows there is no such thing. This mistake — this illusory sense of self — is the primary cause of our mental suffering. When you can’t sleep at night, is it because you are worried about a stranger’s problems, or is it your problems that keep you up? For most of us, we worry about my work problems, my money problems, and my relationship problems. What would happen if we removed the “self” from these problems?
I am distinguishing mental suffering from physical pain. Pain occurs in the body and is a physical reaction—like when you stub your toe or break an arm. The suffering I speak of occurs in the mind only and describes things such as worry, anger, anxiety, regret, jealousy, shame, and a host of other negative mental states. I know it’s a big claim to say that all these kinds of suffering are the result of a fictitious sense of self. For now, the essence of this idea is captured brilliantly by Taoist philosopher and author Wei Wu Wei when he writes, “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”