The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

Oh wonderful. Product endorsements in space. I am just waiting for the first "Taco Bell Fly-Thru" in orbit, and the Anheuser-Busch-Budweiser Moon Base ...

NASA astronauts have a new task: make videos of Estée Lauder products

NASA, one of the space station's primary operators, is preparing to oversee the largest push of business activity aboard the ISS. Later this month, up to 10 bottles of a new Estée Lauder (EL) skincare serum will launch to the space station, a NASA spokesperson told CNN Business. NASA astronauts are expected to film the items in the microgravity environment of the ISS and the company will be able to use that footage in ad campaigns or other promotional material.

... The Estée Lauder partnership will continue NASA's years-long push to encourage private-sector spending on space projects as the space agency looks to stretch its budget beyond the ISS and focus on taking astronauts back into deep space. Those efforts include allowing the space station to be used for marketing and entertainment purposes.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/09/17/tech/e...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Onka]

Oh wonderful. Product endorsements in space. I am just waiting for the first "Taco Bell Fly-Thru" in orbit, and the Anheuser-Busch-Budweiser Moon Base ...



Gassho, J

STLah

Yes. The McMission to explore Mars will be good as will the Mars Mars mission haha
Gassho Onka
Sat/LAH

[Jundo]

Okay, at that pace, restocking may take awhile, not to mention all the squashed sandwiches!

https://youtu.be/W_i6_FY7tH0

And the new look is so comforting!

The next one is something great though, and the first step to the avatar body ...

https://youtu.be/qNYPgoQ0I8w

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

And who "owns" that life on Mars?

Venus is a Russian planet -- say the Russians

No longer confined to territories here on Earth, Russia has now staked its claim on Venus, saying it is a "Russian planet."

This week, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, revealed that the country plans to send its own mission to Venus in addition to "Venera-D," the planned joint mission with the US, the Russian state news agency TASS reported.

Rogozin was addressing reporters at the HeliRussia 2020 exhibition, an international expo of the helicopter industry in Moscow.
"Resuming Venus exploration is on our agenda," he told reporters Tuesday.

"We think that Venus is a Russian planet, so we shouldn't lag behind," he said.

"Projects of Venus missions are included in the united government program of Russia's space exploration for 2021-2030."

The statement came the day after scientists revealed that a gas on Earth called phosphine had also been detected in the atmosphere of Venus.

According to the European Space Agency, the Russians do have significant experience when it comes to Venus. Its website states: "Between 1967-1984 Venusian studies carried out in Russia were at the forefront of international research into this planet.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/09/18/world/...ntl/index.html

Reading the article closely, however, I don't think he meant a legal claim ... yet, at least.

Also, fun fact in the article about Venus, I did not know: "it spins backward compared to other planets."

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

And why worry about those shelf stocking Japanese robots, when the shelf stocking Japanese robots will become YOU and ME?

Workers fear humans implanted with microchips will steal their jobs

Workers worry that in the not-too-distant future they will be sidelined by humans implanted with performance-enhancing microchips.

Two-thirds of employees believe that in 2035, humans with chips implanted in their bodies will have an unfair advantage in the labor market, according to a Citrix survey of employees in the United States and Europe that was shared exclusively with CNN Business. Although cyborgs may sound like the stuff of science fiction, they could be here before long.

Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips in their hands that could one day replace keys and cards. Elon Musk recently showed off a working brain implant in pigs made by Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company. And Synchron, a San Francisco startup funded in part by the US Defense Department, is already testing an implantable wireless device that can stimulate the nervous system from the inside of a blood vessel. It has been implanted in patients with upper-limb paralysis.

"Leaders are consistently more positive about the benefits that technology and AI will bring, while workers are more skeptical and concerned about their own role in the changing world of work," according to Citrix Work 2035, a research study done by the software company whose Workspace service helps employees to work from anywhere. Seventy-seven percent of business leaders believe that under-the-skin chips and sensors will boost worker performance and productivity by 2035. By comparison, just 43% of workers share that positive view on chips

They will need us as servants to our masters, the machines ...

The good news is that C-Suite executives, presumably the ones making the decisions, are much more bullish on the role of humans in the future. Most leaders (81%) think permanent employees will still have a place by 2035.

By 2035, technology such as AI personal assistants and augmented reality glasses will make workers at least twice as productive, according to 51% of professionals in the Citrix survey. "Robots are not going to replace humans," Henshall, the Citrix CEO, said. "Technology will make people better and smarter. It's an enabler, not a replacer."

... But there is no guarantee that the humans being "freed" from mundane tasks will be the same ones hired for the more exciting work. Countless workers, especially those without the right skills training, could be left behind in the disruption.

"The workers that will suffer the most will be the majority whose work can be automated away," said Yang. "There will be a handful of executives and investors who end up profiting at unprecedented levels."

... Not just that, but more than half (57%) of all professionals believe that by 2035, there will be no traditional leadership team at all — just AI making most business decisions.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/09/18/busine...org/index.html

They need us ... for now.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

More about LIFE on VENUS! ... (or not) ...

'Grand claims' of life on Venus lack evidence, skeptics say

Last week, a team of researchers told the world that they had detected a molecule in the upper cloud layers of Venus typically only created by living creatures here on Earth.

The blockbuster announcement of finding phosphine in the clouds of Venus made a major splash in the news. But pushback began appearing even as details of the results were coming to light.

In the days since, scientists have had some time to articulate their criticisms, which fall into two main camps. On one side, there are those who question the detection itself and whether the team has definitely seen what they claim to have seen. And a second attack heavily scrutinizes the interpretation and whether or not life is a good conclusion to arrive at.

...

At the center of this debate is the molecule phosphine, or PH3, which is made from one phosphorus atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms. Phosphine is a nasty and poisonous gas for many creatures, including humans, but is produced by bacteria living in rotting sewage and swamps where oxygen is lacking, as well as in the intestines of some animals.

Using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and ALMA, astronomers looked for telltale dips in Venus' light that would indicate the presence of different chemicals, and noticed one associated with phosphine. The result is particularly perplexing because Venus' atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide and other oxygen-containing molecules, which should rip apart phosphine in no time. To have it present in any amount is bewildering.

But did the research team really see phosphine? The observations contain a good amount of noise, which might simply be mimicking a phosphine signal, suggested Carpenter. ... In particular, Way pointed out that there is a signature associated with sulfur dioxide, SO2, at nearly the same frequency of light. Sulfur dioxide is the third most abundant gas in Venus' atmosphere, so its presence might account for the phosphine finding, David Catling, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Live Science in an email.

...

But even if phosphine exists on our sister world, there are many reasons to doubt that life is making it. Here on Earth, phosphine is associated with living organisms, but Venus is quite literally an alien planet, and scientists don't yet fully understand its many complex details.

Phosphine is a very simple molecule, just four atoms large, and "super easy to make in the laboratory," Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, who has been vocal on Twitter about the results, told Live Science. "You just combine phosphorus and a base. I've made it by mistake." ... Cronin suggested that Venus' surface, which is thought to be geologically active, might on occasion split open, revealing underground reserves of phosphorus. Should Venus' sulfuric acid (H2SO4) clouds then send down rain, they might spark a reaction to form plumes of phosphine that could explain its presence in the atmosphere. Any number of other ways to make phosphine could also be plausible, he added.

... The one thing that's certain is that Venus will be receiving a great deal more attention in the near future. For his part, Cronin believes it's possible life does exist in Venus' clouds, but that it is liable to have chemistry quite unlike terrestrial organisms.

https://www.livescience.com/skepticism-life-on-venus.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Bokucho]

More about LIFE on VENUS! ... (or not) ...



Gassho, J

STLah

Ah the mysteries of the instrumentation, usually when I see something unexpected, turns out my standard was bad, or it needed calibration. But life on other planets, I absolutely believe, and I hope I'm alive to see it conclusively proven. Thanks for the share Jundo!

Gassho,

Josh
SatToday

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

Breathtaking ...

Beaked whales can hold their breath for over 3 hours (and possibly longer)

When scientists recently examined data from thousands of whale dives, they found that one of these extreme divers held its breath for more than 3 hours, shattering the previously reported record — also held by the Cuvier's beaked whale (Ziphius cavirostris) — by over an hour.

Equally intriguing was the deep-diving whales' ability to recover relatively quickly from their exertions. One whale rested for just 20 minutes after a 2-hour dive, hinting that even what appear to be extreme dives (to us, at least) may be no big deal for this species after all, researchers reported in a new study.

... The whales are found in deep ocean waters around most of the world, but because they spend very little time at the surface they are extremely challenging to observe in the wild, said lead study author Nicola Quick, a research scientist in the Duke Marine Lab at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, in Durham, North Carolina.

"They spend 90% of their time under the water, at depths or in shallower dives," Quick told Live Science. When the whales do come up for a rare breath, they surface for around 2 minutes on average before diving again, leaving marine scientists little time to spot the whales, deploy a satellite-linked location-tracking tag for data collection, or recover data from tags, Quick explained.

Diving mammals can remain submerged after they deplete stored oxygen by switching to anaerobic respiration, which causes lactic acid to build up in body tissues, contributing to muscle fatigue. Prior research on other mammalian deep-sea divers has shown that they complete about 95% of their dives before they need to switch to anaerobic respiration, according to the study. When the scientists applied that formula to their data, they estimated that Cuvier's beaked whales could hold their breath for about 78 minutes before anaerobic respiration would take over.

And some of the whales' dives were much, much longer than that.

https://www.livescience.com/whales-b...ng-record.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

If like me, you wonder each day why there's no speed limit in a superfluid universe. Now we know why!

In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself.

As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle - but now, by recreating and studying the phenomenon, physicists have figured out how it happens. Particles in the superfluid stick to the object, shielding it from interacting with the bulk superfluid, thus preventing the superfluid's breakdown.

"Superfluid helium-3 feels like a vacuum to a rod moving through it, although it is a relatively dense liquid. There is no resistance, none at all," said physicist Samuli Autti of Lancaster University in the UK. "I find this very intriguing."

Superfluids are a type of fluid that has zero viscosity and zero friction, and therefore flows without losing kinetic energy. They can be made relatively easily from bosons of the helium-4 isotope, which, when cooled to just above absolute zero, slow down enough to overlap and form a high-density cluster of atoms that act as one 'super-atom'.

...


The team concluded that the initial force comes from the Cooper pairs moving around a little to accommodate the motion, exerting that small starting force on the wire rod. But, after that, the wire can move freely, essentially camouflaged in a coat of Cooper pairs.

...

This new finding could have some interesting implications.

Fermionic superfluids can be used to create superconductors, which in turn are under investigation as a critical component of quantum computers. Knowing more about how and why superfluids behave the way they do is likely to only bring us closer to that goal.

https://www.livescience.com/superflu...eed-limit.html

I KNEW it was the sticky Cooper pairs!

Also ... arsenic apparently useful for something other than old Agatha Christie novels ...

We may finally know what life on Earth breathed before there was oxygen

Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet.

In Chile's Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a hypersaline lake that's permanently free of oxygen. ... "This is the only system on Earth where I could find a microbial mat that worked absolutely in the absence of oxygen."

Microbial mats, which fossilize into stromatolites, have been abundant on Earth for at least 3.5 billion years, and yet for the first billion years of their existence, there was no oxygen for photosynthesis. ...

... Just last year, researchers discovered an abundant life form in the Pacific Ocean that also breathes arsenic. ...

... If the team is right, then we might need to expand our search for life forms elsewhere.

"In looking for evidence of life on Mars, [scientists] will be looking at iron and probably they should be looking at arsenic also," says Visscher.

It really is so much more than just a poison.

https://www.livescience.com/life-on-...re-oxygen.html

... and ... maybe time to buy your time share near the dunes ...

Could the Sahara ever be green again?

Sometime between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended, the Sahara Desert transformed. Green vegetation grew atop the sandy dunes and increased rainfall turned arid caverns into lakes. About 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers) of Northern Africa turned green, drawing in animals such as hippos, antelopes, elephants and aurochs (wild ancestors of domesticated cattle), who feasted on its thriving grasses and shrubs. This lush paradise is long gone, but could it ever return?

In short, the answer is yes. The Green Sahara, also known as the African Humid Period, was caused by the Earth's constantly changing orbital rotation around its axis, a pattern that repeats itself every 23,000 years, according to Kathleen Johnson, an associate professor of Earth systems at the University of California Irvine.

... but ...

However, because of a wildcard — human-caused greenhouse gas emissions that have led to runaway climate change — it's unclear when the Sahara, currently the world's largest hot desert, will turn a new green leaf.
https://www.livescience.com/will-sah...urn-green.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Inshin]

Looks like we may have a solution to plastic https://www.theguardian.com/environm...droidApp_Other

[Jundo]

Looks like we may have a solution to plastic https://www.theguardian.com/environm...droidApp_Other

Yes, lovely, wonderful for our oceans, until ... it escapes and eats my coffee maker and half my car!

New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster
Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling

By the way, yes, found in Japan ... right near here at Keio University, Tokyo ...

Gassho, Jundo

STLah

[Jundo]

Time to climb in them covered wagons, there's gold in them there hills!

There’s too much gold in the universe. No one knows where it came from.

Something is showering gold across the universe. But no one knows what it is.

Here's the problem: Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries. To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus. That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction. But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either. So where's the gold coming from? There are some other possibilities, including supernovas so intense they turn a star inside out. Unfortunately, even such strange phenomena can't explain how blinged out the local universe is, the new study finds.

https://www.livescience.com/where-di...come-from.html

And back to life on Venus ...

Did NASA detect a hint of life on Venus in 1978 and not realize it?

Life on Venus is still a long shot. But there's reason to take the idea seriously. On Sept. 14, a team of scientists made a bombshell announcement in the journal Nature Astronomy: Using telescopes, they'd detected phosphine, a toxic gas long proposed as a possible sign of alien microbial life, in the upper part of the planet's thick atmosphere. The detection was a landmark in the long hunt for life elsewhere in the solar system, which has mostly focused attention on Mars and a few moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Meanwhile, Venus, hot and poisonous, was long considered too inhospitable for anything to survive. But now, digging through archival NASA data, Rakesh Mogul, a biochemist at Cal Poly Pomona in California, and colleagues have found a hint of phosphine picked up by Pioneer 13 — a probe that reached Venus in December 1978.

https://www.livescience.com/life-on-...ioneer-13.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Inshin]

Time to climb in them covered wagons, there's gold in them there hills!





And back to life on Venus ...




Gassho, J

STLah

And the human love of gold :

_90395537_gettyimages-160417204.jpg

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21994873

And an altar decorated with 50kg of gold for the famous Durga Puja festival in Kolkata:
rsz_screenshot_20201003_092418.jpg

Gassho
Sat

[Jundo]

And the human love of gold :

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6779[/ATTACH]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21994873

And an altar decorated with 50kg of gold for the famous Durga Puja festival in Kolkata:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]6780[/ATTACH]

Gassho
Sat

Gold is just a metal, like aluminum or iron. It is only the human heart which assigns special value.

In fact, all this world is diamonds and gold, in every grain of dust.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

I wonder how Master Dogen's detailed instructions for the toilet would have to be rewritten for zero gravity? I guess one would need traps for all the bowing ...

New space toilet reaches the final frontier

A robotic Cygnus spacecraft successfully blasted off from Virginia late Friday (Oct. 2) carrying nearly 4 tons of gear, including a new space toilet, to the International Space Station.

https://youtu.be/j4OU8oWroNU

Gassho, J

STLAh