General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - August 2015

Aug 2015

Jun 08, 2019

NASA Opening the Space Station

NASA executives announced that the space agency will open up parts of the International Space Station to more commercial opportunities, allowing companies unprecedented use of the space station's facilities, including filming commercials or movies against the backdrop of space.
NASA is also calling on the private space industry to send in ideas for habitats and modules that can be attached to the space station semi-permanently.
A new interim directive from NASA allows private companies to buy time and space on the ISS for producing, marketing, or testing their products.
It also allows those companies to use resources on the ISS for commercial purposes, even making use of NASA astronauts' time and expertise (but not their likeness).
If companies want, they can even send their own astronauts to the ISS, starting as early as 2020, but all of these activities come with a hefty price tag.
Russia is more open to ads and brandingon the ISS (as it was with the Mir space station) and has sent tourists to the ISS before.
But NASA has strictly prohibited the use of its side of the International Space Station for commercial purposes.

Jun 07, 2019

World's First Robot Artist

Ai-Da is the brainchild of Aidan Meller, who claims she is the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid artist, able to draw creatively thanks to in-built artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The 46-year-old art dealer unveiled Ai-Da — dressed in a brown wig and period-style painter's blouse — in Oxford, ahead of an exhibition of her first works opening next week in the English university city.
Ai-Da can currently only hold certain hard tools like pencils, not brushes.
Meller, also an art gallery director, first dreamed up Ai-Da — named after Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and writer often called the world's first computer coder — eight years ago. But he only began seriously working on the project in 2017.
Reasoning that the coming age of AI was today's equivalent, Meller set about creating a robotic artist to fuse his ideas into one artistic endeavour. With the help of British robotics company Engineered Arts, and researchers at both Leeds and Oxford universities, Ai-Da was finally completed in April.
Meller was eager for her to adopt a female persona because he argued art and coding worlds need more women represented.

Most Detailed Simulation of Black Hole

The scientists unveiled the most detailed simulation of a black hole yet, solving a mystery dating back more than four decades over how the star-devouring monsters consume matter.
Coming fresh on the heels of the first ever photo of one of the giant objects, which are scattered across the universe, astrophysicists are new several steps closer to understanding how they form and develop.
A black hole is born when a large star collapses in on itself. Far from being a "hole", they are instead incredibly dense objects with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, may escape them.
As they suck in matter, they form an accretion disk — a churning mass of superaccelerated particles that are the brightest objects in the Universe — around them.
It is the accretion disk that can be seen as a blurry halo around the image of the black hole released in April from the Event Horizon Telescope. But accretion disks are nearly always tilted at an angle to the orientation of the black hole, known as its equatorial plane.
But no model could ever work out how, precisely, that would happen. Until now.
A team of astrophysicists from Northwestern University, Oxford University, and the University of Amsterdam, used graphical processing units to crunch large sets of data and simulate how black holes interact with their accretion disks.

Jun 06, 2019

China Launches Rocket from Ship

China successfully launched a rocket from a ship at sea for the first time, the latest step forward in its ambitious space programme.
The Long March 11 rocket blasted off from a platform on a large semi-submersible barge in the Yellow Sea.
The small rocket designed to be deployed quickly and from mobile launch sites such as a ship, carried seven satellites, including one that measures sea-surface winds to forecast typhoons.

Jun 03, 2019

Singapore Transport Has an Electric Future

Singapore is famed both for its car-lite approach that discourages ownership of personal vehicles, and the steady expansion of its public transport system over the past three decades.
The city state is now working on the next big technological leap that will potentially lead to the roll-out of driverless, fully autonomous buses in partnership with Volvo Buses.
The first trials in this race to autonomy are taking place on the smooth macadam of CETRAN, a comprehensive test centre for autonomous vehicles operated by Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore).
There are two Volvo autonomous electric buses in the trials conducted by NTU scientists. The second one is undergoing tests at a bus depot managed by local transport operator SMRT.

May 31, 2019

'Forbidden planet' seen in Neptunian Desert

Astronomers say they have discovered a rogue exoplanet with its own atmosphere in the Neptunian Desert. NGTS-4b, nick-named 'The Forbidden Planet' is smaller than Neptune but three times the size of Earth, said researchers led by the University of Warwick.
The exoplanet, described in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has a mass of 20 Earth masses, a radius 20% smaller than Neptune, and temperature of 1000° Celsius.
It orbits around the star in only 1.3 days — the equivalent of Earth's orbit around the Sun of one year.
It is the first exoplanet of its kind to have been found in the Neptunian Desert, researchers said. The Neptunian Desert is the region close to stars where no Neptune-sized planets are found.
This area receives strong irradiation from the star, meaning the planets do not retain their gaseous atmosphere as they evaporate leaving just a rocky core.
However NGTS-4b still has its atmosphere of gas. Researchers believe the planet may have moved into the Neptunian Desert recently, in the last one million years, or it was very big and the atmosphere is still evaporating.

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