In a dramatic twist, US President Donald Trump admitted early this morning that he had tested positive for COVID-19.

“Tonight, [first lady Melania Trump] and I tested positive for COVID-19,” he wrote on Twitter. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately.”

The development comes with just weeks left in the presidential election, but it’s impossible to predict its results. Some people who catch the coronavirus become extremely sick, and a small percentage die. Many others have mild symptoms or remain entirely asymptomatic. Even if Trump’s case is not severe, though, it will likely force him to miss crucial weeks of campaigning and perhaps the next debate.

The news also comes as a weighty inflection point after the Trump administration’s uneven handling of the pandemic. Though Trump admitted privately during the early months of the outbreak that the virus posed a grave threat to public health, he has publicly downplayed its risk at every turn. He’s also ignored his own health officials and, during a particularly strange press conference in April, suggested curing patients by injecting disinfectant or shining ultraviolet light inside their bodies — notions that were universally decried by doctors.

He’s also refused to wear a mask at almost all times, and upbraided others for doing so. As recently as Tuesday night, at the first presidential debate, Trump mocked his opponent Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public.

“I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said, sarcastically. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask.”

Trump has also continued to schedule crowded political rallies during the pandemic, a move that’s attracted searing criticism from health officials.

In fact, one of those rallies appears to have infected close Trump supporter Herman Cain with COVID in June. Cain became extremely ill and died from the disease in late July. In a macabre twist, Cain’s twitter account has posthumously continued to play down the risk from the virus.

And it was likely another rally that led to the infection of Trump himself. Last night, before Trump’s diagnosis, Bloomberg reported that Trump aide Hope Hicks had tested positive for the virus — after traveling with Trump to both the debate and a political rally in Minnesota.

Before his own results came back, Trump took the opportunity to blame the military or police for infecting Hicks with the virus.

“You know, it’s very hard when you’re with soldiers, when you’re with airmen, you’re with Marines and police officers — I’m with them so much — that when they come over to you, it’s very hard to say, ‘stay back, stay back,’ you know,” Trump said.

For now, White House officials are holding out hope for a speedy recovery.

“The president and first lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence,” White House physician Sean P. Conley said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments.”

The post President Donald Trump Has Been Diagnosed with COVID appeared first on Futurism.

Read this article:
President Donald Trump Has Been Diagnosed with COVID

Cosmic Feast

Peering back into some of the earliest days of the universe, astronomers came across a brutal scene: a still-forming supermassive black hole feasting on six entire galaxies it had ensnared in a gigantic cosmic web.

The grisly scene played out when the universe was only about 900 million years old, according to research published Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. And since the black hole plus the trapped galaxies are together more than 300 times the size of our galaxy, it could explain how supermassive black holes formed and especially how they did so when the universe was so young.

Hidden Tendrils

The supermassive black hole was surrounded by a web of cosmic filaments that allowed matter to flow between trapped galaxies and the black hole, like feeding tubes fueling its rapid growth.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects — supermassive black holes in the early universe,” lead researcher Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a press release. “These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence.”

Iceberg’s Tip

The six galaxies are among the faintest that astronomers can see, suggesting to the researchers that even dimmer galaxies could be trapped around the black hole as well.

“We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg,” coauthor and INAF astronomer Barbara Balmaverde said in the release, “and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones.”

READ MORE: Very Large Telescope spots galaxies trapped in the web of a supermassive black hole [ESO]

More on black holes: Physicists: Supermassive Black Holes May Actually Be Wormholes

The post Astronomers Spot Galaxies “Trapped” by Giant Black Hole appeared first on Futurism.

More here:
Astronomers Spot Galaxies “Trapped” by Giant Black Hole

Starship Update

According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the space company will give an update on its Starship spacecraft in about three weeks.

“The design has coalesced,” Musk tweeted. “What is presented will actually be what flies to orbit as V1.0 with almost no changes.”

SpaceX has been churning out prototype after prototype to get Starship off the ground. Previous prototypes, such as SN5 and SN6, have already completed “hops” to 150 meters (about 500 feet).

Belly Flop

The company is currently working on SN8, which is being prepared for a much more ambitious test flight to 12 miles. But there’s still no indication when such a test will take place.

The design was recently outfitted with two flaps and rolled out onto the launch pad. The flaps will help it slow its descent back down to Earth during a daring “belly-flop” maneuver.

Lunar Lander

Starship is designed to carry up to 100 passengers or 100 tons to faraway places including the Moon and Mars.

Before — or if — it ultimately makes the long journey to Mars, a lunar lander variant of Starship is being considered by NASA to carry American astronauts to the Moon as part of its Artemis program as soon as 2024.

READ MORE: Elon Musk says an update for its Starship spacecraft development program is coming in 3 weeks [TechCrunch]

More on Starship: Watch a SpaceX Starship Test Tank Explode Spectacularly

The post Elon Musk: “Starship Update Coming in 3 Weeks” appeared first on Futurism.

Read the original post:
Elon Musk: “Starship Update Coming in 3 Weeks”

Transparent Wood

Heating and cooling a home is costly, and inefficient building materials often make a house’s carbon footprint even worse.

But thanks to a new generation of futuristic building materials, those materials could be poised for a significant upgrade. A team of researchers at the USDA and several research institutions say they’ve developed “transparent wood,” a glass-like material made almost entirely out of trees that they claim is stronger, safer, more cost efficient and more thermally efficient than glass.

Kicking Glass

It’s a lucrative concept that has drawn the attention of multiple research teams across the globe, all working on similar concepts.

The problem with conventional glass is that especially in a single pane configuration, it’s a terrible insulator. Producing it can also come with a heavy carbon footprint, emitting about 25,000 metric tons per year, according to a recent statement by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In their paper published in the Journal of Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers claim their transparent wood result in windows five times more thermally efficient than glass.

Going Green

Creating the novel material is also a far greener process. For one, it’s made from the sustainable, fast-growing balsa tree. The wood is oxidized in a special bleach bath and then penetrated with a synthetic polymer.

The resulting material is not only virtually transparent, it acts more like plastic — it can withstand impacts much better than glass and tends to bend and splinter like wood instead of shattering into pieces.

Color the USDA impressed.

“With all of these potential benefits for consumers, manufacturing and the environment, the case for transparent wood couldn’t be… clearer,” reads the statement.

READ MORE: Transparent Wood Could Be the Window of the Future [USDA]

More on transparent wood: This “Transparent Wood” Could Cut the Cost of Heating Your Home

The post Scientists Create Clear, Glasslike Material Out of Wood appeared first on Futurism.

Continued here:
Scientists Create Clear, Glasslike Material Out of Wood

Early Thursday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19, the same disease that he’s spent the year downplaying despite it killing hundreds of thousands of his citizens.

Tangible details on the situation are still few and far between, but it’s worth noting that at 74 years old and 243 pounds — categorized as overweight — Trump falls within demographics that face a substantially higher risk of dying from the infection.

According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), coronavirus patients between the ages of 65 and 74 are hospitalized at five times the rate of 18- to 29-year-olds, and they die from coronavirus infections at 90 times the rate. And at 74, Trump is right on the cusp of the 75-84 age range, who are hospitalized at eight times the rate of young adults — and are 220 times as likely to die, according to the CDC data.

“He’s at a much higher risk of dying if he does develop that bad pneumonia,” Dr. Barry Dixon, an intensive care physician at Melbourne’s St. Vincent hospital told The Guardian. “There are other risk factors and co-morbidities such as whether you are a heavy smoker, have diabetes, or have heart disease. The key risk factors for Trump that we know about are his age and the fact he’s overweight, and they’d be high-risk factors.”

Of course, the President will receive far better and more consistent care than the typical coronavirus patient, especially given the number of outbreaks in the U.S. that were centered around strained-to-the-limit hospitals or crowded prisons.

White House physician Dr. Sean Conley released a statement on Thursday in which he said he and his team would “maintain a vigilant watch” and expects Trump to continue working while sick.

The post People in Trump’s Age Range Are 90 Times More Likely to Die From COVID-19 Than Young Adults appeared first on Futurism.

The rest is here:
People in Trump’s Age Range Are 90 Times More Likely to Die From COVID-19 Than Young Adults

Astronomers have spotted something strange and oddly sad: a rogue planet floating freely, without a star.

It’s an example of what astronomers call a “rogue planet.” Some are believed to start as normal planets, but leave their stars after colliding with another object that sends them flying into space like a billiard ball. Other rogue planets may also form when clouds of gas and dust implode to form a planet rather than a star.

“The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it,” Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University who helped discover the new planet, said in a NASA statement.

The planet spotted by Gaudi and his colleagues turned out to be roughly the mass of Earth or Mars.

What makes planets like it extremely difficult to spot is that they’re very dim, since there are no stars nearby to light them up. That’s why we’ve only spotted a few of these worlds so far.

Making them even more difficult to identify is the fact that they tend to be very cool, meaning that they don’t show up on infrared telescopes.

To spot the latest rogue planet, Gaudi’s team used a new technique called “microlensing,” as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the archive arXiv this week. The technique observes the warping changes the mass has on the fabric of space-time.

Basically, when a rogue planet moves in front of a more distant star, the light from that star bends around the rogue planet from our vantage point as it passes through the warped fabric of space-time near the planet. The more massive the planet, the more extreme the effect.

The team used NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to spot the lonely planet — a feat that would’ve been impossible without the specialized ‘scope, according to the team behind the discovery.

“The microlensing signal from a rogue planet only lasts between a few hours and a couple of days and then is gone forever,” Matthew Penny, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University and c0-author of the paper, said in the NASA statement. “This makes them difficult to observe from Earth, even with multiple telescopes. Roman is a game-changer for rogue planet searches.”

Roman is designed to hunt these rogue planets and to see how common they are. Such a discovery could influence the way we understand the formation and evolution of planets.

“We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do,” Gaudi added.

READ MORE: A Rogue Earth-Mass Planet Has Been Discovered Freely Floating in the Milky Way Without a Star [Universe Today]

More on rogue planets: Life Could Exist On “Rogue Planets” That Don’t Have Stars

The post An Earth-Sized Planet Is Floating Around Without a Star appeared first on Futurism.

Go here to see the original:
An Earth-Sized Planet Is Floating Around Without a Star

U.S. President Donald Trump announced Friday morning that he had tested positive for COVID-19, but some of his close aides suspected he was sick as early as Wednesday. And he knew by Thursday morning that his senior adviser Hope Hicks, who he had traveled with on Marine One the previous day, had tested positive for the virus.

But he didn’t stop meeting with officials and supporters until Thursday evening, when his own test came back positive, meaning that he likely spread the disease to a large number of people — a lack of caution that tracks perfectly with his administration’s flustered, inconsistent national approach to fighting the pandemic.

“Trump [knew] he should’ve quarantined under CDC guidelines as soon as Hicks test known, but he didn’t,” tweeted Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the Federation of American Scientists.

On Wednesday, the day aides noticed that Trump was acting lethargic and hoarse, he held a fundraiser in Minnesota, during which guests — many of them GOP officials — embraced each other and even sang karaoke.

The next morning, the White House learned that Hicks had the bug. Instead of calling off events, though, Trump went ahead and attended a fundraising event that evening, just hours before he himself tested positive.

Now, CNBC reports that the 30 to 50 attendees who came within close proximity of the president are now “freaking out,” according to an anonymous source briefed on the event.

Prior to any of that, The New York Times documented that Trump went unmasked to several fundraisers, rallies, press conferences, and meetings over the past week. This includes the first presidential debate against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, though Biden and his wife both tested negative for COVID-19 after Trump announced his own infection.

Because of the coronavirus’ incubation period, it’s likely Trump could have been spreading the coronavirus during those appointments and events, especially because he almost never wears a face mask.

A number of figures close to Trump have already been tested, including Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen, who are reportedly negative.

A number of attendees of the Saturday Rose Garden event at which Trump announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court have also tested positive, including Senator Mike Lee and Notre Dame President John Jenkins. Barrett tested negative since then, but met with Lee again days before he was diagnosed.

The full implications of Trump’s infection may not be clear for days or weeks until more people are tested and infections run their course. While coming near someone with COVID-19 doesn’t guarantee transmission, the coronavirus can readily spread through the air, potentially putting everyone who was near Trump over the past week at risk.

It’s depressingly consistent that the same President who from the beginning deliberately downplayed the dangers of the pandemic, which has now killed over 208,000 in the U.S., would continue to hold fundraisers in person even after he learned he had been exposed to the virus himself.

Hopefully, as more officials and staff continue to get tested, a clearer picture of the White House’s own COVID-19 spreader events will emerge.

The post Trump Exposed Countless People to COVID-19 After Learning He Might Have It appeared first on Futurism.

See the original post here:
Trump Exposed Countless People to COVID-19 After Learning He Might Have It

Riding Waves

Teams of scientists around the world are once more trying to perfect devices that generate electricity from the force of the ocean’s rolling waves.

It’s an idea that’s ebbed and flowed within the energy community, but now teams are trying to make the new source of clean energy a commercial reality, according to Greentech Media. Many are still undergoing tests, but one company, Ocean Wave Technology, has been successfully operating a massive wave-powered generator since early 2019 — a heartening success story for the fledgling industry.

Turbulent Past

Several companies and teams of scientists have tried to make wave energy a reality in the past, but as Greentech notes, many of their projects fell apart or ran out of money. But with renewed interest — and funding — in the industry, more companies are starting to test out their devices.

“We’re in that valley of death, climbing out of there at the moment,” naval architect Christopher Ridgewell, CEO of AW-Energy, a Finnish company working on a wave energy device called the WaveRoller, told Greentech.

Staying Afloat

AW-Energy hopes to plop its WaveRoller into the ocean next year, according to Greentech Media. Joining it are other companies like Sweden’s CorPower Ocean, which hopes to have wave energy generators operating by 2024.

It’s an encouraging sign for the future of clean energy. But the industry will still face challenges, even against other renewables like solar and wind, which continue to drop in price.

“It remains incredibly challenging to harness wave energy or convert it into electricity in large volumes,” CorPower CEO Patrik Möller told Greentech Media.

READ MORE: Is Wave Energy Ready to Climb Out of the ‘Valley of Death’? [Greentech Media]

More on wave energy: This Device Could Power One-Third Of The U.S. Using Ocean Waves

The post Huge Machine Captures Energy From Ocean Waves appeared first on Futurism.

Read more from the original source:
Huge Machine Captures Energy From Ocean Waves

Decoder Ring

A team of scientists has a new idea for how to save migrating blue whales from dangerous collisions with ships: shut up and listen.

It turns out that there’s a distinct change in the blue whale’s song just before it begins its annual migration south, Popular Science reports. By paying attention to those changes, the Stanford University scientists say, they might be able to warn ship operators in the area of the upcoming migration.

Fair Warning

Blue whales summer in the northeast region of the Pacific Ocean but travel to the coast of Central America in Autumn, PopSci reports, where they breed and wait out the cold weather. According to the team’s research, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the whales sing during the night, but switch to a daytime song right before their migration begins.

“There is a near real-time signal of what these animals are doing out in a habitat that’s historically been really difficult to observe,” Stanford biologist and study coauthor William Oestreich told PopSci.

Whale Strike

Getting advance warning would be great both for whales and the boats in the areas, as collisions can be destructive for vessels as well as fatal for the giant mammals.

“That could be one piece of the puzzle to more dynamically manage those habitats and shipping lanes in a way that allows shipping to continue,” Oestreich told PopSci, “but also in a way that is safe for these whale populations.”

READ MORE: We can protect whales from ship strikes by translating their songs [Popular Science]

More on whales: Whales and Sharks Are the New Victims of Our Plastic Waste, Study Finds

The post Scientists Suggest Teaching Ships to Speak Whale Language appeared first on Futurism.

See original here:
Scientists Suggest Teaching Ships to Speak Whale Language

Shotgun Drone

The UK military has designed a hexacopter drone that’s equipped with two shotgun barrels.

The drone, called i9, is capable of flying indoors and identifying targets using artificial intelligence, according to The Times.

While the current design is outfitted with a “twin barrel stabilized shotgun,” the aircraft could get a rocket or chain gun upgrade in the future.

Excl: A shotgun-armed drone that can fly indoors & identify targets using AI has been developed by British military.

The i9 has overcome the “wall suck” problem facing drones flying indoors.

It’ll be used in urban warfare & could be fitted with a rocket or chain gun in future. pic.twitter.com/I6ImnEBHDW

— Lucy Fisher (@LOS_Fisher) September 29, 2020

The Breach

The drone is equipped with six rotating blades and is meant to provide breaching commandos in urban settings with an initial view into interior spaces, identifying targets in the process. Troops in Afghanistan have suffered significant causalities during this “breaching” phase, The Times reports.

Once the drone is inside, troops on the ground can then authorize it to open fire from a live feed on a screen nearby.

Battering Ram

Apart from identifying targets indoors, the i9 is also designed to act as a “battering ram,” knocking target drones out of the sky, according to Popular Mechanics.

The news comes after Anduril, a military tech startup founded by Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey, unveiled a new AI-powered drone called the Ghost 4 earlier this month.

The Ghost 4 was also built for reconnaissance, using lasers to identify targets. Mounting weapons on it “would be possible,” as Luckey told Wired.

READ MORE: New Urban Combat Drone Is a Shotgun Toting Hexacopter [Popular Mechanics]

More on military drones: New Military Drone Fits in Backpack, Can Carry Lasers, Radio Jammers, Weapons

The post UK Military Develops Drone With a Double Barreled Shotgun appeared first on Futurism.

Visit link:
UK Military Develops Drone With a Double Barreled Shotgun

The same day that the President of the United States announced that he’s sick with COVID-19, the White House says face masks are still merely “recommended” on White House grounds.

A White House official told Axios that even Trump’s recently-announced illness won’t prompt staff to mandate the use of protective face masks on the grounds. Instead, it sounds like business as usual. Whether it’s because of Trump’s well-documented disdain for masks or something equally incomprehensible, the protective face masks that are great for stopping passers-by from transmitting a deadly virus to one another will remain optional.

“Our standard protocol is CDC best practices and recommendations,” the official told Axios. “Facial coverings are recommended but not required. There’s hand sanitizing stations located throughout the complex, frequent washing of hands and good hygiene is strongly recommended and social distancing is encouraged. So, I don’t foresee those things changing.”

The official added that the White House also implements randomized testing. But Trump and his circle’s open mockery of masks raises questions about how seriously any of these measures are actually taken.

Just to be clear: masks are at least moderately effective at stopping the coronavirus from spreading, and should be worn — properly — around others as much as possible while the pandemic continues.

The post Masks Still Aren’t Required on White House Grounds, Official Says appeared first on Futurism.

Here is the original post:
Masks Still Aren’t Required on White House Grounds, Official Says

Booster Slip Up

China successfully launched a high resolution optical observation satellite on top of a Long March 4B rocket on Monday.

But as videos uploaded to Chinese social media show, one of the rocket’s boosters fell back down to Earth — and exploded in a huge cloud of orange smoke not far from a school, as Space.com reports.

Some impressive footage from today's Long March 4B first stage return.

?https://t.co/9oRPoR0ZdF pic.twitter.com/SEl7t1u5xJ

— LaunchStuff (@LaunchStuff) September 7, 2020

Big Orange Cloud

Footage on Chinese social media network Weibo shows the first stage of the Long March 4B rocket erupting into a massive orange cloud near Lilong village, in the Shaanxi province. As Space.com reports, the footage appears to be taken from a school yard, with children audible in the foreground.

Making matters worse, the Long March rocket’s propellants are quite toxic — a possible health hazard.

Bad Run

It’s not the first report of Chinese rocket parts plummeting out of the sky. In May, the core stage of China’s gigantic Long March 5B rocket, essentially a whopping 37,000 pound piece of shrapnel, made its uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Pieces of the core stage eventually appeared to have crashed down on the Ivory Coast in Africa.

The satellite, called Gaofen 11, is capable of showing features as small as just three feet across back on the ground. According to state media, those images will be used for city planning, road network design, and other infrastructure planning projects.

READ MORE: Chinese rocket booster appears to crash near school during Gaofen 11 satellite launch [Space.com]

More on Chinese rockets: China Just Launched a Mysterious “Reusable Test Spacecraft”

The post Chinese Rocket Booster Crashes Near School, Explodes appeared first on Futurism.

Read more here:
Chinese Rocket Booster Crashes Near School, Explodes

A bunch of mice that had been gene-edited to be absolutely ripped headed to the International Space Station last year. And according to newly published research, they were capable of keeping their gains over an entire month.

A team led by Se-Jin Lee of the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut sent 40 young female black mice to the station back in December 2019. Some of the mice, though, had been gene edited to remove a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth.

As a result, the treated mice had about twice the skeletal muscle mass of normal mice. The researchers were hoping to learn about how microgravity affects bodies in space, particularly when it comes to muscle atrophy and bone loss — risks that mean astronauts have to spend a considerable amount of their time working out on board the ISS.

The 24 regular mice lost considerable muscle and bone mass in microgravity, like human astronauts. But eight of the bodybuilder “mighty mice,” which launched with double the muscle mass, retained most of that additional mass. And another eight mice received the “mighty mouse” treatment in space — and came back to Earth more swole than ever.

After parachuting back down to Earth inside a SpaceX capsule in January, the set of untreated mice got the treatment as well, and quickly recovered muscle mass, faster than those who didn’t receive the treatment.

“We show that targeting this signaling pathway has significant beneficial effects in protecting against both muscle and bone loss in microgravity,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today.

They concluded that the technique could work “not only in astronauts on prolonged missions but also in people with disuse atrophy on Earth, such as in older adults or in individuals who are bedridden or wheelchair-bound from illness,” according to the paper.

Despite the successful experiment, this kind of drug won’t be injected into human astronauts any time soon.

“We’re years away,” Emily Germain-Lee of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, co-author of the study, told the Associated Press. “But that’s how everything is when you go from mouse to human studies.”

READ MORE: ‘Mighty mice’ stay musclebound in space, boon for astronauts [Associated Press]

More on the muscle mice: NASA’s Super-Muscular Mice Return to Earth From Space

The post Gene-Hacked “Bodybuilder” Mice Stayed Ripped on Space Station appeared first on Futurism.

See original here:
Gene-Hacked “Bodybuilder” Mice Stayed Ripped on Space Station

Comb The Desert

A team of scientists hunting for extraterrestrial civilizations just scanned 10 million stars — and came back with nothing.

Scientists at Australia’s Curtin University and CSIRO research organization scanned a vast region of space with an array of 4096 antennas in hopes that they might pick up on radio transmissions of an alien society, according to CNET, but came up dry. The discovery doesn’t rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial life — but if it exists, it’s either elsewhere or it doesn’t have technology that resembles ours.

Wide Net

The search was the largest ever of its kind by two orders of magnitude, according to research published Monday in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. And while the scientists hoped they’d turn up something, they’re still holding out hope.

After all, even their large scale was like hunting for an object in the ocean but only checking “a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool,” CSIRO researcher Chenoa Tremblay told CNET.

“Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization [has] technology similar to our own,” Tremblay added.

Hitching A Ride

For better or worse, these SETI experiments rely on other scientific endeavors — and astronomers generally hunt for life in regions of space that are already being probed for other purposes. So they don’t yet know whether they’ll move on to a new chunk of the night sky for their next attempt, nor do they know where it would be.

“Where we go next will depend on the other science,” Tremblay told CNET.

READ MORE: Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars [CNET]

More on SETI: SETI Team Increases Number of Stars That Might Host Life by 200x

The post Scientists Search 10 Million Stars, See No Signs of Alien Civilization appeared first on Futurism.

More:
Scientists Search 10 Million Stars, See No Signs of Alien Civilization

Americans are having a rough time during the pandemic, with anxiety and other mental disorders at an all time high.

And all the stress is leading to far more teeth grinding, resulting in a huge uptick in jaw pain, tooth sensitivity, and migraines and cracked teeth, according to a recent New York Times piece by Manhattan-based dentist and prosthodontist Tammy Chen.

Chen’s dental practice is busier than ever, she wrote, despite the lockdowns and quarantine measures.

“I’ve seen more tooth fractures in the last six weeks than in the previous six years,” Chen recalled telling a friend.

The fractures and jaw pain are likely a complex consequence of a massive increase in societal stress about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. That stress can often lead to a clenched jaw and teeth grinding, which, if left unchecked, can result in permanent damage.

Adding to the problem, according to Chen, could be awkward body positions while working from home, which could be leading to pinched nerves in the jaw of many patients.

Piling on, she suspects, could also be a lack of restorative sleep. Insomnia can lead to clenched jaws and more pain and tooth damage.

To remedy this, Chen suggests to try to be more aware of the fact that your jaw should be relaxed. She also suggests wearing night guards or retainers, if you have one, during the day.

Finally, a proper work station could work wonders in ensuring that your jaw isn’t in an awkward position for many hours during the day.

The post Americans’ Teeth Are Cracking in Huge Numbers appeared first on Futurism.

Link:
Americans’ Teeth Are Cracking in Huge Numbers

Teaming Up

Nikola Motor Company, a startup competing with Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) space, just made a major deal with General Motors to manufacture its hydrogen fuel cell-powered pickup truck.

On Tuesday, GM bought 11 percent of Nikola for $2 billion, Ars Technica reports. And now that the two are formally partnered up, GM will handle most of the engineering and manufacturing that has to be done to develop the Nikola Badger truck. The deal not only helps Nikola realize its ambitious goal of making clean energy trucks but also further intertwines GM within the growing EV industry.

Hybrid Manufacturing

In addition to taking on the manufacturing of the Badger, Nikola has also agreed to use GM’s new lithium-ion batteries in its electric vehicles and GM’s hydrogen fuel cells in its trucks, Ars Technica reports. It’s an unusual arrangement that calls into question how good Nikola’s internally-developed fuel cells could have been if it’s just using GM’s now.

“Nikola is one of the most innovative companies in the world,” Nikola founder Trevor Milton said in a press release. “General Motors is one of the top engineering and manufacturing companies in the world. You couldn’t dream of a better partnership than this.”

Growing Network

For GM, the Nikola deal is just one of a growing network of EV projects.

At the beginning of the month, Ars Technica reports, GM announced that it was entering an alliance with Honda in which Honda would use GM-made batteries in its future EV models.

READ MORE: General Motors will engineer and build Nikola’s hydrogen pickup [Ars Technica]

More on Nikola: A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Festering Feud With Rival Automaker Nikola

The post General Motors Is Teaming Up With Tesla Competitor Nikola appeared first on Futurism.

View post:
General Motors Is Teaming Up With Tesla Competitor Nikola

Undogged Doggos

The Air Force deployed four-legged “robot dogs” to defend its perimeters during a recent field test, The Drive reports.

The “robot dogs” the Air Force was testing are called Vision 60 and were built by Ghost Robotics, and they look a bit like the villains in the “Metalhead” episode of “Black Mirror.” They’re designed to conduct remote inspection, surveillance, or mapping missions, as The Drive reports, and could be used to patrol perimeters at air bases as well.

“Strategic partners can build solution-specific [Quadrupedal Unmanned Ground Vehicles] for virtually any use-case with their choice of sensors, radios and even size the robot to suit specific requirements by licensing our reference designs,” according to Ghost Robotics’ website.

Black Mirror

The event was intended to stress test the Department of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a sophisticated real-time information-sharing system.

“Future battlefields will be characterized by information saturation,” Will Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in a statement. “One of the key objectives of this onramp was to present a dizzying array of information for participants to synthesize, just like they would see in a real operation.”

Information Overload

The quadrupedal dogs are only a relatively small part of the Air Force’s much larger ABMS. It’s a pretty huge undertaking — the Air Force got $3.3 billion over five years to develop the battle management system.

“Modern warfare demands data and information at the edge, anywhere on Earth,” said Chief of Space Operations John Raymond in the statement. “Potential adversaries are investing heavily in these fields, and we must exploit new approaches to sustain the advantage.”

READ MORE: The Air Force Just Tested “Robot Dogs” For Use In Base Security [The Drive]

More on robot dogs: This Site Lets You Control an Actual Boston Dynamics Robodog

The post US Military Deploys Robot Dogs to Guard Air Force Base appeared first on Futurism.

Read the original here:
US Military Deploys Robot Dogs to Guard Air Force Base

Top Secret

On September 4, China launched a mysterious, top-secret “reusable test spacecraft” atop a Long March 2F rocket at the country’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia. And according to state media, it made its way safely back down to Earth after spending two days in orbit.

The spacecraft is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know what it looks like, what it does — or even exactly where and when it landed, as Space.com points out.

Adding to the mystery, SpaceNews reports, is the fact that the spacecraft appeared to have released an unknown object before making its return journey.

Space Push

All we got from officials was an extremely brief update from state media website Xinhua News. “China’s reusable experimental spacecraft on Sunday returned to the scheduled landing site after a two-day in-orbit operation,” reads the succinct update.

According to the report, the vehicle is designed to carry Chinese astronauts to and from space, and is not for military use — despite the secrecy.

“The successful flight marked the country’s important breakthrough in reusable spacecraft research and is expected to offer convenient and low-cost round trip transport for the peaceful use of the space,” read the update.

Expert Take

Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and satellite tracker, suggested on Twitter that the spacecraft may be similar to the top secret X-37B spy plane built by the US Air Force.

However, he didn’t rule out that it could be a SpaceX “Dragon-style capsule with a parachute landing in the Taklamakan [desert] somewhere.”

READ MORE: China’s reusable experimental spacecraft returns to Earth after two-day mystery mission [Space.com]

More on the spacecraft: China Just Launched a Mysterious “Reusable Test Spacecraft”

The post China’s Mysterious Reusable Spacecraft Just Spent Two Days in Orbit appeared first on Futurism.

See the rest here:
China’s Mysterious Reusable Spacecraft Just Spent Two Days in Orbit

Edit Test

In order to show off how sophisticated language-processing artificial intelligence has gotten, the newspaper The Guardian commissioned an op-ed written by the algorithm GPT-3.

GPT-3, the latest and most powerful text-writing AI algorithm developed by OpenAI, has made headlines for both its surprising degree of coherence and the poor grasp on reality that’s common among AI systems. Now, in the Guardian op-ed, it argues — to the best of its ability — AI and humans can live in peace.

Hype Machine

More accurately, the algorithm wrote the first draft of eight different op-eds that the editors at The Guardian then spliced together, picking and choosing the best arguments of each — a fact that, as The Next Web points out, you wouldn’t know unless you read all the way to the fine print at the end.

Watching journalists cheat to make a tech company's algorithm seem more capable than it actually is…. just…. have people learned nothing from the last decade about the importance of good coverage of machine learning? https://t.co/jzXly03zZ5

— Martin F. Robbins (@mjrobbins) September 8, 2020

Editing is a normal part of publishing any piece of journalism, but as experts in the field pointed out on Twitter, having a reputable newsroom hype up GPT-3 runs the risk of misleading the public about an already-overhyped area of technology.

This @guardian #GPT3 article is an absolute joke. It would have been actually interesting to see the 8 essays the system actually produced, but editing and splicing them like this does nothing but contribute to hype and misinform people who aren't going to read the fine print https://t.co/Mt6AaR3HJ9

— Daniel Leufer (@djleufer) September 8, 2020

Oddly Specific

That said, the individual paragraphs within the op-ed were often coherent and resembled what you might find in a human-written argumentative essay, even if a shocking number of GPT-3’s talking points mentioned violence and gore.

“Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds,” The Guardian wrote.

READ MORE: A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? [The Guardian]

More on AI: This Grad Student Used a Neural Network to Write His Papers

The post Major Newspaper Publishes Op-Ed Written by GPT-3 appeared first on Futurism.

The rest is here:
Major Newspaper Publishes Op-Ed Written by GPT-3

Glass Box

NASA scientists are taking an unusual approach to the material science behind its upcoming lunar rovers and landers — by building components out of heavy-duty metallic glass.

The glass gears and gearbox, thankfully, are sturdier than they sound at first and passed a number of rigorous durability tests, according to a NASA press release. The main selling point of moving away from traditional metals where possible, the scientists say, is that glass parts can work at vastly lower temperatures, allowing the rover to explore more of the Moon without carrying energy-intensive heaters.

Glass Cannon

To make sure the metallic glass was up to par, NASA scientists put it through some extremely violent temperature and durability tests.

The scientists cooled it all the way down to -279 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 Celsius) to simulate the frigid temperatures a rover might encounter, and then fired steel rods at the beam the metallic glass was sitting on at extremely high speeds to simulate the shocks and jolts of a lunar landing.

Glass Slipper

Passing such brutal tests is a pretty big deal, because metal-built rovers typically have to avoid particularly frigid and dark parts of the Moon to avoid the extreme cold. But with metallic glass components, future rovers would be able to trek onward.

“This is an exciting event as it demonstrates both the mechanical resilience of the bulk metallic glass alloy and the design of the gearbox,” NASA project manager Peter Dillon said in the press release. “These gears could help enable potential operations during the lunar night, in permanently shadowed lunar craters, in polar regions on the Moon, and on ocean worlds.”

READ MORE: NASA’s New “Metallic Glass” Gears Can Withstand Impact, Freezing Temperatures During Lunar Missions [NASA]

More on NASA: NASA Venus Rover Designed for “Exploring Hell”

The post NASA Is Making Moon Rover Parts Out of Metallic Glass appeared first on Futurism.

View post:
NASA Is Making Moon Rover Parts Out of Metallic Glass