NASA’s Perseverance rover captures a geologic feature with details that offer clues to the area’s mysterious past.
Ask any space explorer, and they’ll have a favorite photograph or two from their mission.
For Jorge Núñez, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist working on the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover, one of his current favorites is a rover’s-eye panorama of the “South Séítah” region of Mars’ Jezero Crater.
Exploring the geologic unit was among the major objectives of the team’s first science campaign because it may contain some of the deepest, and potentially oldest, rocks in the giant crater.
“Just like any excited tourist approaching the end of a major road trip, we stopped at a lookout to get a first view of our destination,” said Núñez, who is based at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
“This panorama is spectacular because you feel like you are there. It shows not only the incredible scale of the area, but also all the exploration possibilities South Séítah has to offer. With multiple intriguing rocky outcrops and ridgelines, each one is seemingly better than the last. If it’s not a field geologist’s dream, it’s pretty close.”
Composed of 84 individual enhanced-color images that were later stitched together, the mosaic was taken on September 12 (the 201st Martian day, or sol, of the mission) by the Mastcam-Z camera system as the rover was parked on an elevated overlook just outside its entry point into South Séítah.
Perseverance had just completed a record 190-yard (175-meter) drive the previous sol. READ MORE...
Italian flight attendants stripped down to their underwear to protest job losses and pay cuts.
Around 50 former female Alitalia flight attendants stripped down to their underwear at the Campidoglio in Rome, CNN reported.
The flight attendants decided to remove their clothing after showing up in their Alitalia uniforms, chanting "We are Alitalia” while undressing.
The news comes after Alitalia ceased its operations, and ITA Airways took its place as the national carrier in Italy. However, not everyone from Alitalia was able get a job with the new airline.
Only 2,600 of the 10,500 Alitalia employees have received a job from ITA Airways.
One new ITA Airways attendant told CNN that those who did get a job with the new airline have seen their seniority drop, received a pay cut and are not told far enough in advance when they will work.
ITA President Alfredo Altavilla said all the employees agreed on the terms of their contracts and the threats of a strike are "a thing of national shame."
ITA Airways will retain half of Alitalia’s planes but will also add new airbuses to the national carrier, according to Reuters.
It will still be a few months until ITA Airways is fully phased in while Alitalia ends its operations. Passengers have not been affected by the change in airlines.
What happens during a heart catheterization procedure?
In cardiac catheterization (often called cardiac cath), your doctor puts a very small, flexible, hollow tube (called a catheter) into a blood vessel in the groin, arm, or neck. Then he or she threads it through the blood vessel into the aorta and into the heart. Once the catheter is in place, several tests may be done.
AUTHOR's COMMENTS:
On Tursday of this week, I will be having this procedure at UT Medical Center - Heart and Lung Department... This is the second time that a procedure like this has been performed on me... the first time was at the same hospital and was performed in 2008 and the surgeon recommended a triple bypass, but instead I had 5 stents inserted into my heart arteries over a 12 month period of time with 3 surgeries.
It appears that my stents may no longer be working as they should since a recent stress test indicated an abnormal reading that pointed to my LAD... So, this procedure is to take a closer look at the problem...
My surgery is scheduled at 7:00 am so I have to arrive at 5:30 am which means I have to leave the house at 4:30 am and that means I must get up and shower at 4:00 am... this should not be a problem for me as I am always waking up during the night at various times to urinate.
Hopefully, I will be released and on my way home by noon or earlier of that same day...
The proposed giant tunnel is hundred of light years wide, making it big enough to encompass Earth, our solar system, and even nearby stars. (Image credit: Eduard Muzhevskyi via Getty Images)
Our planet, along with the rest of the solar system and some nearby stars, may be trapped inside a giant magnetic tunnel — and astronomers don't know why.
A tube of vast magnetized tendrils, 1,000 light-years long and invisible to the naked eye, may encircle the solar system, astronomers propose in a new paper.
Jennifer West, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, made the proposal after an investigation into the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region — two of the brightest radio-emitting gas structures in our galactic neighborhood — revealed that the two structures might be linked even though they are located on different sides of the sky.
"If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked — that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light," West said in a statement.
The curving tendrils — which are made of both charged particles and a magnetic field, and resemble long, thin ropes — project outward from the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region.
Not only could the strange cosmic ropes link the two regions, but they could form something akin to "a curving tunnel" where the tendrils are like "the lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane marker," the researchers said. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
US intelligence warns American firms to protect 5 key technologies from China
Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, bioscience, semiconductors, and autonomous systems are five critical tech areas, says US intelligence
American firms and researchers need to pay more attention to protect research against threats from nation-states acquiring American know-how, officials add
A robotic shark is seen at a cloud computing and artificial intelligence conference, in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province on October 19. Photo: AFP
US intelligence officials issued a warning to American technology firms against working with China in five crucial areas.
Border agents kept the robot artist Ai-Da in custody for 10 days and debated removing her eyes, which have built-in cameras.Ai-Da the artist robot with her self-portraits. Photo by Lucy Seal, courtesy the Design Museum and Aidan Meller.The British artist Ai-Da was looking forward to the opening of her first show in Egypt, until security forces denied her entry into the country. The issue? Officials suspected she was part of an espionage plot—because, you see, Ai-Da is actually a robot.
Ai-Da was held by customs officials for 10 days before her release earlier today. Her work is set to appear in the first contemporary art show ever staged at the Great Pyramid of Giza, opening tomorrow. The extended detention led to something of a diplomatic crisis between Egypt and the U.K.
“The British ambassador has been working through the night to get Ai-Da released, but we’re right up to the wire now,” Aidan Meller, an Oxford art dealer who is both Ai-Da’s creator and representative, told the Guardian before she was cleared by customs. “It’s really stressful.”
Ai-Da’s creators have billed her as the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. But her high-tech capabilities raised the suspicions of border guards, who had concerns about her built-in modem as well as the cameras in her eyes, which Ai-Da uses to draw based on algorithmic responses to her observations. (She can also hold a conversation, thanks to a combination of human inputs and an AI language model.)
Ai-Da with Her Paintings. Photo by Victor Frankowski.
“Let’s be really clear about this. She is not a spy,” Meller said. “People fear robots, I understand that. But the whole situation is ironic, because the goal of Ai-Da was to highlight and warn of the abuse of technological development, and she’s being held because she is technology.” He added: “Ai-Da would appreciate that irony, I think.” TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST, CLICK HERE...
Restorative work reveals the designs painted on the stone-cut tombs' ceilings. (Image credit: Blaundos Archaeological Excavation Project Archive)
Archaeologists in Turkey have discovered 400 rock-cut chamber tombs that date to 1,800 years ago and make up part of one of the largest rock-cut chamber tomb necropolises in the world.
The team found the tombs in the ancient city of Blaundos (also spelled Blaundus), located about 110 miles (180 kilometers) east of the Aegean Sea in what is now Turkey. The city was founded during the time of Alexander the Great and existed through the Roman and Byzantine periods.
The tombs are filled with sarcophagi, many of which contain multiple deceased individuals — a clue that families used these tombs for burials over many generations, said Birol Can, an archaeologist at Uşak University in Turkey and head of the Blaundos Excavation Project.
"We think that the Blaundos rock-cut tomb chambers, in which there are many sarcophagi, were used as family tombs, and that the tombs were reopened for each deceased family member, and a burial ceremony was held and closed again," Can told Live Science in an email.
The city of Blaundos sits on a hill surrounded by a valley, which is actually a branch of the vast Uşak canyons, one of the longest canyon systems in the world, Can said. The people of Blaundos built the necropolis into the slopes of the canyon. "Due to the rocky nature of the slopes surrounding the city, the most preferred burial technique was the chamber-shaped tombs carved into the solid rocks," he said. READ MORE...
The injected green algae (green) sit inside the blood vessels (magenta) like a string of pearls. Credit: Özugur et al./iScience
Photosynthesizing algae injected into the blood vessels of tadpoles supply oxygen to their brains.
Leading a double life in water and on land, frogs have many breathing techniques – through the gills, lungs, and skin – over the course of their lifetime. Now German scientists have developed another method that allows tadpoles to “breathe” by introducing algae into their bloodstream to supply oxygen. The method developed, presented October 13 in the journal iScience, provided enough oxygen to effectively rescue neurons in the brains of oxygen-deprived tadpoles.
“The algae actually produced so much oxygen that they could bring the nerve cells back to life, if you will,” says senior author Hans Straka of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. “For many people, it sounds like science fiction, but after all, it’s just the right combination of biological schemes and biological principles.”
Straka was studying oxygen consumption in tadpole brains of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) when a lunch conversation with a botanist sparked an idea to combine plant physiology with neuroscience: harnessing the power of photosynthesis to supply nerve cells with oxygen. The idea didn’t seem far-fetched. In nature, algae live harmoniously in sponges, corals, and anemones, providing them with oxygen and even nutrients. Why not in vertebrates like frogs? READ MORE...
Airlines are constantly raising the bar when it comes to luxury and comfort for passengers, as airliners are flying farther than ever before.
An Airbus A350-1000 XWB aircraft. Andreas Zeitler/Shutterstock.com
But while passengers reap the benefit of glitzy lie-flat business-class seats and even couches in economy on some airlines, not all those onboard — namely flight attendants — get to enjoy the same opulence.
Touring Scandinavian Airlines' Airbus A350-900 XWB. Thomas Pallini/Insider
Hidden in the back of wide-body aircraft are the small compartments in which flight attendants spend their downtime. They're aptly named crew rest areas and are where flight attendants will go when they have a break from service or their other responsibilities.
The crew rest area on an Airbus A350-900 XWB aircraft. Thomas Pallini/Insider
The areas are off-limits to passengers, and even their entryways are discreetly embedded into an aircraft's architecture to help protect against unwanted visitors. READ MORE...
Ai-Da the artist robot with her self-portraits. Photo by Lucy Seal, courtesy the Design Museum and Aidan Meller.
