Some Countries could meet their Total Electricity Needs from Floating Solar Panels

Floating solar photovoltaic panels could supply all the electricity needs of some countries, new research has shown.

The study, by researchers from Bangor and Lancaster Universities and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, aimed to calculate the global potential for deploying low-carbon floating solar arrays. The researchers calculated the daily electrical output for floating photovoltaics (FPV) on nearly 68,000 lakes and reservoirs around the world, using available climate data for each location.

The researchers’ calculations included lakes and reservoirs where floating solar technology is most likely to be installed. They were no more than 10km from a population centre, not in a protected area, didn’t dry up and didn’t freeze for more than six months each year...

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Swarm Satellites Help Aurora Chasers Discover Steve’s Long-Lost Twin

Steve’s twin captured by an all-sky digital camera
Steve’s twin captured by an all-sky digital camera

Ever since aurora chasers discovered Steve, a mysterious ribbon of purple light in the night sky, scientists have wondered whether it might have a secret twin. Now, thanks to a photographer’s keen eye, and data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, we may have found it.

Steve was a sensation when scientists stumbled across it a few years ago, thanks to the eagle eyes and excellent photography of the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group.

But its mauve hue and fleeting appearance meant it couldn’t be a feature of the aurora borealis, commonly known as the northern lights, which comes in shades of green, blue and red and can last for hours. So, what could it be?

Fortunately, ESA’s trio of magnetic-field monitoring Swarm satellites were...

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Researchers discover ‘Trojan Horse’ Virus Hiding in Human Parasite

Apocryptovirus odysseus (Ao) genome. From (rnaspades 3.15.5) assembly of the Ngô RNA sequencing dataset (SRR1205923), we recovered a high-coverage (123× coverage) RdRp-encoding contig, and identified a second correlated contig of likely viral origin. Contig 2 (279× coverage) contains two putative ORFs: pORF1 and pORF2, but these ORFs do not have identifiable homologs via BLASTp in the non-redundant and transcriptome shotgun assembly databases (date accessed: June 2023), TBLASTN with the nucleotide database, or by InterProScan or HHpred (date accessed: June 2023). Inlay, unbranched assembly graphs (Bandage 0.8.1) of both contigs confirmed a linear genome structure.
Apocryptovirus odysseus (Ao) genome. From (RNASPADES 3.15.5) assembly of the Ngô RNA sequencing dataset (SRR1205923), we recovered a high-coverage (123× coverage) RdRp-encoding contig, and identified a second correlated contig of likely viral origin. Contig 2 (279× coverage) contains two putative ORFs: pORF1 and pORF2, but these ORFs do not have identifiable homologs via BLASTp in the non-redundant and transcriptome shotgun assembly databases (date accessed: June 2023), TBLASTN with the nucleotide database, or by InterProScan or HHpred (date accessed: June 2023). Inlay, unbranched assembly graphs (Bandage 0.8.1) of both contigs confirmed a linear genome structure.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has found a new RNA virus that they believe is h...

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A Technique for more Effective Multipurpose Robots

Four photos show, on top level, a simulation of a robot hand using a spatula, knife, hammer and wrench. The second row shows a real robot hand performing the tasks, and the bottom row shows a human hand performing the tasks.
Caption: Three different data domains — simulation (top), robot tele-operation (middle) and human demos (bottom) — allow a robot to learn to use different tools.
Credits:Image: Courtesy of the researchers

With generative AI models, researchers combined robotics data from different sources to help robots learn better. MIT researchers developed a technique to combine robotics training data across domains, modalities, and tasks using generative AI models. They create a combined strategy from several different datasets that enables a robot to learn to perform new tasks in unseen environments.

Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver...

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