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    Why NASA is trying to Crash Land on Mars

    October 25, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This prototype base for SHIELD – a collapsible Mars lander that would enable a spacecraft to intentionally crash land on the Red Planet, absorbing the impact – was tested in a drop tower at JPL on Aug. 12 to replicate the impact it would encounter landing on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    NASA has successfully touched down on Mars nine times, relying on cutting-edge parachutes, massive airbags, and jetpacks to set spacecraft safely on the surface. Now engineers are testing whether or not the easiest way to get to the Martian surface is to crash.

    Rather than slow a spacecraft’s high-speed descent, an experimental lander design called SHIELD (Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device) would use an accordion-like, collapsible base that acts like the crumple zone of a car and abs...

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    Manipulating Stress Response in Cells could help Slow Down Aging

    October 21, 2022, Categories  Uncategorized

    Glucose extends lifespan in aged worms independently of the DAF-16
    (FOXO). Differentially regulated genes downstream of the insulin/insulin-like
    growth factor signalling (IIS) (a), daf-16 (b), hsf-1 independently (ind.) of heat shock
    (HS) (c, d) in animals fed on the normal diet (ND) or high-glucose diet (HGD) from
    5-day old (HGD-5). e Lifespan assays of daf-16(lof) animals fed on the ND or HGD-5
    (ND, n = 502; HGD-5, n = 536 including biological replicates). f, g Representative
    images of DAF-16::GFP localisation in 1- (D1) and 5-day old (D5) worms on 16 h ND,
    HGD (filled circles) or 1 h heat shock (filled circles) at 37 °C (n = 60 for each condition including biological replicates). Scale bars represent 100 μm (f) and 25 μm
    (g). Highlighted worms with dashed lines are WT animals...
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    New Computing Architecture: Deep Learning with Light

    October 21, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Artist’s rendering of a smart transceiver. The dark blue device has golden pathways and rectangles, which represent the wires that connect the smart transceiver chip to a circuit board. A light blue square covered with thin lines rises from the middle, to represent the smart transceiver chip. The thin lines represent an array of fibers that move light from lasers in and out of the chip.
    Caption:This rendering shows a novel piece of hardware, called a smart transceiver, that uses technology known as silicon photonics to dramatically accelerate one of the most memory-intensive steps of running a machine-learning model. This can enable an edge device, like a smart home speaker, to perform computations with more than a hundred-fold improvement in energy efficiency.
    Credits:Image: Alex Sludds. Edited by MIT New

    A new method uses optics to accelerate machine-learning computations on smart speakers and other low-power connected devices. The technique may enable self-driving cars to make decisions in realtime while only using a fraction of the energy that is currently demanded by their power-hungry on-board computers.

    Ask a smart home device for the weather forecast, and it...

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    Method for Decoding Asteroid Interiors could help Aim Asteroid-Deflecting Missions

    October 21, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    3-D modeled illustration depicts the DART mission, and shows a boxy spacecraft with blue jets and solar panel wings approaching a bulky meteor.
    Caption:MIT astronomers have found a way to determine an asteroid’s interior structure based on how its spin changes during a close encounter with Earth. The tool may improve the aim of future asteroid-targeting missions like the recent DART mission.
    Credits:Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

    Astronomers have found a way to determine an asteroid’s interior structure based on how its spin changes during a close encounter with Earth. NASA hit a bullseye in late September with DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which flew a spacecraft straight at the heart of a nearby asteroid. The one-way kamikaze mission smashed into the stadium-sized space rock and successfully reset the asteroid’s orbit...

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