The BepiColombo spacecraft – a joint project by the European and Japanese space agencies – swung by its destination planet Mercury in the early hours of October 2 2021. Passing within just 200km of the surface of Mercury, it sent back some spectacular pictures.

For those of us who have worked for a decade or more on this mission, there could hardly be a way better to celebrate what would have been the 101st birthday of the mission’s namesake, Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe Colombo. His groundbreaking work in this area earned him the title of the grandfather of the planetary fly-by technique, now more often termed a “swing-by”.

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Radical Chemistry Discovery That Reinvented Catalysts Wins Nobel Prize

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This Unusual Plant From The Amazon Rainforest Has Baffled Scientists For 50 Years

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#earth New satellite images have revealed a stunning pattern of concentric cloud rings, resembling a bull's-eye, that was formed by the continued eruption of the volcano on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands.

Normally, a volcano's eruption plume rises straight up into the stratosphere forming a towering column.

But here hot air of Saharan Air Layer forced the plume to move horizontally. The concentric rings formed because of the natural ebbs and flows in the intensity of volcanic activity.

On the next gif you can see the timelapse of their formation from the ground.

The official name for this type of concentric cloud formation is a gravity wave. However, the formation has nothing to do with gravity.

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#earth Time-lapse of the concentric cloud formation above the erupting volcano on La Palma from the ground.

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The Universe May Have Never Begun, Physicists Say

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Poster of 42 asteroids in our Solar System and their orbits (black background - full size image)

This poster shows 42 of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter (orbits not to scale). The images in the outermost circle of this infographic have been captured with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The asteroid sample features 39 objects larger than 100 kilometres in diameter, including 20 larger than 200 kilometres. The poster highlights a few of the objects, including Ceres (the largest asteroid in the belt), Urania (the smallest one imaged), Kalliope (the densest imaged) and Lutetia, which was visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission.

NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough shared a photo from ISS.

"I caught this aurora just as orbital sunrise was beginning. Breathtaking!"

Source: twitter/astro_kimbrough

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A Worm Driving a Car!

Imitating the nematode’s nervous system to process information efficiently.

A worm Brain-inspired Intelligent System Drives a Car Using Only 19 Control Neurons!

This new intelligent system is more robust, more interpretable, and faster to train than current deep neural network architectures with millions of parameters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-020-00237-3

The best images in science September 2021: Big John the dinosaur, a happy Neanderthal and others.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/science-best-photos/

Anti-aging drug acts as a "smart bomb" to take out dysfunctional cells

A new anti-aging breakthrough could clear out senescent cells with great.

Back in 2015 we saw a new class of drugs emerge with huge potential when it comes to the aging process and how it might be slowed. Scientists working to improve the potency and safety of these so-called senolytic drugs have made a significant discovery, pioneering an antibody treatment that closes in on the target cells with a new level of precision, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

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Physicists Shattered The Record For Coldest Temperature Ever Achieved in a Lab

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Breastfeeding Can Be Tough, But This Simple Idea Can Help New Moms Stick With It

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Facebook announced Ego4D, a long-term project aimed at solving AI research challenges in “egocentric perception,” or first-person views. The goal is to teach AI systems to comprehend and interact with the world like humans do as opposed to in the third-person, omniscient way that most AI currently does.
It’s Facebook’s assertion that AI that understands the world from first-person could enable previously impossible augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. But computer vision models, which would form the basis of this AI, have historically learned from millions of photos and videos captured in third-person. Next-generation AI systems might need to learn from a different kind of data — videos that show the world from the center of the action — to achieve truly egocentric perception, Facebook says.

Scientists uncovered a previously unknown repair mechanism of muscles that kicks in within 5 hours after the exercise. The control centers of muscle cells — called nuclei — scoot toward these tiny injuries to help patch them up.

In this study scientists studied muscle fibers (thin elongated tubular cells of skeletal muscles) of mice and people.

In the future, medical treatments could potentially be devised to target the molecular pathways that allow the nuclei to migrate and start this repair process.

Photo: Nuclei (purple) in a muscle cell migrate toward the site of an injury to help repair the tear. (Image credit: William Roman)

Study: Science, DOI:10.1126/science.abm2240
Source: Live Science.

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> Easter Island
> 🌟Moai Head under the stars !

Author: photographer and digital editor Samir Belhamra (aka grafixart_photo on Instagram).

Photo was made on 10 June 2018.

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When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will disrupt most forms of wireless communications, rendering software all but useless. From a technology perspective, not all that much has really changed today when it comes to how people respond to blazes.

Qwake Technologies, a startup based in San Francisco, is looking to upgrade the firefighting game with a hardware augmented reality headset named C-THRU. Worn by responders, the device scans surrounding and uploads key environmental data to the cloud, allowing all responders and incident commanders to have one common operating picture of their situation. The goal is to improve situational awareness and increase the effectiveness of firefighters, all while minimizing potential injuries and casualties.
Techcrunch

Many people suffer from sleep deprivation for months, or even years. But it doesn’t have to be like that. If you have trouble falling asleep or waking up in the morning, you may well be sleeping badly. That needs to change. But the trick isn’t to sleep more; the trick is to sleep better. Luckily, we have scientifically proven methods that can help. And now, you can learn them all without ever leaving Telegram.

Sleepy the Telegram bot was created to help people get a good night’s sleep. Of the 8,000 users who have already tried Sleepy, 93% experienced better sleep during the first few weeks and 24% reported a radical improvement. If you need more convincing, Sleepy’s developers have reviewed over 200 studies relating to sleep and always share links to their sources. That way, you can verify every fact for yourself.

Here’s the clincher: over the 30-day course, Sleepy takes you on a quest to help you form sleep-promoting habits. And all it takes is 15 minutes each night before bedtime.

Try it: @sleepy_coach_bot

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A Physicist Quantified The Amount of Information in The Entire Observable Universe

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DeepMind made a new discovery. Scientists got one step closer to recovering from genetic diseases.

Here is how our body produces needed proteins: in order for the hereditary information from a gene to turn into a protein, DNA changes its "letters" (nitrogenous bases). But sometimes the "letters" change incorrectly and that leads to serious health problems of the individual. For example, Down syndrome.

Researchers at DeepMind have created the Enformer algorithm that very accurately predicts what particular changes in DNA "letters" lead to diseases.

The tool helps scientists look for patterns in the genome and put forward new hypotheses, and also distinguishes which assumptions are true and which are false. The Enformer is much more accurate in predicting than previous models. Later, thanks to this data, scientists will be able to accurately regulate changes in DNA in order to treat genetic diseases.

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What Happens if 4 Electrons Join Up? A Brand New State of Matter Says a Recent Study

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