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Amazon will deliver at-home COVID-19 test kits in Seattle trial
Amazon is playing a direct role in COVID-19 relief beyond shipping essentials to people sheltering at home. Amazon Care, the division providing healthcare to company staff, is partnering with the Gates Foundation-backed Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network to deliver and pick up at-home COVID-19 testing kits as part of a trial. The number of kits will be limited, but should help widen testing for the virus without relying on conventional mail and courier deliveries.
400,000 new people have joined Folding@Home's fight against COVID-19
The Folding@Home community has turned its attention toward the fight against COVID-19, and it now has massive computational power at its disposal as a result. The distributed computing project is now working with about 470 petaflops of output in its quest to fold proteins, or enough to eclipse the world's top seven supercomputers combined. That's more than twice the 149 petaflops of sustained output from the record-setting Summit supercomputer -- helped in part by the Summit team joining the project over two weeks ago. There's been a roughly 1,200 percent increase in contributors, Folding@Home said, with 400,000 new members in the past two weeks.
SpaceX Crew Dragon's Demo-2 test flight is still scheduled for May
SpaceX and NASA are pushing through with Crew Dragon's first manned flight in May. They're gearing up for a mid-to-late May launch, so it'll happen a bit later than the original May 7th target date. However, it doesn't sound like they're expecting the coronavirus outbreak to cause a huge delay. The historic flight will launch humans to space from US soil for the first time since the final space shuttle mission on July 8th, 2011. NASA has been buying seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to take its astronauts to the ISS since then.
SpaceX aborts Falcon 9 launch with rare 'Liftoff! Disregard' sequence
With both computers and human controllers cautiously watching every single rocket function, it's not unusual for SpaceX to abort a launch. However, yesterday a Falcon 9 rocket was stopped at literally the last second, confusing even the countdown commentator. As the clock hit zero, the operator enthusiastically shouted "Liftoff!" but quickly added "Disregard. We have an abort" once it was clear the rocket wasn't getting airborne.
NASA warns Moon base plans might slip by a year
NASA's dreams of returning to the Moon with a permanent presence might have been overly ambitious. The agency's human exploration lead, Doug Loverro, has warned that plans for the lunar Gateway could be set back by a year or more as NASA reworks its design and intended uses. Earlier in the week, he also told an advisory committee that costs and technical challenges would force NASA to revise and streamline its objectives for the Moon.
Recommended Reading: Dead Sea Scroll fragments in DC are fakes
Exclusive: 'Dead Sea Scrolls' at the Museum of the Bible are all forgeries Michael Greshko National Geographic When the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington, DC in 2017, it funded a research project that examined pieces of what was thought to be Dead Sea Scroll fragments. In 2018, the museum announced that all five sections under review were most likely forged. After a more thorough physical and chemical investigation that began in 2019, researchers have filed a 200-page report with the findings: "These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive."
The ExoMars rover mission has been postponed until 2022 for further testing
The ExoMars mission to carry a rover to the red planet will not launch this year as planned, according to the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia's Roscosmos. The agencies announced that several components of the spacecraft, particularly the parachutes, still need testing. That means they'll miss the planned 2020 launch window and will need to wait for the next opportunity happening sometime between August and October 2022.
Tracking down unexpected sources of light pollution
Light pollution is the bane of stargazers, which is why you need to get out of the city to make the best use of your telescope. However, even in the middle of nowhere, your observations might still be disrupted by stray light sources. That prompted a budding astronomer, Alex Altair, to investigate exactly what was producing US light pollution in places with nary a city or town in sight.
Blue Origin shows off the engine and nose cone of its reusable rocket
In late 2018, the US Air Force awarded Blue Origin $500 million to build the New Glenn rocket with a reusable first stage and performance similar to SpaceX's Falcon Heavy. We haven't heard a lot since then, but Jeff Bezos' company has just shared a couple of updates on development, showing the immense scale of the new rocket and how the upper stage engines work.
SpaceX launches its original Dragon capsule for the last time
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft made history in 2012 by becoming the first ever commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS. Last night, the space company sent the first-gen Dragon on its 20th resupply and its last mission ever -- starting in October, SpaceX will use the upgraded Dragon 2 capsule for it ISS trips. That's not even the only reason this mission is far from your typical resupply run. SpaceX also pulled off its 50th rocket booster landing when the Falcon 9 it used for the flight touched down at its Cape Canaveral facility.
Robot learns to set the dinner table by watching humans
To date, teaching a robot to perform a task has usually involved either direct coding, trial-and-error tests or handholding the machine. Soon, though, you might just have to perform that task like you would any other day. MIT scientists have developed a system, Planning with Uncertain Specifications (PUnS), that helps bots learn complicated tasks when they'd otherwise stumble, such as setting the dinner table. Instead of the usual method where the robot receives rewards for performing the right actions, PUnS has the bot hold "beliefs" over a variety of specifications and use a language (linear temporal logic) that lets it reason about what it has to do right now and in the future.
The company behind the robotic arms that help us explore Mars
Despite best efforts, we're still decades if not generations away from regularly living and working off-planet -- whether that's in LEO habitation rings, moon bases, or on the Martian surface. Until humans can colonize space ourselves, we must rely on robotic orbitals, landers and rovers to physically interact with the galaxy around us. As Lucy Condakchian, General Manager of Robotics at Maxar, noted to an assembled audience at TechCrunch Sessions on Tuesday, actually touching the stars is still no easy feat.
‘Cosmos: Possible Worlds’ finds hope for humanity in a hopeless era
In a time where it's easy to feel a bit concerned about the fate of civilization -- take your pick of calamities, really -- National Geographic's Cosmos is like a hope-filled salve. Developed by Ann Druyan, the co-creator of the original show together with her husband Carl Sagan, and hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: Possible Worlds is an exploration of humanity, our past, present and our potential future. The 1980 series redefined how complex topics could be communicated on TV. And with Possible Worlds, Druyan and her co-writer, Star Trek alum Brannon Braga, recapture that magic. But, it's delivered with a new sense of urgency for our turbulent era, which is fueled by climate change and political instability.
Lettuce grown on the ISS is as nutritious as Earth harvests, scientists find
The red romaine lettuce astronauts grew on the ISS a few years ago aren't just as good as Earth-grown lettuce, they're also as nutritious. NASA's Gioia Massa, Christina Khodadad and their colleagues examined and analyzed three batches of lettuce grown on the space station between 2014 and 2016. They compared it to lettuce that they grew here at home under similar conditions -- in the same relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration and temperature, among other things -- and determined that the level of nutrients between them is very similar.
SpaceX will fly space tourists to the ISS as soon as next year
Houston-based private space company Axiom has forged a partnership with SpaceX to fly paying tourists to the ISS as soon as the second half of 2021. Under the terms of their deal, SpaceX will use the Crew Dragon capsule to ferry three tourists and an Axiom staff member, who'll make sure they don't interfere with the NASA crew members doing their job, to the orbiting lab. It's worth noting that Axiom was the company NASA chose to build the space station's first commercial destination module.
The next Mars rover will be named 'Perseverance'
During a live webcast on Wednesday, NASA administrators unveiled the official name of the upcoming Mars 2020 Rover mission. Say hello to Perseverance.
Explore Mars with a 1.8-billion-pixel panorama from the Curiosity rover
NASA's Curiosity rover has sent the highest-resolution panorama of Mars ever taken back to Earth. Now, you can explore the Martian surface by zooming in on the giant 2GB image or cruising around in a 360-degree video that NASA shared on YouTube.
Waymo’s fifth-generation Driver can peek around blind spots
Today, Waymo unveiled its fifth-generation Waymo Driver, the combination of hardware and software that guides its autonomous vehicles. According to the company, the new tech can spot a car door opening a city block away, give trucks the ability to see debris hundreds of meters ahead on the highway, help vehicles "peek" around blind spots and more.
SETI@Home ends its crowdsourced search for alien life after 21 years
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is a series of projects that scrub the background noise of the universe to look for alien life. One of the most famous ventures under the name was SETI@Home, in which members of the public were encouraged to donate their idle computing time to the venture. After 21 years, however, UC Berkeley has announced that the project will stop on March 31st.
The Morning After: NASA is taking applications for new astronauts
Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. SXSW 2020 has not been canceled and will start as planned in just a couple of weeks. However, the show will lack some social media muscle due to the absence of Facebook and 2007 SXSW darling, Twitter. Both companies announced they will not attend the festival because of concerns related to coronavirus. As you read this, automakers are doing online-only reveals of vehicles they planned to present at the Geneva Motor Show, while Microsoft and Google events (MVP Summit and Google Cloud Next) are also going virtual. I wasn't headed to Austin either way, but at this point, every event from now until the Detroit Auto Show this summer looks questionable, at best. -- Richard