Over the years, we have been making good progress in tapping underground spaces, from utility lines to rail lines and roads, to meet the many and growing needs of our urban environment. There are also extensive underground pedestrian links in areas like Marina Bay, which enhance connectivity and allow people to walk in comfort.

As evident in many urban cities, the use of underground space has largely been developed on a first-come-first-served basis. Over time, this hinders further expansion and optimal use of underground space.

By planning and safeguarding the space upfront and with the help of technology, we can unlock the potential of underground space and make better use of it. …

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an “intense and violent process.” This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called “disk instability.”

Direct images of protoplanets embedded in disks around infant stars provide the key to understanding the formation of gas giant planets such as Jupiter. Using the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers just found evidence for a Jovian protoplanet around AB Aurigae orbiting at a wide projected separation (~93 au), probably responsible for multiple planet-induced features in the disk. Its emission is reproducible as reprocessed radiation from an embedded protoplanet. They also identified two structures located at 430–580 au that are candidate sites of planet formation.

These data reveal planet formation in the embedded phase and a protoplanet discovery at wide, >50 au separations characteristic of most imaged exoplanets. With at least one clump-like protoplanet and multiple spiral arms, the AB Aur system may also provide the evidence for a long-considered alternative to the canonical model for Jupiter’s formation, namely disk (gravitational) instability.

“Most people know that blockchain is the official technology for digital currencies. However, few people or industry experts know that blockchain technology is empowering various enterprises and industries… One of the enterprises empowered by blockchain technology is online learning.”

“Most people know that blockchain is the official technology for digital currencies. However, few people or industry experts know that blockchain technology is empowering various enterprises and industries… One of the enterprises empowered by blockchain technology is online learning.”

If we ever encounter intelligent life beyond Earth, the first question we are most likely to ask is “How can we effectively communicate?” As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message — humanity’s first attempt to send out a message capable of being understood by extraterrestrials — the question feels more urgent than ever. Advances in remote sensing technologies have revealed that the vast majority of stars in our galaxy has planets and that many of these exoplanets appear capable of hosting liquid water on their surface—a prerequisite for life as we know it. The odds that at least one of these billions of planets has produced intelligent life seem favorable enough to spend some time figuring out how to say “hello.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says we’ll eventually work all day in virtual reality. I think he’s wrong; here’s why….

Read the full article at: www.computerworld.com

Robotics News

This is the future of robots! Every year they are getting more and more sophisticated. Right now, this is the most realistic robot in the world. It can hold conversations with you using Artificial Intelligence, and even remark on the world around it.

Credit Supercar Blondie

Daniel Rothman says carbon in the atmosphere may push our seas past a tipping point, triggering a cascading catastrophe for global ecosystems that we do not yet fully understand.

Earth’s skin already bears the scars of the climate crisis. Fires ravage forests, hurricanes swamp coastlines, floods drown city blocks and entire species disappear. But beneath the surface layer, in the planet’s rocks, lies evidence of past catastrophes much more severe. Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes we may be creeping toward a calamity for Earth’s life system as a whole — the planet’s sixth mass extinction event.

The staggering amount of carbon humans are pumping into the atmosphere and the oceans may soon cross a threshold that will disorder the planet’s carbon cycle and cause a cascade of disruptions we cannot fully envision, Rothman said.

What we do know is that such disruptions in the past have coincided with a series of mass extinctions in the 540 million years since life became abundant on the planet. And while the climate crisis is usually framed in terms of years, decades, or the next century, mass extinctions play out over thousands of years.

“Every time there has been a major event in the history of life, there has also been a major perturbation of the environment. These things tend to come together,” he said. These disruptions are associated with the carbon cycle, or the exchange of carbon in the environment, “and we know that by traces that are left in the carbon chemistry of old rocks. The average person doesn’t really think about such long time scales, of course they don’t, but that’s also geology’s gift to the world,” Rothman said.