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Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt’s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. read more

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See the James Webb Space Telescope’s Dazzling New Photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Located 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, the galaxy got its unique wagon wheel-like shape from a cosmic collision
Several hundred million years ago, astronomers believe the Cartwheel Galaxy collided with another smaller read more

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A Chess Robot Broke a Kid’s Finger
And the child is being blamed for violating safety policies.

Chess isn’t typically a contact sport. At the Moscow Open earlier this month, however, a robot broke a seven-year-old player’s finger because he moved too suddenly for the robot’s liking.

The Guardian reports that a video of the July 19 incident, which the newspaper read more

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This Week’s New Space Images From The Webb Telescope And More Will Make Your Jaw Drop
Webb’s ‘Cosmic Cliffs’
A close-up of the Carina Nebula—a nursery 7,600 light-years distant—shows apparent ridges, valleys and pillars of hot dust and gas. Like all of Webb’s first targets it’s in the southern hemisphere’s night sky—that just happened to be where Webb was pointed during July 2022.

The read more

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Meet the world’s largest plant: A single seagrass clone stretches 180 km in Western Australia’s Shark Bay
Next time you go diving or snorkeling, have a close look at those wondrously long, bright green ribbons waving with the ebb and flow of water. They are seagrasses—marine plants which produce flowers, fruit, and seedlings annually, like their land-based relatives.

To read more

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Gif inventor Stephen Wilhite ‘helped shape the modern world’
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a gif is worth millions. The image file format has been a defining element of internet culture for decades, with glass-raising DiCaprios and mic-dropping Obamas facilitating self-expression in a faceless digital world. And we have one man to thank for all the jokes, snark read more

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Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices
When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds.

Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these read more

bigfin squid

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Man Who Found World’s Deepest-Dwelling Octopus and Jellyfish Scores 3-of-a-Kind, With Deepest-Dwelling Squid
There’s a dynamic duo of divers out there that can’t seem to keep to stop finding tentacled animals in the deepest of undersea zones, where pressure and temperature prohibit the vast majority of ocean life from surviving.

Whilst read more

Boyan Slat, CEO of The Ocean Cleanup

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A Dutch Teenager Had a Dream to Clean Up the World’s Oceans. 7 Years On, It’s Coming True
For someone who gets violently seasick, Boyan Slat spends a lot of time thinking about the ocean. The Dutch inventor has designed the world’s first ocean plastic cleanup system but admits he won’t be on the ship with it when it launches out of San Francisco on Saturday. read more

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected its first rock sample on Mars, marking an historic first step in a mission to return the sample to Earth later this decade.
Initially scientists couldn’t conclusively confirm whether the rover had gathered a sample due to poor sunlight conditions on the Red Planet. On read more

(quote) Elon Musk’s SpaceX lands Starship spacecraft in first full successful test flight The flight comes after NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop Starship to land astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally stuck the landing of one of its Starship spacecraft prototypes Wednesday, a key milestone in the test program and a dramatic statement coming just two weeks after NASA chose the vehicle to fly its astronauts to the surface of the moon. The Starship spacecraft, known as Serial Number 15 (SN15), lifted off from SpaceX’s launch site near the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, firing its three Raptor engines to an altitude of about 6 miles. It then turned itself sideways in a “belly flop” maneuver and headed back to Earth before righting itself, reigniting its engines and touching down softly. “The Starship has landed,” John Insprucker, SpaceX principal integration engineer, said during the live broadcast. The flight was the fifth high-altitude test of a Starship prototype, and the first that ended without the rocket destroyed. Musk’s company is developing Starship to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. The landing caps off a busy period for SpaceX that has seen the return of astronauts to Earth aboard a Crew Dragon and a milestone Starlink launch, not to mention Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live this week. Nailed it! Elon Musk’s SpaceX blasts its Starship SN15 rocket six miles into the sky before returning it safely to the pad – a month after the last prototype exploded after landing The Elon Musk-owned company launched SN15 around 6:24pm ET on Wednesday, following a day of delays and anticipation, from its testing facility in Boca Chica, Texas. SN15 ignited its three massive Raptor Engines that released out streams of white smoke from the base before fire blew out to shoot the rocket into the air. The prototype climbed through the sky until it reached six miles, hovered for a moment and then performed the infamous sideways flip, dubbed a ‘belly flop’ maneuver by Musk. ‘Starship landing nominal,’ Musk tweeted moments after his pride and joy made a safe and successful landing on the pad. The successful landing brings the billionaire one step closer to fulfilling his dream of sending the humans to Mars. 27 Apr 2021 – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin challenges NASA over SpaceX moon lander deal

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NASA’s Perseverance rover just made breathable air on Mars
The Perseverance rover converted carbon dioxide into oxygen on Mars, marking the first time breathable air has been made on another planet, NASA announced Wednesday. A toaster-sized instrument called MOXIE – short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment – made the feat possible. read more

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China launches Chang’e-5 Moon sample return mission
A Long March 5 rocket launched China’s Chang’e-5 spacecraft Monday to kick off a 23-day mission to deliver the first lunar samples to Earth since the 1970s.

The mission aims to collect the youngest samples so far obtained from the moon and later land in Siziwang Banner, read more

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In other words, it’s fast enough to see waves of light traveling and the fluorescent decay of molecules.
The camera technology is called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP) and it’s very similar in some respects to previous fast cameras he has built, such as his phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP) device, which has the ability read more