Cool STEM News:

Google-Free Android Smartphones Are Now Available in the US | PCMag (01:29)

• The /e/ Foundation has been offering refurbished smartphones running Android, but “deGoogled” since 2019. 

• First focus was the European market due to a limit on the supply of phones available for refurbishment.

• The situation has now changed and there’s enough stock to start offering Google-free smartphones in the US.

• Initially, two phones are being made available: a premium refurbished Samsung Galaxy S9 for $380, and a Galaxy S9+ for $430.
  • “Premium refurbished,” meaning: fully-functional, the battery has been tested, and the camera works perfectly.
  • Backed by a one-year warranty, are carrier unlocked, and include a headset, quick start guide, and SIM tray pin in the box.

• New operating system that replaces the Android OS is called /e/ OS and as the company explains, “We have removed many pieces of code that send your personal data to remote servers without your consent. We don’t scan your data in your phone or in your cloud space, and we don’t track your location hundreds [of] times a day or collect what you’re doing with your apps.”

• You do lose access to the Google Play Store, but your refurbished phone ships with open source apps “to cover most of your needs: browser, email, calendar, maps, camera …. And because /e/OS runs on Android, you can still run most of your favorite Android apps.”

Engineers Have Proposed The First Model For a Physically Possible Warp Drive | Science Alert (10:16)

• A group of physicists have put together the first proposal for a physical warp drive, based on a concept devised back in the ’90s. And they say it shouldn’t break any laws of physics. 
• Theoretically, warp drives bend and change the shape of space-time to exaggerate differences in time and distance that, under some circumstances, could see travelers move across distances faster than the speed of light.
  • “Warp Drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek.

• Scientists have been theorizing about faster-than-light space travel for decades. Mainly, due to the fact that even if we get to the speed of light, it would take 4 years just to get to the nearest solar system. 

• Theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed in 1994, a spacecraft powered by something called an ‘Alcubierre drive‘, which could achieve this faster-than-light travel. The problem is it requires a lot of negative energy in one place

• Why negative energy? 
  • Gets around some of the general relativity problems of faster-than-light travel, by allowing for space to expand and contract faster than light, while keeping everything within its warping within universal speed limits.
  • Introduces more problems of its own – primarily that the negative energy we’d require exists only in fluctuations on a quantum scale.
  • Alcubierre Warp drive = Tablecloth Trick (The spaceship (dishes) sits atop the tablecloth of spacetime, the drive pulls the fabric around it, and the ship is situated in a new place relative to the fabric.)

• According to researchers from the independent research group Applied Physics based in New York, it’s possible to ditch the fiction of negative energy and still make a warp drive

• “In particular, we have formulated new classes of warp drive solutions that do not require negative energy and, thus, become physical,”  says astrophysicist Alexey Bobrick, from Lund University in Sweden.

• The new research works around this by instead of utilizing a large amount of negative energy, they would use powerful gravitational fields.
  • Gravity would bending space-time so that the passage of time inside and outside the warp drive machine would be significantly different.
  • Think of a Bubble (Passenger Area, “Warp Shield”, and Outside Space)
    • Passenger Area would be relative to the bubble & space-time is flat so they would not feel the gravitational forces. 
    • Move the bubble itself to faster than the speed of light.

• Amount of mass required to produce a noticeable gravitational effect on space-time would be at least planet-sized

• Even though the reality of travelling to distant stars and planets is still a long way off, the new study is the latest addition to a growing body of research that suggests that the principles of warp drives are sound in scientific terms.

• The researchers admit that they’re still not sure exactly how to put together the technology that they’ve described in their paper, but at least more of the numbers add up now. 

SpaceX Successfully Landed Starship For The First Time – Before It Exploded | Science Alert (22:01)

• On March 3rd, SpaceX successfully landed its SN10 Starship prototype in an upright position… before it blew up a few minutes later.

• The rocket landed after reaching 10 km (6.2 miles in altitude) and turned around to perform a descent. The prototype landed upright but at an angle on the landing pad – potentially due to issues with the landing legs.

• The legs deployed at touchdown appeared to collapse and, as water hoses attempted to extinguish a fire at the base of SN10, it sprung upwards and exploded.

• SpaceX has yet to detail the cause of the explosion, but theories include a propellant tank leak or landing leg issues.

• SpaceX after the SN10 test provide their thoughts on their website: “Similar to the high-altitude flight tests of Starship SN8 and SN9, SN10 was powered through ascent by three Raptor engines, each shutting down in sequence prior to the vehicle reaching apogee—approximately 10 km in altitude….SN10 performed a propellant transition to the internal header tanks, which hold landing propellant, before reorienting itself for re-entry and a controlled aerodynamic descent.”

• To wrap it up they explain how the day went, and why these tests are important:  “All in all a great day for the Starship teams – these test flights are all about improving our understanding and development of a fully reusable transportation system…Congratulations to the entire Starship and SpaceX teams on the flight test!”

A submersible soft robot survived the pressure in the Mariana trench | New Scientist (27:06)

• A silicone robot has survived a journey to 10,900 meters below the ocean’s surface in the Mariana trench, where the crushing pressure can implode all but the strongest enclosures. 
• A team led by Guorui Li at Zhejiang University in China based the robot’s design on snailfish, which have relatively delicate, soft bodies and are among the deepest-living fish. They have been observed swimming at depths of roughly 5 miles.

• Key Trait of Snailfish: 
  • Its skull is not completely fused together with hardened bone. That extra bit of malleability allows the pressure on the skull to equalize.

• Following the snailfish’s lead, the scientists distributed the electronics of their robot fish farther apart than they normally would, and then encased them in soft silicone to keep them from touching.

• Propelled through the water by two flapping wings designed to work like the fins of a snailfish
  • Operated by artificial muscles made of a conductive polymer that contracts when an electrical current is applied
  • moves the fins in a 6.3 degree arc and pushes the robot forward in the water.

• In untethered tests 3224-metres deep in the South China Sea, the robot swam at speeds of more than 5 centimeters a second.

• It is designed for deep-sea exploration and has been successfully tested at the bottom of the Mariana trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans, while tethered to a traditional submersible. 
  • The pressure from all that overlying water is about a thousand times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, 15,000 pounds per square inch.

• Could lead to lighter and more nimble submersible designs.

This study just uncovered a surprising predictor of dementia | The Ladders (32:44)

• In a new study published in the JNeurosci journal, researchers may have determined a major predictive element of dementia-related illness.
• Given that spatial learning declines in the older population, the researchers based their analysis on its prevalence among their study sample. 
  • Spatial Learning: short-term memory tasks that require reasoning and comprehension in new environments
    • How Rats learn to navigate a maze to get to the reward in the middle

• What they found during this study actually goes counter to what you would think:
  • The authors identify increased activity in the hippocampus (memory retention) as a potential risk factor for mental deterioration later in life.
  • Hippocampus is actually crucial in converting your short-term memories into long-term ones and it plays a role in spatial learning. 

• The Study:
  • Young Group (Ages: 21-28) and Old Group (61-72)
    • Neither group had signs of cognitive impairments 
  • Tasked with learning the layout of a town in Virtual Reality
  • After exploring the town, the participants were asked to estimate the location of specific landmarks in the VR town. 
  • Their brains were assessed during this asking period

• Result:
  • Young group performed better than the older one, and the older group took longer to familiarize themselves with the VR town.
  • After repeat sessions, the younger group’s performance improved while the brain activity showcased: 
    • Less activity in the hippocampus 
    • More activity in other areas related to spatial learning
  • Opposite for the older adults:
    • More activity in the hippocampus
    • Brain activity was “too noisy” to retain new info

• “Reducing hippocampal activity could become a treatment option for improving memory performance in aging adults,” lead author Dr. Nadine Diersch of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases says in a media release.

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