Using one of the telescopes of the project "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (ATLAS), in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, astronomers detected an extremely close passage of an asteroid yesterday, Saturday, November 14, and when analyzing its orbit, they They noticed that the space rock had its closest approach the day before, that is, on Friday, the 13th.

The asteroid has been dubbed "2020 VT4," reported the International Astronomical Union.

"It is estimated that this space rock passed only 238 miles above the Pacific Ocean, making it the asteroid to pass closest to Earth without disintegrating in our atmosphere," said Eddie Iriarry of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC).

The educational entity clarified that it was a relatively small asteroid, between 16 to 36 feet (5 to 11 meters) in diameter.

London - Imagine a world where you move around in your own personal sound bubble. You listen to your favorite tunes, play loud computer games, watch a movie or get navigation directions in your car — all without disturbing those around you.

That's the possibility presented by "sound beaming," a new futuristic audio technology from Noveto Systems, an Israeli company. On Friday it will debut a desktop device that beams sound directly to a listener without the need for headphones.

The company provided The Associated Press with an exclusive demo of the desktop prototype of its SoundBeamer 1.0 before its launch Friday.

The listening sensation is straight out of a sci-fi movie. The 3-D sound is so close it feels like it's inside your ears while also in front, above and behind them.

Noveto expects the device will have plenty of practical uses, from allowing office workers to listen to music or conference calls without interrupting colleagues to letting someone play a game, movie or music without disturbing their significant others.

The lack of headphones means it's possible to hear other sounds in the room clearly.

The technology uses a 3-D sensing module and locates and tracks the ear position sending audio via ultrasonic waves to create sound pockets by the user's ears. Sound can be heard in stereo or a spatial 3-D mode that creates 360 degree sound around the listener, the company said.

In 2018, a new aurora-like discovery struck the world. From 2015 to 2016, citizen scientists reported 30 instances of a purple ribbon in the sky, with a green picket fence structure underneath. Now named STEVE, or Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, this phenomenon is still new to scientists, who are working to understand all its details. What they do know is that STEVE is not a normal aurora - some think maybe it's not an aurora at all - and a new finding about the formation of streaks within the structure brings scientists one step closer to solving the mystery.

"Often in physics, we build our understanding then test the extreme cases or test the cases in a different environment," Elizabeth MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explains. "STEVE is different than the usual aurora, but it is made of light and it is driven by the auroral system. In finding these tiny little streaks, we may be learning something fundamentally new in how green auroral light can be produced."

These "tiny little streaks" are extraordinarily small point-like features within the green picket fence of STEVE. In a new paper for AGU Advances, researchers share their latest findings on these points. They suggest the streaks could be moving points of light - elongated in the images due to blur from the cameras. The tip of the streak in one image will line up with the end of the tail in the next image, contributing to this speculation from the scientists. However, there are still a lot of questions to be answered - determining whether the green light is a point or indeed a line, is one extra clue to help scientists figure out what causes green light.

"I'm not entirely sure about anything with respect to this phenomenon just yet," Joshua Semeter, a professor at Boston University and first author on the paper, said. "You have other sequences where it looks like there is a tube-shaped structure that persists from image to image and doesn't seem to conform to a moving point source, so we're not really sure about that yet."

Maunakea, Hawaii - Astronomers have discovered the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen, with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible.

Its half-second flash of light, detected in May of this year, came from a violent explosion of gamma rays billons of light-years away that unleashed more energy in a blink of an eye than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.

The study has been accepted in The Astrophysical Journal and will be published online later this year. A pre-print is available on arXiv.org.

"It's amazing to me that after 10 years of studying the same type of phenomenon, we can discover unprecedented behavior like this," said Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University and lead author of the study. "It just reveals the diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of producing, which is very exciting."

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope quickly captured the glow within just three days after the burst and determined its near-infrared emission was 10 times brighter than predicted, defying conventional models.

"These observations do not fit traditional explanations for short gamma-ray bursts," said Fong. "Given what we know about the radio and X-rays from this blast, it just doesn't match up. The near-infrared emission that we're finding with Hubble is way too bright."

Massive explosions of energy happening thousands of light-years from Earth may have left traces in our planet's biology and geology, according to new research by CU Boulder geoscientist Robert Brakenridge.

The study, published this month in the International Journal of Astrobiology, probes the impacts of supernovas, some of the most violent events in the known universe. In the span of just a few months, a single one of these eruptions can release as much energy as the sun will during its entire lifetime. They're also bright — really bright.

"We see supernovas in other galaxies all the time," said Brakenridge, a senior research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU Boulder. "Through a telescope, a galaxy is a little misty spot. Then, all of a sudden, a star appears and may be as bright as the rest of the galaxy."

A very nearby supernova could be capable of wiping human civilization off the face of the Earth. But even from farther away, these explosions may still take a toll, Brakenridge said, bathing our planet in dangerous radiation and damaging its protective ozone layer.

To study those possible impacts, Brakenridge searched through the planet's tree ring records for the fingerprints of these distant, cosmic explosions. His findings suggest that relatively close supernovas could theoretically have triggered at least four disruptions to Earth's climate over the last 40,000 years.

The results are far from conclusive, but they offer tantalizing hints that, when it comes to the stability of life on Earth, what happens in space doesn't always stay in space.

"These are extreme events, and their potential effects seem to match tree ring records," Brakenridge said.

An invention similar to an elephant's trunk has potential benefits for many industries where handling delicate objects is essential, say the UNSW researchers who developed it.
Nature has inspired engineers at UNSW Sydney to develop a soft fabric robotic gripper which behaves like an elephant's trunk to grasp, pick up and release objects without breaking them.

The researchers say the versatile technology could be widely applied in sectors where fragile objects are handled, such as agriculture, food and the scientific and resource exploration industries - even for human rescue operations or personal assistive devices.

Dr Thanh Nho Do, Scientia Lecturer and UNSW Medical Robotics Lab director, said the gripper could be commercially available in the next 12 to 16 months, if his team secured an industry partner.

He is the senior author of a study featuring the invention, published in Advanced Materials Technologies this month.

Dr Do worked with the study's lead author and PhD candidate Trung Thien Hoang, Phuoc Thien Phan, Mai Thanh Thai and his collaborator Scientia Professor Nigel Lovell, Head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering.

"Our new soft fabric gripper is thin, flat, lightweight and can grip and retrieve various objects - even from confined hollow spaces - for example, a pen inside a tube," Dr Do said.

"This device also has an enhanced real-time force sensor which is 15 times more sensitive than conventional designs and detects the grip strength required to prevent damage to objects it's handling.

"There is also a thermally-activated mechanism that can change the gripper body from flexible to stiff and vice versa, enabling it to grasp and hold objects of various shapes and weights - up to 220 times heavier than the gripper's mass."

Natural processes without external assistance could never explain the origin of the first cell, and researchers have increasingly come to realize this. A cell's genesis faces two monumental challenges. First, it requires a chemical system to transition into a state of much higher free energy: higher energy and lower entropy (higher order). Such a transformation, without aid, violates the most fundamental laws of physics (here, here).

Origins researchers have attempted to identify a natural process that could supply the required free energy to power the transformation to life. The most popular proposal is proton gradients across alkaline thermal vents. I described in my exchange with Jeremy England why this source could never provide even the tiniest amount of the required energy. Another proposal by biophysicist Helen Hansma is that mica sheets embedded in rock in the ocean floor or in other environments could have provided mechanical energy to drive life-relevant chemical reactions uphill. In my exchange with her, I demonstrated that neither her model nor any other fared any better than the hydrothermal vents (here, here, here).

There are two more reasons to love Australia's fluffiest aeronautical marsupials after the discovery that there are actually three species of greater glider, not one as previously assumed.

The greater glider is a possum-sized marsupial living in the forests of eastern Australia, squeezing into tree hollows during the day and at night soaring up to 100 metres through the air on the hunt for its favourite eucalyptus leaves.

A study of the genetics of greater gliders, published in Nature's public access Scientific Reports journal, found distinct species in the southern, central and northern ranges.

A 2-inch-long (5 centimeters) spider thought to be extinct in Great Britain is actually alive and thriving on a British military base.

A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust rediscovered the great fox-spider (Alopecosa fabrilis) on an undeveloped portion of a military installation in Surrey, England, after a two-year search. The last time the spider was seen before this in Britain was in 1993, or 27 years ago.

"It's a gorgeous spider, if you're into that kind of thing," the program manager Mike Waite told The Guardian.

Nocturnal hunter

SOEST Earth Sciences professor Bridget Smith-Konter and graduate student Lauren Ward co-authored a study published recently in Science that revealed unusual surface deformation associated with the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake in the San Andreas Fault area of California.

Watch the video below.

The research team, led by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, analyzed satellite data and discovered hundreds of previously unmapped fractures surrounding the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence.

Most deformation associated with an earthquake is, not surprisingly, in the same direction as the fault rupture. However, the researchers found areas of deformation associated with the 2019 event that moved in the opposite direction.