As we all know, the far side of the Moon always faces away from Earth, and so it cannot be seen from the naked eye when you’re on Earth. On the far side of the Moon lies the Moon’s — nay, the solar system’s largest crater: the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin. Just recently, a lunar lander made its touchdown on the crater and collected samples there.

The crater itself is oval-shaped, as wide as 2,000 kilometers — roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C. — and several miles deep.

This latest news, however, could perhaps be bigger news than the previous one. A study from Baylor University discovered a mysterious mass on the Moon’s crater.

“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected,” said lead author Peter B. James, Ph.D., assistant professor of planetary geophysics in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.

It is still unknown what the gigantic mass is, although scientists have a few theories of what it could be.

(Image Credit: NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center/ University of Arizona)

According to the statistics gathered by the World Health Organization, around 1.35 million people die each year because of road traffic crashes, while 20-50 million more people suffer from non-fatal injuries, which often result in disabilities. Traffic crashes are also the leading cause of death of people aged 5-29 years old.

The usual causes of car crashes are speeding, driving under alcohol influence, non-use of seatbelts, distracted driving (such as texting while driving), and unsafe road infrastructure.

Of course, avoiding alcohol and distractions and using seatbelts can reduce your risk of going to the afterlife well before your time, but we know better. We want to drive safer than safe, and ZF, a German supplier, can help us with that.

We already know that airbags inside the car can be an equipment crucial for our survival once accidents happen, but ZF offers us something better — airbags on the outside of the car:

A new airbag that deploys from the side of a vehicle before a collision can reduce the severity of occupant injuries 40%, according to ZF, which is bidding to become a major force in safety engineering in addition to its longstanding expertise in steering and transmissions.

The system uses cameras, radar and lidar to determine when a collision is unavoidable, igniting the air bag milliseconds before the oncoming vehicle strikes. The sensors will also communicate with safety systems inside the vehicle, for instance adjusting the seat belts for side impact.

What are your thoughts?

(Image Credit: ZF)

Let’s face it. Having your picture taken for your graduation is boring. You go to the room, your picture gets taken, and that’s it. But what if you can come alive in those photos? This is what the 12.C class of the Fazekas Mihály High School of Debrecen, Hungary, just did.

We usually see Augmented Reality used in video games such as Pokemon Go. Who knew that you can use it for school? And for graduation photos, to add to that.

Via Daily News Hungary

(Video Credit: Szakál Vince Abosa/ YouTube)

“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” states Dr. Eimear Nic Lughadha. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

Dr. Ludhadha is part of the team of researchers studying plant extinction, and according to them, the numbers of plants driven to extinction are “frightening”, and we humans are to blame for that. What’s more, they believe that these numbers are a gross underestimate. In other words, we most likely have made more plants extinct than we have ever known.

They found 571 species had definitely been wiped out since 1750 but with knowledge of many plant species still very limited the true number is likely to be much higher. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was also likely to be an underestimate.

The number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. The new figure is also four times the number of extinct plants recorded in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.

She said the true extinction rate for plants could easily be orders of magnitude higher than that reported in the study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. There are thousands of “living dead” plant species, where the last survivors have no chance of reproducing because, for example, only one sex remains or the big animals needed to spread their seeds are extinct.

It takes many years to be sure a plant has been wiped out, meaning there are many species awaiting formal confirmation. “How are you going to check the entirety of the Amazon for your lost plant?” Vorontsova said. And some plant species may have gone extinct before ever being discovered. Botanists find about 2,000 new species a year.

A sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is under way, according to some scientists. A landmark report in May said human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, with 1 million species of plants and animals at risk of extinction.

Is the end of life on Earth nearer than we thought?

(Image Credit: Kew Gardens)

Last June 6, Vivian Gomez posted a video that would immediately spread all over the internet. It was a 9-second security camera footage of her front yard. As seen on the footage, a creepy shadow appears from what seems to be Vivian’s front door. A second later, a strange figure can be seen walking in an upbeat manner with its toes facing outward. It even does the chicken dance for a moment and then proceeds to walk weirdly again. The video then abruptly ends.

What could it be? Is it an alien? A hyperactive child? A drunk guy? Even Vivian does not know.

Of course, this being the internet, the first assumption is that it's somehow fake. But perhaps the most logical explanation comes from a commenter on Gomez's original Facebook post who said, "It is probably some kid wearing flip flops with shorts on his head." 

But for Harry Potter fans, this is not a child and definitely not an alien. There is only one creature they can think of that has the same physique as the figure caught on camera: Dobby the House Elf.

What do you guys think?

See the full video here.

(Image Credit: Vivian Gomez/ Facebook)

The future of medicine may not be as far we thought it would be. Already, 3D printed body parts are created and tested on laboratory animals such as the 3D-printed heart and this one — the 3D-printed air sac. Scientists are hopeful that synthetic organs would be available for transplant in around two decades.

This 3D-printed lung-mimicking air sac is a collaborative work of researchers from Rice University, the University of Washington, Duke University, Rowan University, and Massachusetts-based design firm Nervous System. The work was led by Rice University’s Jordan Miller.

From Science Focus:

In tests, the resulting air sac was sturdy enough to avoid bursting as blood flowed through it and took in and expelled air that simulated the pressures and frequencies of human breathing. It was also found that red blood cells could take up oxygen as they flowed through a network of blood vessels surrounding the “breathing” air sac – a process similar to the gas exchange that occurs in the lung’s alveolar air sacs.

(Video Credit: Rice University/ YouTube)

Jaune is a stencil artist known for his works centered upon his protagonists — sanitation workers. His funny illustrations are drawn from his experiences as a sanitation worker. 

Slinkachu, on the other hand, is a British photographer known for his miniature artworks that embody street art, sculpture, installation art, and photography. 

Put them together and what do you get? Even more creative artworks!

In their current show “Trash Talk” at Thinkspace Projects, mixed-media interventionists Jaune and Slinkachu offer new solo pieces and collaborative works… This show runs through June 22 at the space.

Via Hi-Fructose

(Image Credit: Jaune & Slinkachu)

Tomato? Latte? Do they even taste good together? That’s what SoraNews24 tried to find out.

Convenience store chain Lawson unveiled the Tomato Latte on June 4. The said beverage is Lawson’s new addition to their Machi Cafe drink series and costs ¥210 (US $1.95).

It’s a collaboration between Lawson and Japanese vegetable juice producer Kagome, and Lawson boasts that it’s made with “high-lycopene tomatoes.”

Trust us when we say the sound of it wasn’t all that appealing to us, but we were too curious to not try it. A closer look at the latte’s description made us relax a bit: it’s a blend of tomatoes and milk, and there are some carrots thrown in to sweeten it up and make it easier to drink.

We watched the cashier mix the tomato juice and milk, our eyes full of trepidation. But when we tried it…

…it was delicious!

(Image Credit: SoraNews24)

Hundreds of robots go round and round the 125,000 square foot “field” as their human companions (or masters, whichever you like) direct them where to go and put the packages that they are holding. Matt Simon of Wired describes the situation inside the warehouses of Amazon in one word: chaotic.

Amazon needs this robotic system to supercharge its order fulfillment process and make same-day delivery a widespread reality. But the implications strike at the very nature of modern labor: Humans and robots are fusing into a cohesive workforce, one that promises to harness the unique skills of both parties. With that comes a familiar anxiety—an existential conundrum, even—that as robots grow ever more advanced, they’re bound to push more and more people out of work. But in reality, it’s not nearly as simple as all that.

This Colorado Warehouse is, in a way, a monument to robots. It’s not one of the Amazon fulfillment centers you’ve probably heard of by now, in which humans grab all the items in your order and pack them into a box. This is a sorting facility, which receives all those boxes and puts them on trucks to your neighborhood. The distinction is important: These squat, wheeled drives aren’t tasked with finely manipulating your shampoos and books and T-shirts. They’re mules.

Very, very finely tuned mules. A system in the cloud, sort of like air traffic control, coordinates the route of every robot across the floor, with an eye to potential interference from other drives on other routes. That coordination system also decides when a robot should peel off to the side and dock in a charger, and when it should return to work. Sometimes the route selection can get even more complicated, because particularly populous zip codes have more than one chute, so the system needs to factor in traffic patterns in deciding which portal a robot should visit.

“It's basically a very large sudoku puzzle,” says Ryan Clarke, senior manager of Special Amazon Robotics Technology Applications. “You want every column and every row to have an equal amount of drops. How do we make sure that every row and every column looks exactly equal to each other?” The end goal is to minimize congestion through an even distribution of traffic across the field. So on top of tweaking the robots’ routes, the system can actually switch the chute assignments around to match demand, so that neither the robots nor the human sorters they work with hit any bottlenecks.

(Image Credit: Amazon)

That’s right. Our respective bodies are a complex mosaic formed by clusters of cells along with different genomes. A lot of these clusters carry mutations that may contribute to cancer, a survey suggests.

It is the largest such study to date, and compiles data from thousands of samples collected from about 500 people. The results, published on 6 June in Science, could help scientists to better understand how cancer starts, and how to detect it earlier.

“We now appreciate that we are mosaics’, and that a substantial number of cells in our body already carry cancer mutations,” says Iñigo Martincorena, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. “These are the seeds of cancer.”

Tissue mosaics arise as cells accumulate mutations — from DNA errors that creep in during cell division, or because of exposure to environmental factors such as ultraviolet light or cigarette smoke. When a skin cell with a given mutation divides, it can create a patch of skin that is genetically different from its neighbours.

Previous studies have found high levels of mosaicism in the skin, oesophagus and blood. Those results were typically gleaned from sequencing specific genes in microscopic tissue samples.

…

“This messy situation is the new normal,” Tomasetti says. “The challenge is now to figure out up to what point we call something normal.”

(Image Credit: Science Photo Library)

“Give us one star on Yelp and get 25% off any Pizza!” chef Davide Cerretini, owner of the Italian joint Botto Bistro, advertised in 2014. The discount would then be changed to 50% after a time. Why would he do that? It was because he got tired of Yelp.

Like many small businesses, [Botto Bistro] was enslaved to the whims of online reviewers, whose public dispatches could make or break its reputation.

[…]

In the months after Botto Bistro’s grand opening, Cerretini began receiving dozens of calls from Yelp salespeople, who implored him to buy ads.

According to Cerretini, when he rebuffed these offers, he’d often notice that freshly posted 5-star reviews would be removed from his page — often no less than 24 hours after getting off the phone with a Yelp rep.

“I came from Italy, and know exactly what mafia extortion looks like,” he says. “Yelp was manipulating reviews and hoping I would pay a protection fee. I didn’t come to America and work for 25 years to be extorted by some idiot in Silicon Valley.”

And that is why he made such a crazy offer to customers. For small business owners like him, Davide is a hero.

More details about this story over at The Hustle.

(Image Credit: Davide Cerretini)

“Dogs are quite good at understanding humans,” says Lina Roth, a senior author and also a zoologist at Sweden’s Linkoping University. “They’re definitely better at understanding us than we are at understanding them,” she continues.

While it may seem like dogs only play, eat, bark, or sleep, those are not the only things that they do. The man’s best friend knows very well how to sympathize with its hooman.

Our canine friends may get sympathetically stressed out in response to their owners’ anxieties, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers in Sweden found that dogs’ anxiety levels rose along with those of their humans, implying that the pets are highly attuned to their human companions’ moods.

Roth and her colleagues looked at 58 dog-owner duos: 33 Shetland sheepdogs and 25 border collies, and the owners were all human women. To measure just how stressed their participants were over a period of several months, the scientists analyzed hair and fur samples for concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol. While cortisol in the bloodstream can quickly spike and drop in “fight-or-flight” situations, consistently high levels of the hormone are associated with chronic stress—the kind of mental strain that comes with a more persistent problem, like unemployment or institutional racism. As hair grows, it accumulates cortisol [that can] serve as a chemical record of these long-term stress levels.

After measuring samples from two different time points to account for seasonal changes, the scientists found that when humans had high cortisol levels, their dogs did too. While earlier studies had shown examples of immediate “stress contagion” in high-pressure situations like competitions, authors write that this is the first evidence for long-term stress syncing between species.

(Image Credit: ivanovgood/ Pixabay)

“I’m so done with today,” wrote Caitlin Christine as she posted her cat’s new haircut who now looks like someone straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. Nevertheless, the cat still looks majestic, although you can see his annoyance in these photos.

“And just so you guys know... this is what he looks like when he doesn’t look like a Dr. Seuss character”, Caitlin wrote as she posted another picture of Oliver, the cat — this time in his original state.

As it turns out, Oliver's new look wasn't an accident, either. Caitlin's mother explains it was actually requested by her father. "He dropped Oliver off for his groom and he came back like this," writes Caitlin's mother in a text to her, which she posted along with the aforementioned photos for context. She added that she had waited over two months for this appointment.

(Image Credit: Caitlin Christine/ Twitter)

This is a severed head of the Pleistocene wolf, an ancient species of wolves that existed in prehistoric times. Amazingly, because of permafrost, its mammoth-like fur and majestic fangs remained intact. This was found on the summer of 2018 by a local man named Pavel Efimov on shore of the Tirekhtyakh River, tributary of Indigirka.

The wolf… was fully grown and aged from two to four years old when it died.

The head was dated older than 40,000 years by Japanese scientists.

Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History will examine the Pleistocene predator’s DNA.

‘This is a unique discovery of the first ever remains of a fully grown Pleistocene wolf with its tissue preserved. We will be comparing it to modern-day wolves to understand how the species has evolved and to reconstruct its appearance,’ said an excited Albert Protopopov, from the Republic of Sakha Academy of Sciences. 

(Image Credit: Albert Protopopov)

NASA is letting us take a peek as they assemble and test the Mars 2020 Rover and the great thing is... it’s free! You can watch the engineers and technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) via their YouTube channel.

"There is so much happening and changing in the clean room, I come here every opportunity I get," said Mars 2020 project manager John McNamee of JPL. "It is great that we can share this part of our journey to the Red Planet with the public anytime they want."

Affectionately called "Seeing 2020," the webcam provides the video feed (without audio) from a viewing gallery above the clean room floor. You can also watch and participate in live webchats with members of JPL's social media team and the Mars 2020 team as they answer questions from the public about the mission. These "Seeing 2020" webchats will occur Mon.-Thu. at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT (2 p.m. and 7 p.m. EDT), with additional moderated chats when special activities (like drive tests) occur.

Cool!

(Image Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ YouTube)