Fresh crater on Oceanus Procellarum. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
It was a good week for space science as a multi-institutional team of astronomers and astrophysicists found telescopic evidence that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning (and warping space-time) to take the shape of an American football. Additionally, a small international team of astronomers reports that one of Saturn’s smallest moons, Mimas, has a young ocean beneath its icy shell. And a team of geographers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reports that analyzes of minerals in lunar samples returned by China’s Chang’e-5 lunar mission provide clues to the Moon’s history.
In technology news, a team of chemical engineers from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology has developed a scalable photoelectrochemical system for the production of green hydrogen. And an international team of computer scientists has built an on-chip phonon-magnon tank for neuromorphic computing, a development that could lead to more compact and efficient AI hardware. Additionally, a multi-institutional technical collaboration has shown that low-cost, carbon-neutral biofuels are actually possible. And a team of roboticists from Qingdao University of Technology has discovered that a deep reinforcement learning approach could be used to improve autonomous robotic grasping and assembly.
Furthermore, a team of bioengineers and mental health specialists affiliated with several institutions in the United States discovered a link between body temperature and depression: people with higher body temperatures were more prone to depression . Also, a trio of ecologists report the first observation of an act of altruism on the part of a male elephant seal. A male elephant seal helped save a drowning pup, an action requiring a high expenditure of energy. Finally, a study analyzing reports of deaths in the United States during the pandemic found that many of them were likely attributable to COVID-19.
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