Continued the agency: “The need urgently exists to accommodate the planned communications and data transmission requirements of long-term and continuous commercial and scientific operations on and around the moon.”
Landing LunaNet
Through its Artemis program, NASA intends to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, followed shortly by establishing a sustained lunar presence. And it will need a communications network to do so.
NASA’s GRAIL mission has produced an amazing discovery about the moon, solving a timeless mystery for humanity in the process: what is the moon made of?
Do you ever look up at night and wonder what is on the moon, or what it is even made of? The mystery of the moon’s inner core has been around for centuries. Now, scientists have finally confirmed what it looks like.
The latest research, published in the journal Nature, has revealed that the inner core is a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron, surrounded by a liquid outer core—a finding that will help us better understand how our solar system formed.
Proteins are made from chains of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional shapes, which in turn dictate protein function. Those shapes evolved over billions of years and are varied and complex, but also limited in number. With a better understanding of how existing proteins fold, researchers have begun to design folding patterns not produced in nature.
But a major challenge, says Kim, has been to imagine folds that are both possible and functional. “It’s been very hard to predict which folds will be real and work in a protein structure,” says Kim, who is also a professor in the departments of molecular genetics and computer science at U of T. “By combining biophysics-based representations of protein structure with diffusion methods from the image generation space, we can begin to address this problem.”
The new system, which the researchers call ProteinSGM, draws from a large set of image-like representations of existing proteins that encode their structure accurately. The researchers feed these images into a generative diffusion model, which gradually adds noise until each image becomes all noise. The model tracks how the images become noisier and then runs the process in reverse, learning how to transform random pixels into clear images that correspond to fully novel proteins.
Some of Uranus’ moons likely have deep oceans lurking beneath their ice-capped surfaces, a new study by NASA shows.
Two of them, Titania and Oberon, may even have water warm enough to support life.
Scientists have recently pored through decades-old information collected by the veteran Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Uranus in 1986 during its extended space mission. Armed with new computer modeling techniques, researchers reanalyzed the data and concluded four of the ice giant’s 27 moons (opens in a new tab) probably have liquid water sandwiched between their cores and crusts.
More accurate space-weather predictions and safer satellite navigation through radiation belts could someday result from new insights into “space waves,” researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University reported.
The group’s latest research, published on May 4, 2023, by the journal Nature Communications, shows that seasonal and daily variations in the Earth’s magnetic tilt, toward or away from the sun, can trigger changes in large-wavelength space waves.
These breaking waves, known as Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, occur at the boundary between the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic shield. The waves happen much more frequently around the spring and fall seasons, researchers reported, while wave activity is poor around summer and winter.
WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin announced May 4 it is consolidating several businesses focused on space into three sectors: Commercial civil space, national security space, and strategic and missile defense.
“With an eye toward the future and building on our current business momentum, these changes position us to deliver end-to-end solutions for today’s mission demands and well into the future,” said Robert Lightfoot, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space.
Posted in space
Astronomers spotted a dying star swallowing a large planet, a discovery that fills in a “missing link” in understanding the fates of Earth and many other planets.
Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space to generate coarse geometry, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork, and a neural facial tracker for video input. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments validate the effectiveness and generalizability of DreamFace. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.
Observations of ZTF SLRN-2020, a short-lived optical outburst in the Galactic disk accompanied by bright, long-lived infrared emission, show that the resulting light curve and spectra are consistent with the signatures of a planet being engulfed by its host star.
