- First Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra ‘drop & scratch durability’ test with sand and grinder: drops still not a good idea Notebookcheck.net
- Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra teardown shows new extensive vapor chamber – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
- First Galaxy S24 Ultra drop test is out for your (painful) viewing pleasure SamMobile – Samsung news
- Galaxy S24 Ultra Has A Significantly Tougher Titanium Frame, Holds Out Well Against Sand Too In New Drop And Scratch Test Wccftech
- Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra survives drop and scratch tests – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
Tag Archives: Sand
Denny Hamlin on Chase Elliott suspension: NASCAR ‘putting a line in the sand’ – FOX Sports
- Denny Hamlin on Chase Elliott suspension: NASCAR ‘putting a line in the sand’ FOX Sports
- Bubba Wallace Reacts To Chase Elliott Suspension The Spun
- NASCAR decision crushes ridiculous conspiracy theory Beyond the Flag
- “I wonder if Earnhardt Sr. ever apologized to anyone”: Chase Elliott not apologizing to Denny Hamlin leaves NASCAR fans divided Sportskeeda
- Furious Fans Go for the Kill at “Halfa** Apology” While Chase Elliott Nation Defends the Hendrick Motorsports Star Amid Suspension EssentiallySports
- View Full Coverage on Google News
FIRST DRIVE: Porsche 911 Dakar – Off-Road Supercar On Sand… And Snow! | Top Gear – youtube.com
- FIRST DRIVE: Porsche 911 Dakar – Off-Road Supercar On Sand… And Snow! | Top Gear youtube.com
- Watch a Porsche 959 Paris-Dakar Be Carefully Disassembled Before Restoration The Drive
- Why Matt Farah Thinks The Porsche 911 Dakar Is “One Of The Coolest Factory Production Cars” HotCars
- Now that AWD is Available, Will Corvette Enter the Hot New Off-Road Sportscar Market? – Corvette: Sales, News & Lifestyle Corvette Blogger
- 1986 Porsche 959 Paris-Dakar Got a Sympathetic Restoration, Still Has Its Battle Scars autoevolution
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Perseverance rover spots Ingenuity helicopter on sand dune
NASA’s Perseverance rover just caught another glimpse of its pioneering robotic cousin.
The car-sized Perseverance snapped a photo recently of the Ingenuity helicopter as the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) rotorcraft sat atop a Red Planet sand dune.
“The #MarsHelicopter and I are closer together than we’ve been in a while, and guess who I spotted resting on a dune between flights. Can you believe Ingenuity is gearing up for Flight #39?” the Perseverance team said via Twitter (opens in new tab) on Wednesday (Jan. 11), in a post that featured a photo of the little chopper.
Related: Soar over Mars rover tracks with Ingenuity helicopter (video)
Ingenuity and Perseverance landed together inside Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero hosted a big lake and a river delta long ago, and Perseverance is scouring the area for signs of ancient life on Mars.
The six-wheeled robot is also collecting and caching dozens of samples for future return to Earth. For the past few weeks, Perseverance has been caching some of its sample tubes in a “depot” in a patch of Jezero’s floor that the mission team calls Three Forks.
Perseverance has so far deposited six of a planned 10 sample tubes (opens in new tab) in the Three Forks depot, which serves as a backup in case the rover isn’t healthy enough to haul material to a future NASA lander later this decade. A rocket aboard that lander will launch the samples to Mars orbit, where they’ll be picked up by a European spacecraft and hauled back to Earth. The samples could land here as early as 2033.
The depot samples are doubles; Perseverance is keeping a set of material drilled from the same target rocks on its body. If need be, two Ingenuity-like helicopters that will launch with the future lander will fly over to Three Forks and grab the sample tubes there one by one.
Ingenuity is currently serving as a scout for Perseverance, helping the rover team pick the best routes through the rough Jezero landscape and identify promising outcrops for in-depth study.
This work is part of the chopper’s extended mission. Not long after landing, Ingenuity aced its primary five-flight campaign, showing that powered flight is possible in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Ingenuity conducted its 39th Martian flight on Wednesday, covering 459 feet (140 meters) of ground over the course of nearly 79 seconds. To date, the chopper has flown a total of 25,690 feet (7,830 m) on Mars and stayed airborne for more than 64 minutes, according to the mission’s flight log (opens in new tab).
Perseverance has captured footage of Ingenuity before. The rover snapped photos of the chopper just after it deployed onto Jezero’s floor, for example, and also recorded video of Ingenuity’s 13th flight, which took place in September 2021.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
Purified Sand Particles Have Anti-Obesity Effects, Scientists Confirm : ScienceAlert
Porous particles of silica made from purified sand could one day play a role in attempts to lose weight.
Past clinical trials have already produced promising results, but the actual weight-lowering mechanism behind the potential treatment has been poorly understood.
To sift out the key variables, researchers have now tested a range of silica sizes and shapes in a simulation of the human gut after a heavy meal.
The results support the idea that porous silica can “impede the digestive processes” that are usually triggered by enzymes breaking down fat, cholesterol, starches, and sugars in the stomach and intestines.
What’s more, the size of administered nanoparticles seems to determine how much digestive activity is inhibited.
The authors acknowledge that their model is much too simple to perfectly mimic the complexity of the human gut during digestion, but given the ethics surrounding human clinical trials, gut simulations and animal models are closer than researchers might otherwise get.
Unlike other human gut models, this new one accounts for both fat digestion and carbohydrate digestion. The authors also analzyed the degree to which organic matter might be absorbed within the gastrointestinal tract.
It’s possible that porous silica triggers a reduction of weight gain in other ways, too, but the new findings provide additional research with a more solid place to start.
In 2014, researchers found mice on high fat diets put on significantly less weight when fed nanoparticles of porous silica (MSPs). Their total body fat percentage was also reduced. Still, that effect seemed to be based on the relative size of the silica particles used. Larger particles were ultimately more effective.
Follow-up studies on mice supported these results. The right size and shape of porous silica particles seemed to determine the power of mouse digestion in the small intestine.
In 2020, the first clinical data on 10 healthy humans with obesity demonstrated that MSPs can reduce blood glucose levels and blood cholesterol levels, both of which are known risk factors for metabolic and cardiovascular complications.
Even better, the treatment did not trigger any abdominal discomfort or changes to bowel habits, which can’t be said of current medicines for weight gain like Orlistat.
The current research elaborates on these promising findings by comparing an array of 13 porous silica samples of various widths, absorption potentials, shapes, sizes, and surface chemistries.
These samples were each introduced to a human gastrointestinal model that simulated a fed state after a high-carbohydrate, high-fat meal. The model allowed for half an hour of gastric digestion and an hour of intestinal digestion and absorption.
Fat digestion was monitored by titrating fatty acids from what was absorbed, while starch digestion was monitored by measuring the concentration of sugars absorbed.
The authors say the ideal silica samples were silica microparticles with pore widths between 6 and 10 nanometers. These sizes seemed to inhibit the enzymes examined best.
The pores don’t just appear to trap enzymes, either. It’s more complicated than that, researchers think.
Some pores which were the optimal size for inhibiting starch digestion, for instance, were too large to optimally trap enzymes associated with fat digestion.
The porous sand particles also seemed to absorb digested and undigested nutrients from the gastrointestinal tract before they could pass into the system’s bloodstream.
This could be another way in which the particles counter the input of calories.
Those particles with greater surface areas but smaller pores unable to impact digestive enzymes actually absorbed the most organic matter in models.
Further research on animal models will be needed to replicate these results. Maybe after that, the proposed mechanism can be validated in human clinical trials.
The study was published in Pharmaceutics.
What’s it like to be on Venus or Pluto? We studied their sand dunes and found some clues.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Andrew Gunn (opens in new tab), Lecturer, Monash University
What is it like to be on the surface of Mars or Venus? Or even further afield, such as on Pluto, or Saturn’s moon Titan?
This curiosity has driven advances in space exploration since Sputnik 1 was launched 65 years (opens in new tab) ago. But we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what is knowable about other planetary bodies in the solar system.
Our new study (opens in new tab), published May 19 in Nature Astronomy, shows how some unlikely candidates — namely sand dunes — can provide insight into what weather and conditions you might experience if you were standing on a far-off planetary body.
Related: Weird ‘blue’ dunes speckle the surface of Mars in NASA photo
What’s in a grain of sand?
English poet William Blake famously wondered (opens in new tab) what it means “to see a world in a grain of sand.”
In our research, we took this quite literally. The idea was to use the mere presence of sand dunes to understand what conditions exist on a world’s surface.
For dunes to even exist, there are a pair of “Goldilocks (opens in new tab)” criteria that must be satisfied. First is a supply of erodible but durable grains. There must also be winds fast enough to make those grains hop across the ground — but not fast enough to carry them high into the atmosphere.
So far, the direct measurement of winds and sediment has only been possible on Earth and Mars. However, we have observed wind-blown sediment features on multiple other bodies (and even comets (opens in new tab)) by satellite. The very presence of such dunes on these bodies implies the Goldilocks conditions are met.
Our work focused on Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton (Neptune’s largest moon) and Pluto. Unresolved debates about these bodies have gone on for decades.
How do we square the apparent wind-blown features on Triton’s and Pluto’s surfaces with their thin, tenuous atmospheres? Why do we see such prolific sand and dust activity on Mars, despite measuring winds that seem too weak to sustain it?
And does Venus’s thick and stiflingly hot atmosphere move sand in a similar way to how air or water move on Earth?
Furthering the debate
Our study offers predictions for the winds required to move sediment on these bodies, and how easily that sediment would break apart in those winds.
We constructed these predictions by piecing together results from a host of other research papers, and testing them against all the experimental data we could get our hands on.
We then applied the theories to each of the six bodies, drawing on telescope and satellite measurements of variables including gravity, atmospheric composition, surface temperature, and the strength of sediments.
Studies before ours have looked at either the wind speed threshold required to move sand, or the strength of various sediment particles. Our work combined these together — looking at how easily particles could break apart in sand-transporting weather on these bodies.
For example, we know Titan’s equator has sand dunes — but we aren’t sure of what sediment encircles the equator. Is it pure organic haze (opens in new tab) raining down from the atmosphere, or is it mixed with denser ice?
As it turns out, we discovered loose aggregates of organic haze would disintegrate upon collision if they were blown by the winds at Titan’s equator.
This implies Titan’s dunes probably aren’t made of purely organic haze. To build a dune, sediment must be blown around in the wind for a long time (some of Earth’s dune sands are a million years (opens in new tab) old).
We also found wind speeds would have to be excessively fast on Pluto to transport either methane or nitrogen ice (which is what Pluto’s dune sediments were hypothesized to be). This calls into question whether “dunes” on Pluto’s plain, Sputnik Planitia (opens in new tab), are dunes at all.
They may instead be sublimation waves (opens in new tab). These are dune-like landforms made from the sublimation of material, instead of sediment erosion (such as those seen on Mars’s north polar cap).
Our results for Mars suggest more dust is generated from wind-blown sand transport on Mars than on Earth. This suggests our models of the Martian atmosphere may not be effectively capturing Mars’s strong “katabatic” winds, which are cold gusts that blow downhill at night.
Potential for space exploration
This study comes at an interesting stage of space exploration.
For Mars, we have a relative abundance of observations; five space agencies are conducting active missions in orbit, or in situ. Studies such as ours help inform the objectives of these missions, and the paths taken by rovers such as Perseverance (opens in new tab) and Zhurong (opens in new tab).
In the outer reaches of the solar system, Triton has not been observed in detail since the NASA Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. There is currently a mission proposal (opens in new tab) which, if selected, would have a probe launched in 2031 to study Triton, before annihilating itself by flying into Neptune’s atmosphere.
Missions planned to Venus and Titan in the coming decade will revolutionize our understanding of these two. NASA’s Dragonfly (opens in new tab) mission, slated to leave Earth in 2027 and arrive on Titan in 2034, will land an uncrewed helicopter on the moon’s dunes.
Pluto was observed during a 2015 flyby (opens in new tab) by NASA’s ongoing New Horizons mission, but there are no plans to return.
This article is republished from The Conversation (opens in new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article (opens in new tab).
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
Photos show family moments before tragic NJ sand collapse killed teen
Exclusive photos show the family of a teenager who died in a freak sand hole collapse on the Jersey Shore having fun in the sun just moments before tragedy struck.
The last known images of the Caverly family appear to show Levi, 18, digging the deep pit with his 17-year-old sister as their parents, Angela and Todd, watched at Toms River’s Ocean Beach 3, according to a beach-goer who snapped the shot.
“They were digging so frigging deep. We’ve had storms and everything was wet, so the sand was firm. It wasn’t hard to dig that deep. I’d say by 12:30 p.m., you couldn’t even see them, they were so deep,” the beach-goer told The Post.
The witness said she accidentally captured the family in the background of a photo she shot of her husband around 12:50 p.m. Tuesday — just hours before the sand caved in on the teens, killing Levi and burying his sister up to her neck, according to police and witnesses.
The woman who took the shot said she got a bad feeling about the teens digging, and considered warning the family of the danger.
“I said to my husband, ‘I’d better go over there,’” she said.
The beach-goer, who asked not to be named, decided not to intervene — but later realized something was terribly wrong when she saw first responders arriving.
“At around 3:45 p.m., there were helicopters, fire engines. I came running over,” she said, adding: “These are the last family pictures, timestamped 12:49.”
The woman said she can’t get the tragedy out of her mind.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I know better. I’m the kind of person who gets a premonition, and I knew something wasn’t right about this hole,” she said. “I was bothered by it, and in hindsight I should have walked over here and said, ‘You’ve got to watch it. Don’t dig.’ That’s why there’s a lot of guilt.”
Another witness told The Post Wednesday that she assumed someone had drowned when she saw the number of cops rushing toward the shoreline.
“We got to the beach and said, ‘Oh no, somebody drowned.’ And then I saw all the shovels and everybody was going crazy,” said Frankie Graziano, 52, who was walking dogs with her sister.
She watched the father of the teens’ “agonized” facial expression as dozens of first responders tried to dig out his kids from the hole, which fire officials said was 10 feet deep.
“The hole was so deep that you could hardly see the men who were digging. The men were meticulously handing off buckets of sand in a row in a bucket brigade to get it away from the hole. I heard them say, ‘We’ve located him.’ He was obviously deceased because he’d been in there too long,” she said.
“I saw the dad, too. I saw his face. I could recognize the agony in it. My heart bleeds for him, because one day your life is whole and the next day it’s broken. And the guilt that goes along with it — I’m sure they’ll never be the same again,” she said.
The Caverly family, from Union, Maine, was on vacation when the freak accident unfolded, Toms River police said.
The siblings had spent hours digging the hole with Frisbees before it collapsed, according to police and other sources. It took first responders more than 2 1/2 hours to dig out Levi and his sister, who was treated for injuries at the scene, according to police.
Here’s a visualization of what exactly got nerfed with Luke’s medium Sand Blaster projectile in the Street Fighter 5 patch
Late last night, Capcom dropped a patch for Street Fighter 5 seemingly out of nowhere. There weren’t too many changes overall, but Luke did appear to receive the most attention in the form of slight nerfs — emphasis on “slight.”
One of the changes was focused on Luke’s medium Sand Blaster projectile. Capcom noted that this move had his active frames and overall range reduced, but by how much exactly?
According to the patch notes, Luke’s medium Sand Blaster has had its active frames reduced from 7 frames to 6 frames. For comparison, the light Sand Blaster still has 5 active frames while the heavy version of the beam projectile still has 9 active frames.
Theoretically, this means that Luke’s medium Sand Blaster has had its range reduced by one-seventh of what it was before. It’s not a huge nerf, but it’s sure to reduce Luke’s ability to control the opponent somewhat.
Ghanem recently posted a clip on Twitter that gives us a visualization of what exactly was changed about Luke’s infamous special. The clip perfectly shows how the move looked before the patch, and how it now appears.
Check it out below:
Luke got a slight nerf to his MP sandblast pic.twitter.com/DWkgklx70e
— Ghanem 🇰🇼 (@Ghoonem_) May 16, 2022
Surprising Discovery Reveals Sand Dunes ‘Breathe’ Water Vapor
Desert landscapes are not as lifeless as they look. Vast seas of sand dunes can not only grow, move, and interact with one another, a recent study suggests they can also ‘breathe’.
Using a super-sensitive probe that took decades to invent, researchers have shown sand dunes regularly inhale and exhale tiny amounts of water vapor.
The inhales are harder to achieve when the sand is drier. But when the wind flows over the surface of a dune, it carries off the top layer, creating a rapid change in surface moisture and pressure. As a result, “evanescent waves of humidity” from the atmosphere above flow downward.
The probe used to detect this flow is so sensitive to moisture, it can pick up tiny films of water on a single grain of sand.
When plunged into a dune in the Qatar desert, the instrument was able to scan the temperature, radiation, and moisture in its surroundings on a millimeter-scale resolution in just 20 seconds.
These measurements were repeated every 2.7 minutes for two whole days, amassing a huge quantity of data.
The authors know of no other instruments that can keep tabs on a sand dune with such high spatial or temporal resolution.
In combination with data on wind speed and direction as well as ambient temperature and humidity, the authors have revealed an extremely subtle behavior of sand in the desert.
Unlike heat, which is conducted through individual sand grains, water vapor seems to percolate between grains.
The pores of a sand dune, therefore, carry moisture from the surface downward, and these pathways are made and remade as the wind blows.
“The wind flows over the dune and as a result creates imbalances in the local pressure, which literally forces air to go into the sand and out of the sand. So the sand is breathing, like an organism breathes,” explains mechanical engineer Michel Louge from Cornell University.
This ‘breathing’ could be part of what allows microbes to live deep in sand dunes, even when no liquid water is available.
Interestingly, at the surface of the dune, the probe measured less evaporation than scientists were predicting. For such a hyper-arid region, the leaching of moisture from the sand dune to the atmosphere was a relatively slow chemical process.
“This is the first time that such low levels of humidity could be measured,” says Louge.
The sensitivity of the new probe is a feat of technology that could allow scientists to more accurately measure how agricultural lands turn to desert, a process exacerbated by climate change.
“The future of the Earth, if we continue this way, is a desert,” warns Louge.
Knowing more about how deserts work could, therefore, be really useful. And not just for a better understanding of our own planet.
Probes that can sensitively measure moisture within sand could help experts find invisible signs of water on, say, Mars.
Just because the desert looks deserted on the surface, doesn’t mean there isn’t life hiding below.
The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface.
Strange Quantum Object Successfully Created in The Lab For The First Time
Quantum mechanics – the behavior of the Universe at the smallest of scales – continues to surprise us, with scientists now having been able to successfully create a quantum object called a domain wall in laboratory settings.
For the first time, these walls can now be generated in the lab on demand, occurring when atoms stored at very cold temperatures – a scenario known as a Bose-Einstein condensate – group together in domains under certain conditions. The walls are the junctions between these domains.
The researchers creating these domain walls say they could end up shedding new light on many different areas of quantum mechanics, including quantum electronics, quantum memory, and the behavior of exotic quantum particles.
“It’s kind of like a sand dune in the desert – it’s made up of sand, but the dune acts like an object that behaves differently from individual grains of sand,” says physicist Kai-Xuan Yao from the University of Chicago.
There has been previous research into domain walls, but they’ve never been able to be created at will in the laboratory until now, giving scientists the ability to analyze them in new ways. It turns out they act as independent quantum objects, but not necessarily in the way that scientists would expect them to.
That unexpected behavior means domain walls join a class of objects called emergent phenomena, where particles that join together seem to follow a different set of physics laws than particles that are operating on their own.
One of the unusual observations made by the team is the way that domain walls react to electric fields, something which will need further study to untangle. For now, just being able to produce and manipulate these walls is an important step forward.
“We have a lot of experience in controlling atoms,” says physicist Cheng Chin from the University of Chicago. “We know if you push atoms to the right, they will move right. But here, if you push the domain wall to the right, it moves left.”
Part of the reason why the discovery is so important is that it could teach us more about how atoms behaved at the very beginning of the Universe’s existence: Particles that were once clumped together eventually expanded to form stars and planets, and scientists would like to know exactly how that happened.
This domain wall discovery falls under the umbrella of what’s known as dynamical gauge theory – a way to test and compute the dynamics of quantum phenomena in the lab. These discoveries could explain how emergent phenomena operate in everything from materials to the early Universe.
As well as looking backwards though, the researchers are also looking forwards. Once more is understood about how domain walls can be controlled, it could open up opportunities for new quantum technologies.
“There may be applications for this phenomenon in terms of making programmable quantum material or quantum information processors,” says Chin.
“It can be used to create a more robust way to store quantum information or enable new functions in materials. But before we can find that out, the first step is to understand how to control them.”
The research has been published in Nature.