☀️ A giant solar prominence has just broken away from the Sun — one of the largest this year, according to Russia’s Space Research Institute (IKI RAS).

This time, we got lucky. Scientists say that if it had happened a day later, Earth would have been grazed by the edge of the blast — and if two days later, we’d have taken a direct hit.

Fortunately, the plasma cloud is heading safely into deep space, missing all planets.

Still, the spectacle was breathtaking — a fiery arch of superheated plasma tens of thousands of kilometers high, briefly suspended above the solar surface before being hurled away into the void.

#Space #Sun #SolarStorm #Science

🤖 A robot that feels touch with its whole body

German Aerospace Center (DLR) engineers have created SARA — a robot that can sense touch across its entire surface — without any external tactile skin or sensors.

How it works:
SARA uses only the force sensors built into its joints plus clever math.
When a person touches the robot’s body, the system calculates where and how strongly it was touched by analyzing subtle mechanical changes in the joints.

What it can do:
✍️ Recognize letters or numbers traced on its body — with 90–95% accuracy
🔘 Create “virtual buttons” anywhere — place a sticky note and the robot will remember that spot
🎚 Adjust settings — swipe across its arm like a slider to change speed or grip strength

Why it matters:
Traditional tactile robots rely on expensive, fragile “electronic skin.”
SARA skips that — turning its entire body into an interactive surface, like a smartphone screen.

Limitations:
Currently it can detect only two simultaneous touches, and sensitivity is lower than dedicated sensors.
But for most human–robot collaboration tasks, this minimalist design is a breakthrough.

#robotics #AI #DLR #innovation #HRI #sensors

☀️ A massive explosion erupted last night on the far side of the Sun (IKI RAS).

The bright ejection you see in the footage is plasma being hurled away from the Sun — fortunately, in the opposite direction from Earth.

The dark circle and stripe in the frame aren’t mysterious objects — they mark the blind zones of the coronagraph’s optics, used to block direct sunlight and make solar activity visible.

Even though the blast happened on the far side, it shows just how restless our star remains — constantly storing and releasing titanic amounts of magnetic energy.

#Sun #Space #Astronomy #SolarFlare

🚀 The first color footage of a FUSION REACTOR in action!

Tokamak Energy has just released incredible high-speed video — shot at 16,000 frames per second — showing the birth of plasma inside their fusion reactor.

In the clip, you can see a mesmerizing bright pink glow at the plasma’s edge — that’s light emitted as the superheated gas interacts with the reactor walls. The core itself remains invisible, simply because it’s millions of degrees hot — far beyond what any camera can capture.

This is what the future of clean, limitless energy looks like — contained in a magnetic field.

🎥 Full video here: watch the fusion magic

#fusion #energy #tokamak #plasma #science

Cyberpunk remote work, IRL.

Operators in the Philippines—paid about $250/month—are remotely piloting shelf-stocking robots in Japanese stores.
Today it’s teleoperation; tomorrow it’s training data. The real question: how fast until the robots learn enough to cut humans out of the loop?

#robots #teleoperation #retailtech #AI #futureofwork #science

🚀 Starcloud wants a 4-km, 5-GW GPU data center… in space

NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud is about to put a data-center-class GPU in orbit: their Starcloud-1 satellite launches in November with an NVIDIA H100 onboard — roughly 100× more GPU compute than any prior space system. The 60-kg, fridge-sized sat is a first step toward orbital GPU clouds.

Why it matters: today, satellites downlink raw data to Earth for processing. With an H100 upstairs, AI runs where data is born — cutting response times from hours to minutes. That’s big for sensors like SAR, which can spit out ~10 GB/s; instead of shipping it all home, the model can filter, segment, and alert in orbit.

Power & cooling: sunlight is (nearly) constant in orbit and space is an “infinite heat sink” via radiators, so no water-hungry chillers. Starcloud’s roadmap sketches a ~5 GW orbital data center fed by solar + radiator panels about 4 km × 4 km. Future birds aim to integrate Blackwell GPUs for up to 10× more performance versus Hopper.

Biz timeline: Crusoe (the “energy-first” cloud) plans to deploy capacity on Starcloud’s platform from 2026–27. Starcloud projects ~10× lower energy cost than Earth data centers long-term. A white paper even models a 40 MW cluster with a ~$8.2M launch cost — if Starship-class launch prices fall to ~$30/kg (a big if).

CEO Philip Johnston’s bet: within 10 years, most new data centers get built in space. Gamers, rejoice — astronauts might finally run DOOM at ultra.

#Starcloud #H100 #Blackwell #OrbitalCompute #SpaceDatacenter #SAR #EdgeAI
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@science

AI-powered parking never looked like this in my head.

A 35-kg Unitree G1 running BAAI’s THOR whole-body control just dragged a 1.4-ton car — ~40× its own weight. It’s a stunt, but it shows how fast balance, traction, and whole-body control are improving. Next stop: factory logistics, recovery, and precision vehicle positioning.

#Unitree #BAAI #THOR #Robotics #AI #Humanoids
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@science

🤖 “Hand-motion farms” are real — and they’re training robot hands.

In parts of India, workers strap a small camera to their forehead and spend hours doing simple, tactile tasks: folding towels, packing boxes, sorting everyday objects.
The POV videos go to U.S. labs, where neural networks study exactly how human fingers grip, pull, twist, and place—so robots can learn to copy the same motions.

Why this matters:
• Dexterity is the bottleneck. Vision models are great, but robots still struggle with cloth, cables, zipper pulls, and irregular objects. Human POV data captures the micro-moves that simulators miss.
• Imitation learning at scale. Hour after hour of clean, labeled hand maneuvers becomes training fuel for policies that generalize to new objects and tasks.
• Societal twist. It’s efficient—and a little dystopian: people meticulously teach the fine motor skills that may one day automate their own work.

Humans teaching their replacements, one folded towel at a time.

#AI #robots #imitationlearning #India #futureofwork