If we hope to someday inhabit other planets, astronauts will need more sources of nourishment than the packets of freeze-dried space food they can take with them. It’s not just the nutritional value of fresh produce that has NASA interested in growing greens — researchers think that astronauts would also get a psychological boost from farming.
To that end, NASA collaborated with researchers at the University of Arizona to design an inflatable greenhouse that can be deployed in space and offer astronauts a sustainable bounty of fresh vegetables.
The greenhouse prototype was built as a “bioregenerative life support system” — meaning it recycles air, waste, and water. As astronauts breathe out, they release carbon dioxide, which the plants use to generate oxygen through photosynthesis. Water flows through the roots and back to a storage tank where it’s oxygenated and fortified in a constant cycle. To avoid radiation, the greenhouses would likely be buried under soil, and so would require an artificial light source.
“We’re mimicking what the plants would have if they were on Earth and make use of these processes for life support,” Gene Giacomelli, director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona, said in a statement to NASA. “The entire system of the lunar greenhouse does represent, in a small way, the biological systems that are here on Earth.”
One of the main goals of future space travel is to carry as little cargo as possible by using things found along the way, a principle called in-situ resource utilization. It’s expensive to launch a rocket. The lighter the cargo, the cheaper the costs. NASA hopes to collect resources like water from regions off Earth rather than carrying it all along.
Moving forward, the researchers will use similar greenhouse prototypes to determine if produce grown in the eighteen-foot-long, eight-foot-wide cylinders could sustain a group of astronauts.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.