The First Robot Operated Hospital In North America Has Finally Opened

We pulled together the week’s top tech stories, just for you:

1. Living in the ‘90s? So are Underwater Wireless Networks Pro tip for anybody experiencing the frustration of heavy lag when you’re trying to watch a streaming video: You might be underwater. Try unplugging your router and plugging it back in again, once you’ve made it to dry land. via: Cellular News

2. Man survives 48 straight hours in VR with no reported nausea This is great news for pretty much everybody involved. Of course, if you believe in the many-worlds theory, there’s some alternate timeline where two whole days of this guy’s life were a real bummer. via: @arstechnica

3. When Virtual Reality Meets Education A bold step forward in the radical plan to unseat “time for recess!” as the most exciting thing students hear at school. via: @techcrunch

4. In a Huge Breakthrough, Google’s AI Beats a Top Player at the Game of Go One 2,500-year-old game. One 19-by-19 grid. Two players. One human brain. One state-of-the-art neural network. 170 GPU cards. 1,200 standard processors. 250 possible moves for any given turn. (Go figures). via: @wired

XKCD has been tapped to teach high schoolers science

What if your most fearsome high school subjects like physics, chemistry and biology could be explained in humorous stick-figure drawings? That is exactly what textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hopes to do by hiring 31-year-old artist and XKCD creator Randall Munroe to illustrate lessons. But wait, the collaboration gets even better for students.

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Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean mental illness don’t exist.

www.thebpmag.com

The simple discovery that a piece of wire mesh can stop a flame in its tracks saved the lives of thousands of miners.

This demonstration shows how a simple lamp made of gauze could contain the open candle flames that miners used before 1815. With the safety lamp, any potential explosions would stay contained and never escalate to dangerous levels (although mining remained an extremely dangerous occupation).

Watch the whole demo and hear the full story here.

Scientists find “the holy grail of astronomy” after uncovering a galaxy that is made up of mostly dark matter

Mars will one day have a ring system due to Phobos, the planet’s small moon, being crushed by tidal forces

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket successfully launches to the edge of space and lands vertically back on Earth

A new exoplanet called GJ1132b is found 39 light-years away, making it the closest Earth-sized exoplanet ever discovered

Researchers make ultra-thin diamond nanothreads, which could help us build a space elevator

A blue Neptune-like exoplanet, which seems to have skies like Earth, is found orbiting a red dwarf star

A staggering 574 newly discovered massive galaxies are revealed that date back to the beginnings of the universe

New research shows that galaxies were far more efficient at making stars during the first 10% of history than they are now

Last week’s chemistry news: Electronic plants, anti-viral ‘superballs’, and more! http://goo.gl/Tt21g8

Tesla’s cheapest Model X is priced at $80,000

Solar System: 2016 Preview

What do we have planned for 2016? A return to the king of planets. A survey of mysterious Ceres. More postcards from Pluto. Anyone who follows solar system exploration in 2016 is in for quite a ride. Last year was one for the record books – and now here are 10 things to look forward to in the new year. See also: what we have planned agency wide for 2016.

Juno Arrives at Jupiter

July 4, 2016 is arrival day for the Juno mission, the first sent expressly to study the largest planet in the solar system since our Galileo mission in the 1990s. Humans have been studying Jupiter for hundreds of years, yet many basic questions about the gas world remain: How did it form? What is its internal structure? Exactly how does it generate its vast magnetic field? What can it tell us about the formation of other planets inside and outside our solar system? Beginning in July, we’ll be a little closer to the answers.

OSIRIS-REx Takes Flight

The OSIRIS-REx mission, short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, sets sail for an asteroid in September. The spacecraft will use a robotic arm to pluck samples from the asteroid Bennu to help better explain our solar system’s formation and even find clues to how life began.

Dawn Sees Ceres Up Close

After an odyssey of many years and millions of miles, in December the Dawn spacecraft entered its final, lowest mapping orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. The intriguing world’s odd mountains, craters and salty deposits are ready for their close-ups. We can expect new images of the starkly beautiful surface for months.

Cassini Commences Its Grand Finale

In late 2016, the Cassini spacecraft will begin a daring set of orbits called the Grand Finale, which will be in some ways like a whole new mission. Beginning this year and extending into next, the spacecraft will repeatedly climb high above Saturn’s poles, flying just outside its narrow F ring 20 times. After a last targeted Titan flyby, the spacecraft will then dive between Saturn’s uppermost atmosphere and its innermost ring 22 times. As Cassini plunges past Saturn, the spacecraft will collect rich and valuable information far beyond the mission’s original plan.

New Horizons Sends More Postcards from Pluto

We have stared slack-jawed at the images and discoveries from last year’s Pluto flyby, but the fact is that most of the data that New Horizons collected remains on board the spacecraft. In 2016, we’ll see a steady release of new pictures — and very likely some expanded answers to longstanding questions.

Mars Missions March Forward

With five of our missions continuing their Martian quests, 2016 should be a good year for discoveries on the Red Planet.

Mars Odyssey

Mars Opportunity

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Mars Curiosity

MAVEN

Mercury Transits the Sun

A transit is a very rare astronomical event in which a planet passes across the face of the sun. In May, Mercury will transit the sun, on of only thirteen Mercury transits each century on average.

LRO Keeps an Eagle Eye On the Moon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will extend its run in 2016, scanning the moon’s surface with its sharp-eyed instruments, investigating everything from lava tube skylights to changes at the Apollo landing sites.

Spacecraft Fly Under Many Flags

Our partner agencies around the world will be flying several new or continuing planetary missions to destinations across the solar system:

Akatsuki at Venus

ExoMars

Mars Express

Mars Orbiter Mission

Rosetta at Comet 67/P

Technology Demonstration Missions Push the Envelope

We’re always looking for new frontiers on distant worlds, as well as the technology that will take us there. This year, several missions are planned to take new ideas for a spin in space:

Deep Space Atomic Clock

NODES

LDSD

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

The robots sent into Fukushima have 'died'

Not good...

The remote-controlled robots that were sent into the site of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan have reportedly ‘died’, thanks to incredibly high amounts of leaked radiation destroying their wiring.

The robots - which take years to manufacture - were designed to swim through the underwater tunnels of the now-defunct cooling pools, and remove hundreds of extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods. But it looks like that’s not going to happen any time soon.

In 2011, one of the most severe earthquakes in recorded history triggered a 10-metre-high tsunami that crashed into Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, leading to several meltdowns that killed nearly 19,000 people and destroyed the homes and jobs of 160,000.