Interstellar Object

On December 18th 2017, scientists announced in a paper posted to the journal Nature Astronomy, that an object believed to have come from another solar system may be covered in a thick layer of organic material. The cigar shaped object, which was first observed on October 19th 2017 by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii, was first thought to be a comet. However, the object's path and speed suggested otherwise.

The object first known as 1I/2017 U1 (I is for interstellar), has been renamed Oumuamua. It is believed to be 1,300 ft or 400 meters long and possibly 10 times as long as it is wide. It traveled around our sun at a speed of 196,000 miles per hour. Oumuamua's approach was from outside the plane of the ecliptic, on a trajectory from the direction of the star Vega, in the constellation Lyra. It is thought that its organic covering may protect a water rich interior.

Kepler Discovers A Solar System With Eight Planets

On December 14th 2017, NASA announced that its Kepler Space telescope had discover another solar system that has eight planets just our own. Using Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI), scientists were able to search though "weak" data to find an eight planet orbiting a star that was previously discovered in 2014. Kepler-90 as it is called, is an earth like star that is 2,545 light years from Earth and until now was believed to have only seven planets in its system.

The newly discovered planet is being called Kepler-90i. It is a hot, rocky planet that orbits its star every 14.4 days. The planet was discovered by Andrew Vanderburg of the University of Texas at Austin with the help of Google Machine Learning researcher, Christopher Shallue. The discovery was made by the Machine Learning technology, which mimics a neural network, as in the human brain. It was able to learn to recognize weak transits while it sifted though previously search data.

Disney Buys Fox

On December 14th 2017, The Walt Disney Company announced that is buying 21st century Fox's film, TV and international assets. Disney has agreed to pay $54.2 billion for much of the company owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fox will be keeping its Fox Broadcasting Network, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2, and Big Ten Network. As part of the deal, Disney will be getting Hulu which would serve to help the company in its effort to compete with Netflix.

The total value of the deal is $66.1 billion, as Disney will be assuming $13.7 billion of Fox's debt. Bob Iger, Disney's chief executive, will remain in charge of the company until 2021. The deal now awaits approval of federal regulators.

Scientists Create Robot Muscles From Origami

On November 27th 2017, scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), announced in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), that they have successfully created robotic muscles made from metal or plastic skeletons. The muscles, which are covered in liquid or air and then sealed in plastic or fabric, can lift up to a thousand times their own weight. 

The new flexible robots use a folding origami structure combined with the use of a vacuum. Each muscle is filled with either air or fluid that is manipulated with an electric pump. In this way the structures can be expanded or contracted. They can move according to their shape and can grip, twist, and lift, just like the real muscles of a human arm. Professor Robert J. Wood of Harvard says the actuators are scalable and can be made in sizes from a few milometers up to a meter.