TopNews

Hanson Robotics has created new humanoid robot with name Sophia that is capable of displaying variety of emotional faces. It even answers questions and calls itself destroyer of humanity. The robot has been designed as an application to be employed in domains of healthcare, therapy, education and customer service.

Talking Sophia was created by Hanson Robotics at SXSW in Austin, Texas. She has skin of patented silicon and her eyes work as a camera to identify individuals. Sophia robot also has voice recognition software and most remarkable is its ability to emulate more than 62 facial expressions. Her appearance is inspired from Audrey Hepburn and wife of Hanson Robotics CEO David Hanson.

For the first time ever, scientists have managed to see a star going supernova in visible light. The Kepler space telescope captured two exploding stars in 2011. At that time, explosion of two red supergiants took place in what are known as Type II supernovae.

Type II supernovae occur when the core of the star collapses and explodes violently in fast succession. Such kind of explosion’s shockwaves or shock breakout lasts just around 20 minutes due to which recording one of the events is a remarkable achievement for astronomy.

Scientists have discovered an interesting behavior among beetles as they care for their child and the females do not engage in mating till the time baby beetles are independent. Females also seek help from males in caring for baby beetles.

The research team noted that female burying beetles do not allow males to mate till the time baby beetles are independent. The study has appeared on Tuesday in journal Nature Communications.

Lead researcher Sandra Steiger, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Ulm in Germany, said they are quite a modern family. They studied 400 pairs of beetles during a time period of three years.

With the help of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, a UCL-led research team found that solar storms have triggered Jupiter’s intense ‘Northern Lights’ by producing a new X-ray aurora that is eight times brighter compared to normal and hundreds times more energetic in comparison to Earth’s aurora borealis.

This is for the first time ever that Jupiter's X-ray aurora has been analyzed during the arrival of a huge storm from the Sun at the planet.

The striking findings go together well with NASA's Juno mission this summer which is looking forward to understand the link between the two largest structures in the solar system, including the area of space managed by Jupiter's magnetic field and the region under the control of solar wind.

A new study has concluded that modern cityscapes have been possibly changing birds into better problem solvers compared to their counterparts living in the wild or rural regions. Published recently in Behavioral Ecology, the McGill University research paper discovered that city birds studied by researchers were dissimilar to their rural counterparts in a number of ways.

In a statement, first author Jean-Nicolas Audet, a PhD candidate at McGill, said, “We found that not only were birds from urbanized areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had a better immunity than rural birds”.

On Monday, scientists said climate change has moved French wines into unexplored territory, and may push producers to reposition, or abandon the grape varieties that played an important role in giving prominence to their vineyards.

Scientists reported in Nature Climate Change that since 1980, emerging conditions in northern climes like Champagne and Burgundy, and in sun-drenched Bordeaux, have vitally altered the ‘harvest equation’ that represented these regions. French wine is ranked among the highest in the world.