Meet Esther the first ever human scale tennis playing robot. Robots have been introduced into

Scientists have developed new ultrasound technology that can induce immediate “hibernation”, they say. The system can be aimed at the head and bring on “torpor” a state similar to hibernation where mammals suppress their metabolism, reduce their body temperature and slow down other processes. The researchers behind the new system successfully brought it on in mice and rats, after pointing the ultrasound pulses at the animals’ heads. They suggest that it could work in humans – and might have important applications for long-distance space flight or medicine, they say. While further work is needed to understand how it might work on people, they suggest that it could be used when people have experienced acute emergencies or severe disease, for instance. If someone is in a car accident, for instance, they could essentially be put on ice until their organs are used for transplantation, for instance. It might also be useful in long journeys through space, where it would help reduce the amount of resources that people might stay alive if they are travelling to Mars or other distant locations. Mammals and birds keep high body temperatures and burn through a lot of energy. That characteristic is useful host of ways, but almost means that they require a lot of food and other resources. Some animals are able to limit the drawbacks of that situation by inducing torpor, which turns down many of those processes. It means that they use less energy, but are able to come back to living as normal after, without damage to their body. Humans are not able to do that. But if they were, it would be incredibly useful – which has led to the search for a noninvasive, safe and reliable way of inducing that state. The scientists found that directing ultrasound pulses at mice’s heads for around 10 seconds brought on the same conditions as torpor, with their heart rate slowing, their body temperature cooling and their metabolism slowing. They also built a special system that was able to measure that body temperature and send more of those pulses if a mouse appeared to be coming back to normal. Without that, however, the mice would wake back up again, returning to normal metabolism and body temperature. There are still a host of dangers, however. Experiments have shown that it is dangerous to bring animals back from those deep “torpid” states, and that they might not recover. If the mice were in cold environments, for instance, they did not spontaneously wake up. And any experiments in humans would be at risk of repeating those safety issues for people. The work is described in a new paper, ‘Induction of a torpor-like hypothermic and hypometabolic state in rodents by ultrasound’, published in Nature. Read More Apple lays bare danger of losing your health data What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? Electric car range set to double with first production of breakthrough battery Apple lays bare danger of losing your health data What is Twitter Spaces and why did it go so wrong during DeSantis’s 2024 launch? Electric car range set to double with first production of breakthrough battery

Bitcoin mining requires as much water annually as all of the baths in Britain, according to a new analysis of the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact. Financial economist Alex de Vries, who runs the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, estimated that roughly 1.6 trillion litres of water each year is required to cool the computers used to support the cryptocurrency’s network. Separate research from 2018 found that 1.6 trillion litres is how much bath water the British public sends down the plughole every year – enough to fill roughly 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The latest analysis, which was published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability on Wednesday, suggested that a single bitcoin transaction could use as much water as a backyard swimming pool. “Many parts of the world are experiencing droughts, and fresh water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource,” said Mr de Vries. “If we continue to use this valuable resource for making useless computations, I think that reality is really painful.” The “useless computations” refer to the complex calculations required to mint new units of the cryptocurrency and verify transactions on the network. The use of water to cool the necessary hardware could be significantly reduced if miners shifted their operations underwater, with companies like Microsoft already placing some of their data centres in the ocean in order to cool them. Earlier this month, China announced that it had begun building the world’s largest underwater data centre in order to reduce electricity and water costs. Bitcoin has previously been criticised for its electricity consumption, with Mr de Vries’s Energy Consumption Index estimating that the cryptocurrency’s network uses roughly as much electricity as the country of Poland. Bitcoin advocates have refuted accusations relating to bitcoin’s electricity consumption, claiming that miners are increasingly turning to renewable energy sources as the costs of wind and solar drop. A recently published study suggests bitcoin mining could actually help speed up the transition to renewable energy, as solar and wind energy installations could earn hundreds of millions of dollars mining bitcoin during periods of excess electricity generation. ”These rewards can act as an incentive for miners to adopt clean energy sources, which can lead to combined positive effects on climate change mitigation, improved renewable power capacity, and additional profits during pre-commercial operation of wind and solar farms,” said Apoorv Lal, a doctoral student at Cornell University who was involved in the research. Read More Bitcoin mining could supercharge transition to renewables, study claims Bitcoin mining rate hits all-time high amid record-breaking prediction for 2024 Elon Musk scam ads appear on X as key advertisers depart Scientists find planets moving around in strange ‘rhythm’ Astronomers find unprecedented ‘disc’ around distant planet Scientists have cooked ‘alien haze’ that could help find life

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