On this week’s news update…

Fossilized human footprints
A recent study by Scientists independently confirms that the fossilised footprints at White Sands National Park are between 21 thousand and 23 thousand years old.

Tidying Robot
Scientists from some of the top universities in the United States collaborate to create a robot that can tidy up.

World’s Largest Digital Camera
The world’s largest digital camera is currently being built and once complete it will take extremely detailed pictures of the universe.

First up…

White Sands National Park
White Sands National Park in New Mexico is home to the world’s largest collection of fossilized human and animal footprints from the ice age.

Now, a recent study of these footprints suggests that they are between 21 thousand and 23 thousand years old. This backs up the results of a different study from 2021, and together these studies suggest that humans were on the American continent thousands of years earlier than first thought.

Which would mean that they co-existed with ice age animals.

Some of the human footprints are set within the footprints of a giant sloth, which suggests the animal was being hunted. This research has led scientists to wonder what role humans may have played in the extinction of ice age animals. We may never know the exact answer, but these studies are vital in building our understanding of early history in America.

Up next …

Engineers from some of America’s top universities have collaborated to create a new robot.
Meet TidyBot, a robot that can clear up.

TidyBot
TidyBot uses a combination of cameras on its body, and cameras on the ceiling of the room it’s in, to navigate the room and identify and sort objects.

The robot was programmed to put items into categories such as clothes, types of food, toys and trash. Once it receives a few basic instructions on where a particular item goes it can then apply that same information to similar items.

So different colored cans all go in the blue bin, and a range of fruit should all go on the same shelf. To do this it uses artificial intelligence, applying information it has learned from the internet, to recognize and categorize objects it has not seen before.

The next challenge for TidyBot will be to adapt to different places so it can be more widely used outside of the lab. Once it does, it could mark the first step towards robots that can tidy becoming commonplace in the household.

And Finally…

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are building the world’s largest digital camera. The camera will be 1.65 meters tall and designed to take extremely detailed pictures of the universe which will allow scientists to further map space.

Vera Rubin
Once complete, the camera will be installed in Chile’s Vera Rubin Observatory, which is named after a pioneering American astronomer. Vera Rubin provided important evidence for the existence of dark matter.

dark matter
Invisible to the eye, we can’t see dark matter in the same way we can see other forms of matter, like stars and planets. So because it is difficult to detect, scientists still don’t know much about it. They hope that this new camera will deepen our understanding of dark matter and the make up of the universe.

That's all for this week, we'll see you next time!