News of the week selected by Impactscool – October 7th

A virtual tour of the Palace of Versailles

Go to Versailles from the comfort of your sofa. Google offers the opportunity to visit the palace with virtual reality, reconstructed through four terabytes of data.
Virtual visitors will therefore be able to admire sculptures, paintings and rooms of Versailes without going to France. However, will the experience offered by Google be at the height of a real visit?

Introducing Tunabot

A research team developed a robot fish used to study and refine new forms of propulsion for unmanned submarines. Robotics, once again, is inspired by nature for ever more efficient systems.
In fact, Tunabot, created by the collaboration between engineers and biologists, not only moves in the water like a fish, but beats its tail fast enough to reach speeds comparable to those of tuna.

We emit 100 times the CO2 of all the volcanoes in the world

Volcanoes damage the environment, but their effect is almost nil compared to the impact of human actions. The emissions caused by the sum of the eruptions of all the volcanoes in the world in a year, in fact, are equivalent to less than 1% of the CO2 produced by human activities.
According to a study carried out by an international research team, humans pump about 37 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases into the air every year, against the only 0.3 for which volcanoes are responsible.

Luca Parmitano is the new International Space Station commander

Since yesterday the command of the International Space Station has passed from the hands of the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin to Luca Parmitano, he is the first Italian to fill this role. The handover has also marked the official start of the expedition 61. “Thanks to Europe and Italy, I thank everyone for the trust you give me”, astroLuca stated live from the Space Station, also connected with the headquarters of the Italian Space Agency. The ceremony celebrated in orbit ended with the symbolic sound of a brass bell.