The first in history a robot performs surgery in space under the guidance of doctors from Earth

A team of Earth-based doctors performed the first-ever remote-controlled space surgery using a robot aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The successful procedure, which saw surgeons cut rubber bands as a substitute for human tissue, could pave the way for a new era of space medicine that facilitates long missions to Mars and beyond.

The spaceMIRA robot, made by engineers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, had a signal arrival time of two-thirds to three-quarters of a second.

Weighing only 0.9 kg, the small and flexible surgical robot can operate in pre-programmed telesurgical modes. The successful experiment in space shows its potential to become an accessible and less complex surgical robot for communities on Earth that lack specialized surgeons.

NASA astronaut Yasmine Moghbeli said: “These surgeries will enable us to carry out these long-duration missions, far from Earth. So it is a real game changer.”

Virtual Incision, a private company created to develop the robot, said SpaceMIRA is currently the only robotic surgery device small enough to be suitable for space missions.

Six surgeons from Lincoln, Nebraska, remotely directed the robot to perform multiple surgeries on tissue. The tests not only demonstrated the robot's prowess in simulating surgical operations using the hands, but also demonstrated its flexibility in overcoming the time delay in controlling it from the ground.

NASA has been researching and investing in this technology for decades, hoping to one day use it for deep space missions.

“Longer space missions increase the likelihood that crew members will require surgical procedures, whether simple stitches or emergency appendectomy,” the agency wrote in a blog post detailing the mission. “The results of this achievement could support the development of automated systems to perform these procedures.”

Aside from long-term space missions, Virtual Incision said its robot could be used to perform surgeries in remote locations on Earth, providing any operating room with the option of accessing specialized surgeons.

John Murphy, the company's CEO, added: "Although it is exciting to have our technology in space, we expect the impact of this research to be even more pronounced on Earth."

He noted that the use of miniRAS has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling life-saving interventions to be performed by professionals located thousands of miles away.

"Yandex Translator" is the world's first in terms of quality of translation from English and Russian

"Yandex Translator" ranked first in the world among online translation applications in terms of the quality of translation from English to Russian, according to the results of the independent international evaluation DiBiMT.

The results of the evaluation were published by the Italian institutes Sapienza and SSML Carlo Bo

The evaluation showed that Yandex Translator was more accurate than others in determining the meanings of certain words depending on their position in the sentence, and made the fewest possible semantic errors. The application also achieved advanced positions in working with other languages, as it won third place in translation from English into Chinese, German, Italian, and Spanish.

During the evaluation, experts collected a database of several thousand English sentences with homonymous nouns, then the applications translated them, and specific criteria for correct translation were determined. The accuracy of the translation was also evaluated by professional translators.

Yandex Translator uses machine translation technology developed by the company based on neural networks. The application analyzes text paragraphs and identifies translation patterns in different cases of phrases according to their location in the sentence. Therefore, during translation, it is important not to divide the sentence into words and phrases, but rather to translate it as a whole.