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Category: futurism

Italian mission adds to growing IRIDE space fleet

The Italian programme IRIDE, which provides public sector services based on data from its fleet of Earth observation constellations, has added eight satellites to its second constellation, Eaglet II.

The Eaglet II satellites lifted off on board a Falcon 9 rocket at 19:44 CET (10:44 local time), 28 November, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US. All satellites were placed into orbit about one hour after launch. Acquisition of signal for all satellites was confirmed several hours later by OHB’s Mission Control Centre in Rome.

The launch was a rideshare carrying numerous other satellites into orbit, including HydroGNSS (ESA’s first Scout mission under its FutureEO programme) and two ICEYE satellites for Greece.

Wafer-scale uniform epitaxy of transferable 2D single crystals for gate-all-around nanosheet field effect transistors

Gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet field-effect transistors (FETs) based on 2D semiconductors hold promise to complement silicon in future integrated circuits. Here, the authors report the wafer-scale growth of high-κ dielectric/semiconductor β-Bi2SeO5/Bi2O2Se/α-Bi2SeO5 heterostructures and their application for high performance 2D GAA FETs.

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Bichromatic moiré superlattices for tunable quadrupolar trions and correlated states

The authors show that bichromatic moiré superlattices formed by two mismatched moiré patterns in van der Waals semiconductor heterotrilayers stabilize quadrupolar moiré trions and enable electric-field tuning of excitonic and electronic ground states.

Why Space?: The Purpose of People

Life Boaters! I could use a great favour from you! Please buy a copy of my new book “Why Space? The Purpose of People” ASAP and leave me a good review (if you like it — if not — send me a sternly worded letter!) If you love it, buy a bunch and give them to every geek and nerd on your list.

I’m getting great reviews! Rod Roddenberry said I’m channeling the great captains of Star Trek, Dr. Greg Autry (future NASA CFO) called me the “godfather of commercial space.” Of course, you can bet those went on the cover — and now I have to buy them dinners for the rest of my life, but not too bad!

Look, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the Real Space Revolution. I straighten some of that out — from the inside.

But my primary goal is to give those in the “cause” language to explain why they are in this, and perhaps even to supply those who will go out there to open the High Frontier with the words they need to stay strong as they do.

In the book, I chronicle how people like some of you gave me Permission to Dream about doing what I do now. Something for which I will be forever grateful.

Help me — help you — help us. Buy the book! Read the book! Share the book!

(The audio version comes out in a week or so)

Continue reading “Why Space?: The Purpose of People” | >

Study finds AI can safely assist with some software annotation tasks

A dystopian future where advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems replace human decision-making has long been a trope of science fiction. The malevolent computer HAL, which takes control of the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a chilling example.

But rather than being fearful of automation, a more useful response is to consider what types of repetitive human tasks could be safely offloaded to AI, particularly with the advances of large language models (LLMs) that can sort through vast amounts of data, see patterns and make predictions.

Such is the area of research co-authored by Christoph Treude, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University (SMU). The team explores potential roles for LLMs in annotating software engineering artifacts, a process that is expensive and time-consuming when done manually.

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