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WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic says production of its new suborbital spaceplanes remains on track to allow commercial flights to begin in the middle of next year as it contemplates restarting ticket sales.

The company spent much of a May 15 earnings call talking about the technical progress it has made in the assembly of its first Delta-class vehicles, or SpaceShips, in areas such as structures, propulsion and avionics.

“An enormous amount of work is taking place across our company as well as our key suppliers,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in the call. Earlier in the day, the company released a video highlighting current progress on the vehicle, and Colglazier said the company would start a regular series of updates on assembly in June.

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WASHINGTON — Norway signed the Artemis Accords May 15, a sign that the new administration continues to advance the document outlining best practices for responsible space exploration.

Cecilie Myrseth, Norway’s minister for trade and industry, signed the Accords during an event at the headquarters of the Norwegian Space Agency in Oslo, attended by the head of the agency as well as the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy there.

“This is an important step for enabling Norway to contribute to broader international cooperation to ensure the peaceful exploration and use of outer space,” Myrseth said in a statement.

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MIT didn’t name the student in its statement Friday, but it did name the paper. That paper, by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was covered by The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets.

In a press release, MIT said it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”

The university said the author of the paper is no longer at MIT.

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Inherited mutations in the gene BRCA2 significantly increase the risk of carriers to breast and ovarian cancers. BRCA2, a crucial player in the body’s DNA repair system, aids in repairing damaged DNA. This function is particularly intriguing as our cells constantly divide and replicate, passing on any genetic damage to newly developing cells.

Because of its significant role in maintaining genetic stability, BRCA2 belongs to a class of genes known as tumor suppressors. These genes code for proteins that control how often cells divide. However, when a tumor suppressor gene, such as BRCA2, undergoes a mutational change, the protein it codes for won’t function normally, resulting in uncontrolled cell division and, in some circumstances, cancer development.

BRCA2 predisposes carriers to cancer and research has shown that BRCA2-deficient tumors respond to therapies known as PARP inhibitors, which block the function of the poly ADP-ribose polymerase 1 (PARP1) protein. PARP1 becomes activated in tumors with BRCA2 mutations, resulting in the continued abnormal growth of damaged DNA.

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In the new study, however, these shapes appeared in calculations describing the energy radiated as gravitational waves when two black holes cruised past one another. This marks the first time they’ve appeared in a context that could, in principle, be tested through real-world experiments.

Mogull likens their emergence to switching from a magnifying glass to a microscope, revealing features and patterns previously undetectable. “The appearance of such structures sheds new light on the sorts of mathematical objects that nature is built from,” he said.

These findings are expected to significantly enhance future theoretical models that aim to predict gravitational wave signatures. Such improvements will be crucial as next-generation gravitational wave detectors — including the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and the Einstein Telescope in Europe — come online in the years ahead.

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A team of AI researchers at the Alibaba Group’s Tongyi Lab, has debuted a new approach to training LLMs; one that costs much less than those now currently in use. Their paper is posted on the arXiv preprint server.

As LLMs such as ChatGPT have become mainstream, the resources and associated of running them have skyrocketed, forcing AI makers to look for ways to get the same or better results using other techniques. To this end, the team working at the Tongyi Lab has found a way to train LLMs in a new way that uses far fewer resources.

The idea behind ZeroSearch is to no longer use API calls to search engines to amass search results as a way to train an LLM. Their method instead uses simulated AI-generated documents to mimic the output from traditional search engines, such as Google.

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White light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the semiconductor devices underpinning the functioning of countless lighting technologies on the market today, were first released to the public in 1996. Following their commercial debut, these devices have fueled significant advancements within the electronics and lighting industry, due to their remarkable energy efficiencies and extended lifespans.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and ETH Zurich recently carried out a study aimed at re-tracing the development of white LEDs over the past three decades, as well as trends in their costs and innovations in other engineering fields that fueled their advancement. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, was part of a larger research project that investigated the factors driving innovation in the clean energy sector.

“As part of our research, we looked at three key technologies at the forefront of the ongoing energy transition: solar photovoltaics for , lithium-ion batteries for , and white LEDs for efficient energy use in lighting,” Michael P. Weinold, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

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