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SpaceX has introduced a compact version of satellite internet antennas. Called Starlink Mini, the antenna is portable and can be packed in a backpack. The product is dubbed revolutionary due to being a mobile option for satellite internet customers.

Currently, a limited number of antennas are being offered for just $599 each in an early access release. Starlink Mini integrates the WiFi router right inside the dish and can deliver over 100mbps speed.

Elon Musk claims the product has the power to change the world.

SpaceX was back at the launch pad Sunday with an updated rocket to finish off a Starlink mission it tried to send up earlier this month.

A Falcon 9 on the Starlink 10–2 lifted off at 1:15 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 amid cloudy skies with 22 more Starlink satellites for the company’s growing internet constellation that now numbers more than 6,100 satellites in orbit.

The launch came nine days since SpaceX last attempted to knock out the mission on June 14. That attempt had a rare scrub as the reached 0 and the rocket was ultimately brought back from the pad to allow for last week’s ASTRA 1P satellite launch to go up instead.

Building the quantum internet could be significantly simplified by leveraging existing telecommunications technologies and infrastructure. In recent years, researchers have identified defects in silicon—a widely used semiconductor material—that hold the potential for transmitting and storing quantum information across the prevalent telecommunications wavelengths. These silicon defects might just be the prime contenders to host qubits for efficient quantum communications.

Exploring Quantum Defects in Silicon

“It’s still a Wild West out there,” said Evelyn Hu, the Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “Even though new candidate defects are a promising quantum memory platform, there is often almost nothing known about why certain recipes are used to create them, and how you can rapidly characterize them and their interactions, even in ensembles. And ultimately, how can we fine-tune their behavior so they exhibit identical characteristics? If we are ever to make a technology out of this wide world of possibilities, we must have ways to characterize them better, faster, and more efficiently.”

The quantum internet would be a lot easier to build if we could use existing telecommunications technologies and infrastructure. Over the past few years, researchers have discovered defects in silicon—a ubiquitous semiconductor material—that could be used to send and store quantum information over widely used telecommunications wavelengths. Could these defects in silicon be the best choice among all the promising candidates to host qubits for quantum communications?

Researchers have devised a new method of building quantum computers, creating and “annihilating” qubits on demand, using a femtosecond laser to dope silicon with hydrogen.

This breakthrough could pave the way for quantum computers that use programmable optical qubits or “spin-photon qubits” to connect quantum nodes across a remote network.

In turn, this creates a quantum internet that is more secure and capable of transmitting more data than current optical-fiber information technologies.

Internet data scraping is one of the biggest fights in AI right now. Tech companies argue that anything on the public internet is fair game, but they are facing a barrage of lawsuits over their data practices and copyright. It will likely take years until clear rules are in place.

In the meantime, they are running out of training data to build even bigger, more powerful models, and to Meta, your posts are a gold mine.

If you’re uncomfortable with having Meta use your personal information and intellectual property to train its AI models in perpetuity, consider opting out. Although Meta does not guarantee it will allow this, it does say it will “review objection requests in accordance with relevant data protection laws.”