Lifeboat Foundation

A fundamental decision on a new station would be made by the end of this year, he said.

Rogozin said that current negotiations with NASA on the future of the ISS were “shallow”. He speculated that ISS’s life cycle would be repeatedly prolonged not by several years, but by one year. Also, he said it might be possible to extend the service life not of the whole station, but of its individual modules.

“On the sidelines of the April 9 launch we plan to hold technical consultations with NASA,” Rogozin said, adding there was a possibility of configuring the Lunar orbital platform Gateway for its possible docking with Russia’s new generation spacecraft Oryol.

Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering.

In a new Nature paper, Slonim and colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has performed very decently—with a human audience being the judge of that. “However, it is still somewhat inferior on average to the results obtained by expert human debaters,” says Slonim.

Continue reading “AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too” »

A theoretical way to create a sub-light warp drive has been described that does not require negative mass. This could enable fast travel through our Solar System and onwards to distant star systems.

A unique — details are a bit sketch 😉 looks amazing tho!

Requirements:

Continue reading “Russian Aerospace-Robotics Farm is hiring” »

Graph representations can solve complex problems in natural science, as patterns of connectivity can give rise to a magnitude of emergent phenomena. Graph-based approaches are specifically important during quantum communication, alongside quantum search algorithms in highly branched quantum networks. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Max Ehrhardt and a team of scientists in physics, experimental physics and quantum science in Germany introduced a hitherto unidentified paradigm to directly realize excitation dynamics associated with three-dimensional networks. To accomplish this, they explored the hybrid action of space and polarization degrees of freedom of photon pairs inside complex waveguide circuits. The team experimentally explored multiparticle quantum walks on complex and highly connected graphs as testbeds to pave the way to explore the potential applications of fermionic dynamics in integrated photonics.

Complex networks

Complex networks can occur across diverse fields of science, ranging from biological signaling pathways and biochemical molecules to exhibit efficient energy transport to neuromorphic circuits across to social interactions across the internet. Such structures are typically modeled using graphs whose complexity relies on the number of nodes and linkage patterns between them. The physical representation of a graph is limited by their requirement for arrangement in three-dimensional (3D) space. The human brain is a marked example of scaling behavior that is unfavorable for physical simulation due to its staggering number of 80 billion neurons, dwarfed by 100 trillion synapses that allow the flow of signals between them. Despite the number of comparably miniscule volume of nodes, discrete quantum systems faced a number of challenges owing to complex network topologies, efficient multipartite quantum communications and search algorithms.

In my last post, I talked about the idea of warp drive and whether it might one day be possible. Today I’ll talk about another faster-than-light trick: wormholes.

Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It’s based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube.

This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole, or white hole, on the other end.

“For those that know rockets, this is a ridiculously hard thing.”

As this is the first Falcon 9 rocket to launch nine missions, it raises the prospect of a first stage making a tenth flight in the near future, probably within a month or two. Reaching ten flights would accomplish one of the main goals set by SpaceX with the Falcon 9 rocket, after optimizing the vehicle for reuse about three years ago.

The company debuted its “Block 5” version of the Falcon 9 rocket in May 2018, and since then this vehicle has flown 55 missions, all of which have successfully delivered their payloads to orbit. More importantly, the changes SpaceX engineers incorporated into this new rocket to ensure its robustness for reuse, such as strengthening its “Octaweb” engine bay, have largely been validated.

Continue reading “After Sunday’s launch, SpaceX is on the cusp of a historic reuse milestone” »

Starship SN11 will re-attempt a Static Fire test Tuesday – following a scrub on Monday – ahead of a potential flight later this week. Forever subject to change due to numerous considerations – ranging from weather, hardware parameters, and paperwork approval – SN11 will mark the final test of this iteration of Starship before the program moves into the next phase of testing.

Following SN11’s flight, SpaceX will move on to SN15, 16, and 17, alongside testing with Super Heavy prototypes BN1 and BN2, before shooting for an orbital launch with SN20 and BN3. In typical SpaceX-style, that orbital launch has an astonishing – and unlikely – “by July 1” target. At the very least, this target portrays SpaceX’s Starship drive to push the vehicle into operation. SN11:

OEC is proud to associate with these space women from Africa.

In celebration of International Women’s Day, meet three inspiring pioneers shaping the future of space science and technology in South Africa and Zimbabwe.