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Category: space – Page 390

Y Combinator’s latest cohort of founders have opinions on the future of fintech. One-fifth of the accelerator’s Summer 2022 batch, which spans 240 companies, is working on solving issues in the financial space. The pitches range from building the Square for micro-merchants in Latin America to creating a way to angel invest in your favorite athlete.

And while the pitches are diverse, some concentrations show key ways that a group of vetted entrepreneurs are thinking about the landscape’s shift in light of finicky venture markets, a downturn, and some public market meltdowns. The most popular problem area among this batch’s fintech cohort has to do with payments, which is unsurprising. The story really begins with which focus made second place: neobanks.

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Scientists have detected a sunspot that’s so huge it’s changing the way our sun vibrates.

Sunspots appear as dark blotches on the sun’s surface because they are cooler than the surrounding areas. They form where magnetic fields are particularly strong, driven by the electrically charged gases that constantly swirl inside our nearest star.

Sometimes these magnetic fields can be so intense that they prevent some heat from reaching the surface, forming a sunspot.

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A look at revolutionary new materials with seemingly impossible properties.
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Metamaterials offer many properties normally not found in nature, from superior lenses and communications to stealth applications, potentially offering invisibility. Today we’ll examine the science behind that and look at many other possible applications.

AMA thread tonight (Thursday March 29) at 6 PM EST over at /r/space on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/881rbl/ama_this_is_i…_anything/

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Mitch Armstrong.

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For all of history, there’s been an underlying but unspoken assumption about the laws that govern the Universe: If you know enough information about a system, you can predict precisely how that system will behave in the future. The assumption is, in other words, deterministic. The classical equations of motion — Newton’s laws — are completely deterministic. The laws of gravity, both Newton’s and Einstein’s, are deterministic. Even Maxwell’s equations, governing electricity and magnetism, are 100% deterministic as well.

But that picture of the Universe got turned on its head with a series of discoveries that began in the late 1800s. Starting with radioactivity and radioactive decay, humanity slowly uncovered the quantum nature of reality, casting doubt on the idea that we live in a deterministic Universe. Predictively, many aspects of reality could only be discussed in a statistical fashion: where a set of probable outcomes could be presented, but which one would occur, and when, could not be precisely established. The hopes of avoiding the necessity of “quantum spookiness” was championed by many, including Einstein, with the most compelling alternative to determinism put forth by Louis de Broglie and David Bohm. Decades later, Bohmian mechanics was finally put to an experimental test, where it failed spectacularly. Here’s how the best alternative to the spooky nature of reality simply didn’t hold up.

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It was the country’s 35th successful rocket launch this year.

China’s space agency, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) continues its impressive launch cadence for this year with its latest launch. The agency launched a mystery spy satellite that may gather military intelligence for the country, a report from Space.com reveals.

The satellite, called Yaogan 33, launched atop China’s Long March 4C rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 7:44 pm (23:44 GMT) on Friday, September 2.

China launched a mysterious spy satellite that will “monitor land, crop yield and natural disasters” but could also gather military intelligence, analysts think.

The Yaogan 33 (02) satellite lifted off atop China’s Long March 4C rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 7:44 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 2, (2344 GMT, or 7:44 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 3) in what was the east-Asia’s space power’s 35th successful launch this year.

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Are near-Earth objects a threat to Earth?

An asteroid is a metallic or rocky body that orbits the Sun within the asteroid belt, a region of space between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids are believed to be remnants of the early formation of the solar system. They are often called “minor planets”, although they do not have an atmosphere. They can be the size of a dwarf planet, but they can also be as small as 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter —which is the case of the tiniest asteroid ever found, 2015 TC25.

Most asteroids are not that small. If it were to hit the Earth, a sufficiently large asteroid may have a higher chance of surviving the entrance to our atmosphere and impacting the ground.

Source: ESO

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