Lifeboat Foundation

Jupiter mission’s Ganymede flyby offers a dramatic ride-along. It is one of the highlights mission scientists shared in a briefing at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth’s oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA.

Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.

Continue reading “Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms” »

From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct.

That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness is unknown to us. This means that sometimes, we can totally miss huge structures that you’d think should be right under our noses.

A new set of such enormous structures has now been unveiled at the outer regions of the Milky Way disk: massive, spinning filaments with unclear provenance. Astronomers will be conducting follow-up surveys to try and solve the mystery.

Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking – the most famous physicists of the twentieth century — both spent decades trying to find a single law that could explain how the world works on the scale of the atom and on the scale of galaxies. In short, the Standard Model describes the physics of the very small. General relativity describes the physics of the very large. The problem? The two theories tell different stories about the fundamental nature of reality. Einstein described the problem nearly a century ago in his 1923 Nobel lecture 0, telling the audience that a physicist who searches for, “an integrated theory cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” Even while on his deathbed, Einstein worked on a way to unite all the laws of physics under one unifying theory.

Just in time for Christmas.

Scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) will soon open a container of Moon soil that has gone untouched since it was collected by the Apollo 17 astronauts almost 50 years ago, a press statement reveals.

To open the sample, they will have to use a specialized piercing tool jokingly titled the “Apollo Can Opener” by members of the team. The tool was specially designed to open the specific soil sample, designated the number 73001.

Continue reading “An ‘Apollo Can Opener’ Will Soon Unseal a 50-Year-Old Box of Moon Soil” »

Intricate patterns in the movements of millions of stars are revealing the history of our home galaxy in rich detail – and could even pinpoint the events that gave birth to our sun.

The world’s next generation cosmic observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope 0, is due for launch on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Webb is a joint project between NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

The new machine-learning system can generate a 3D scene from an image about 15,000 times faster than other methods. Humans are pretty good at looking at a single two-dimensional image and understanding the full three-dimensional scene that it captures. Artificial intelligence agents are not.

The hunt is on for leptoquarks, particles beyond the limits of the standard model of particle physics —the best description we have so far of the physics that governs the forces of the Universe and its particles. These hypothetical particles could prove useful in explaining experimental and theoretical anomalies observed at particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and could help to unify theories of physics beyond the standard model, if researchers could just spot them.

A Christmas Eve present to the world.

In what can be considered as a Christmas present for the world, NASA is looking to launch its new space telescope on coming Friday, which also happens to be ‘Christmas Eve’.

On Friday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the agency will blast off the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope on December 24.

Continue reading “Finally, NASA to launch $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope on Christmas Eve” »