Folklore suggests that a full moon has a strong effect on sleep. But the reality is more complex, and lifestyle habits like screen use before bedtime are likely to have a larger effect.
Category: space – Page 50
Novel memristor wafer integration technology paves the way for brain-like AI chips
A research team led by Professor Sanghyeon Choi from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST has successfully developed a memristor, which is gaining recognition as a next-generation semiconductor device, through mass-integration at the wafer scale.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, proposes a new technological platform for implementing a highly integrated AI semiconductor replicating the human brain, overcoming the limitations of conventional semiconductors.
The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons and around 100 trillion synapses, allowing it to store and process enormous amounts of information within a compact space.
Science’s best answer to “where did the Universe come from?”
Perhaps no existential question looms larger than that of our ultimate cosmic origins. At long last, science has provided the answers.
Physicists Just Ruled Out The Universe Being a Simulation
A question that has vexed physicists for the past century may finally have a solution – but perhaps not the one everyone was hoping for.
In a new, detailed breakdown of current theory, a team of physicists led by Mir Faizal of the University of British Columbia has shown that there is no universal “Theory of Everything” that neatly reconciles general relativity with quantum mechanics – at least, not an algorithmic one.
A natural consequence of this is that the Universe can’t be a simulation, since any such simulations would have to operate algorithmically.
Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Changed Color Again, And Shows Signs Of Non-Gravitational Acceleration
Behind the Sun, the comet appears to show signs of acceleration beyond what is expected by gravity. And for reasons not yet clear, it appears to have changed color.
Intelligence Exists in Platonic Space — We Just Download It
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The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges —Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.
The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair.
XRISM catches a pulsar’s cosmic wind—and sees a surprising result
The universe is a strange place. The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) orbiting observatory recently highlighted this fact, when it was turned on a pulsar to document its powerful cosmic winds.
The XRISM observatory is a joint mission for NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission was also a replacement for the ill-fated Hitomi X-ray observatory, which failed shortly after launch in 2016.
The discovery comes courtesy of ESA’s Resolve instrument, a soft X-ray spectrometer aboard XRISM. The study looked at neutron star GX 13+1. This is a strong X-ray source located in the constellation Sagittarius, very near the galactic plane towards the core of our galaxy. GX 13+1 is about 23,000 light-years distant. The system is a binary, consisting of a pulsar and a massive star in a 24.5-day orbit.