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Archive for the ‘space’ category: Page 643

Apr 16, 2019

Building A Mars Habitat

Posted by in categories: habitats, space

This is what the first Mars colony could be living in 🔮 🚀.

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Apr 15, 2019

Astronomers take first, high-resolution look at huge star-forming region of Milky Way

Posted by in categories: particle physics, space

Astronomers from the United States and South Korea have made the first high-resolution, radio telescope observations of the molecular clouds within a massive star-forming region of the outer Milky Way.

“This region is behind a nearby cloud of dust and gas,” said Charles Kerton, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and a member of the study team. “The cloud blocks the light and so we have to use infrared or radio observations to study it.”

The Milky Way region is called CTB 102. It’s about 14,000 light years from Earth. It’s classified as an HII region, meaning it contains clouds of ionized—charged—hydrogen atoms. And, because of its distance from Earth and the dust and gas in between, it has been difficult to study.

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Apr 15, 2019

The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world

Posted by in categories: evolution, finance, physics, space

Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in “chunks,” but rather “flows,” smoothly and continuously. So they often model the dynamics of physical systems as continuous-time “Markov processes,” named after mathematician Andrey Markov. Indeed, scientists have used these processes to investigate a range of real-world processes from folding proteins, to evolving ecosystems, to shifting financial markets, with astonishing success.

However, invariably a scientist can only observe the state of a system at discrete times, separated by some gap, rather than continually. For example, a stock market analyst might repeatedly observe how the state of the market at the beginning of one day is related to the state of the market at the beginning of the next day, building up a conditional probability distribution of what the state of the second day is given the state at the first day.

In a pair of papers, one appearing in this week’s Nature Communications and one appearing recently in the New Journal of Physics, physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that in order for such two– dynamics over a set of “visible states” to arise from a continuous-time Markov process, that Markov process must actually unfold over a larger space, one that includes hidden states in addition to the visible ones. They further prove that the evolution between such a pair of times must proceed in a finite number of “hidden timesteps”, subdividing the interval between those two times. (Strictly speaking, this proof holds whenever that evolution from the earlier time to the later time is noise-free—see paper for technical details.)

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Apr 15, 2019

Concept unveiled for village on the moon

Posted by in category: space

The concept design has been unveiled for Moon Village, the first permanent human settlement on the lunar surface.

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Apr 14, 2019

Spot the Andromeda Galaxy Overhead This Week

Posted by in category: space

Watch for Andromeda in the early evening night sky this fall.

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Apr 14, 2019

Our Milky Way Galaxy: How Big is Space?

Posted by in category: space

When we talk about the enormity of the cosmos đŸ’«, it’s easy to toss out big numbers – but far more difficult to wrap our minds around just how large, how far, and how numerous celestial bodies really are. Join us for a cosmic journey to see the size of our Milky Way galaxy: https://go.nasa.gov/2UxkHIN

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Apr 13, 2019

The world’s largest plane just flew for the first time

Posted by in categories: space, transportation

After years of development in the desert north of Los Angeles, a gigantic, six-engined mega jet with the wingspan of an American football field flew Saturday morning for the first time.

“We finally did it,” said Stratolaunch Systems CEO Jean Floyd at a news conference from the hangar at Mojave Air & Space Port. “It was an emotional moment to watch this bird take flight.”

Stratolaunch, the company founded in 2011 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, conducted the first test flight of the world’s largest plane.

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Apr 13, 2019

A new graphene foam stays squishy at the coldest temperatures

Posted by in categories: materials, space

Researchers have now made a material that is superelastic even at extremely cold temperatures, which could be helpful in space.

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Apr 13, 2019

Environmentalists are Wrong: Nature Isn’t Sacred and We Should Replace It

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, ethics, food, information science, life extension, robotics/AI, space, sustainability, transhumanism

Environmentalism and climate change are increasingly being pushed on us everywhere, and I wanted to write the transhumanism and life extension counter argument on why I prefer new technology over nature and sustainability. Here’s my new article:


On a warming planet bearing scars of significant environmental destruction, you’d think one of the 21st Century’s most notable emerging social groups—transhumanists—would be concerned. Many are not. Transhumanists first and foremost want to live indefinitely, and they are outraged at the fact their bodies age and are destined to die. They blame their biological nature, and dream of a day when DNA is replaced with silicon and data.

Their enmity of biology goes further than just their bodies. They see Mother Earth as a hostile space where every living creature—be it a tree, insect, mammal, or virus—is out for itself. Everything is part of the food chain, and subject to natural law: consumption by violent murder in the preponderance of cases. Life is vicious. It makes me think of pet dogs and cats, and how it’s reported they sometimes start eating their owner after they’ve died.

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Apr 12, 2019

The First Group of Female Cosmonauts Were Trained to Conquer the Final Frontier

Posted by in categories: military, space

In early 1962, members of the male space squad gathered at a dining room in Star City and were joined by Yuri Gagarin. “Congratulations! Get ready to welcome the girls in a few days,” announced Gagarin.

“We, a tiny group of military test pilots selected for the space program, had been living together as one big family in Star City for two years. We shared struggles and knew everything about each other, and now we had to accept new members to our family,” recalled cosmonaut Georgi Shonin.

“When we started training together, it was very unusual to hear soft and feminine call signs Chaika (seagull) or Bereza (birch) instead of solid and firm Sokol (falcon) or Rubin (ruby),” Shonin continues. “Their intonations alone were telling. If a voice was sonorous, everything went as planned. But sometimes their voices sounded pitiful. That meant the instructor was practicing certain failures of the system with them, and Bereza or Chaika was trying to fix the problem.”

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