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A massive cylindrical habitat may one day house up to four astronauts as they make the trek to deep space.

Lockheed Martin gave a first look at what one of these habitats might look like Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center, where the aerospace giant is under contract with NASA to build a prototype of the living quarters.

Lockheed is one of six contractors—the others are Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp.‘s Space Systems, Orbital ATK, NanoRacks and Bigelow Aerospace—that NASA awarded a combined $65 million to build a habitat prototype by the end of the year. The agency will then review the proposals to reach a better understanding of the systems and interfaces that need to be in place to facilitate living in .

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In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.

Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.

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The ADAM Research Project, an acronym for Acquisition & Data Analysis of Materials, will focus on the collection and scientific evaluation of material samples obtained through reliable reports of advanced aerospace vehicles of unknown origin.

As a first step, TTS Academy has established a contract with EarthTech International, Inc., (www.earthtech.org) a well-respected research think tank in Austin, Texas, to evaluate the properties of the available materials. Under the leadership of Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, a former Senior Advisor and Subcontractor to the Pentagonfs AATIP program (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) and current VP of Technology for TTS Academy, EarthTech is well-positioned to head up this materials research plan.

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Home to both Tmall (B2C) and Taobao (C2C)—China’s top online marketplaces—Alibaba has taken its legacy worldwide with foreign-facing AliExpress. But the real treasure trove of real-world data lies in Alipay, Alibaba’s mobile payments platform.

While mobile payments make up less than one percent of overall in-store transaction volume in the US, they are almost indispensable in China.

Pedestrians pay street-side fruit vendors using QR codes. Charitable givers use Alipay or Wechat Wallet when donating to relief funds or directly to affected families. And at one Hangzhou-based KFC, Alipay debuted the concept of paying with your face.

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