Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has pushed forward a revolutionary new rocket technology at its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Engineers at the facility fired the 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE) for a record 251 seconds with 5,800 lb (2,631 kg) of thrust.

For over six decades, NASA has relied on chemical rockets to launch its vehicles into space. It works, but chemical rockets suffer from the fact that they’ve been operating in the neighborhood of their theoretical limit since 1942. This isn’t helped by the fact that most liquid rockets are essentially unchanged in their basic design since the days of the German V2s.

Continue reading “NASA completes record sustained burn of revolutionary rocket engine” »

Hyper Force: Nissan’s future GT-R will be all electric.

Body scan companies say they can diagnose cancer faster and that AI can make it cheaper. But there’s a gap between that dream and the medical community’s reality.

ChatGPT may do an impressive job at correctly answering complex questions, but a new study suggests it may be absurdly easy to convince the AI chatbot that it’s in the wrong.

A team at Ohio State University challenged large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to a variety of debate-like conversations in which a user pushed back when the chatbot presented a correct answer.

Through experimenting with a broad range of reasoning puzzles, including math, common sense, and logic, the study found that when presented with a challenge, the model was often unable to defend its correct beliefs and instead blindly believed invalid arguments made by the user.

AI influencers are striking six-figure deals with luxury brands trying to cut marketing costs. It’s making human influencers antsy, the FT reported.

From a surprisingly active solar cycle to finding evidence of ancient superflares and solar auroras, here are the most exciting discoveries about the sun made this year.

The FASHI survey has mapped 35% of its target sky area with the FAST telescope, discovering over 41,000 extragalactic HI sources, and gaining acclaim in the astronomical community.

The FAST All Sky HI survey (FASHI) was designed to cover the entire sky observable by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), spanning approximately 22,000 square degrees of declination between-14 deg and +66 deg, and in the frequency range of 1050–1450 MHz, with the expectation of eventually detecting more than 100,000 HI sources.

Between August 2020 and June 2023, FASHI covered more than 7,600 square degrees, which is approximately 35% of the total sky observable by FAST. FASHI team has detected a total of 41,741 extragalactic HI sources in the frequency range 1305.5−1419.5 MHz. When completed, FASHI team will provide the largest extragalactic HI catalog and an objective view of HI content and large-scale structure in the local universe.

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

Neutron star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day Universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their cores to densities exceeding those of individual protons and neutrons manyfold.

These densities make neutron stars interesting astrophysical objects from the point of view of particle and nuclear physics. A longstanding open problem concerns whether the immense central pressure of neutron stars can compress protons and neutrons into a new phase of matter, known as cold quark matter. In this exotic state of matter, individual protons and neutrons no longer exist.

A team of Japanese researchers has discovered significant properties of non-Fock states (iNFS) in quantum technology, revealing their stability through multiple linear optics and paving the way for advancements in optical quantum computing and sensing.

Quantum objects, such as electrons and photons, behave differently from other objects in ways that enable quantum technology. Therein lies the key to unlocking the mystery of quantum entanglement, in which multiple photons exist in multiple modes or frequencies.

In pursuing photonic quantum technologies, previous studies have established the usefulness of Fock states. These are multiphoton, multimode states made possible by cleverly combining a number of one-photon inputs using so-called linear optics. However, some essential and valuable quantum states require more than this photon-by-photon approach.