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The next-gen aerospace company Electra has achieved a remarkable milestone with its hybrid-electric test aircraft, which took off in under 170 feet on its first test flight — around 10% of the typical length of conventional airplane runways.

In a company news release, Electra said that test flights of its hybrid-electric short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft, the EL-2 Goldfinch, took place earlier this year at several Virginia airports. Although the vehicle is designed to take off and land on airstrips about the size of a soccer field (300 feet by 100 feet), as New Atlas described, it needed “almost no runway” to take flight.

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👉 Researchers at Tencent AI Lab Seattle have developed a way to use synthetic personalities to generate billions of data sets for training AI models.

Researchers at the Tencent AI Lab in Seattle have introduced a new method for generating synthetic data: synthetic personalities.

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The Tencent AI Lab calls them “personas” and creates substitutes for real people to generate billions of synthetic datasets for developing AI systems.

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Related: New NASA astronauts celebrate moon missions, private space stations as they get ready for liftoff (exclusive)

“I’ve always been fascinated with new things. I like to develop things,” Douglas told Space.com in March about the Artemis program, which later this decade aims to put astronauts on the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972. “I really believe in pushing ourselves, in understanding what is our true potential: both me as an individual, [and] within all of us as a species.”

“This is the perfect place to be, where we’re going to push that boundary,” he said.

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Time: It bends and warps, or seems to speed up or slow down, depending on your position or perception. So measuring its passing accurately is one of the most fundamental tasks in physics – which could help land us on Mars or even observe dark matter.

Now, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Delaware have developed the most accurate and precise atomic clock yet, using a ‘web’ of light to trap and excite a diffuse cloud of cold strontium atoms.

“This clock is so precise that it can detect tiny effects predicted by theories such as general relativity, even at the microscopic scale,” says Jun Ye, a physicist at the NIST’s Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) lab at the University of Colorado. “It’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with timekeeping.”

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NASA astronauts Mike Barratt, Matt Dominick, Tracy C. Dyson, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, and Suni Williams share a Fourth of July message and extend their best wishes to those back on Earth in a video recorded on June 28, 2024.

The crew members are currently living and working aboard the International Space Station. Their missions aim to advance scientific knowledge and test new technologies for future human and robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, including NASA’s Artemis lunar missions.

Learn more about the International Space Station: https://www.nasa.gov/international-sp…

Credit: NASA

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A study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour challenges the belief that identical physical actions are governed by the same motor memory, regardless of the decision-making process involved. Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and HONDA R&D Co., Ltd. have discovered that the brain differentiates and stores motor memories based on the level of uncertainty experienced during decision-making.

In a football (soccer) penalty shootout, a player may decide to confidently kick the ball to the right corner upon observing the goalkeeper moving in the opposite direction. Alternatively, the player might make the same kick while being unsure about the goalkeeper’s movement.

Although the physical action—kicking the ball to the right—is identical in both scenarios, this new study reveals that the brain tags these actions differently based on the decision uncertainty involved. This discovery suggests that motor memories are not simply repetitions of the same action but are influenced by the cognitive processes leading up to them.

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A new theory has finally deciphered the physical mechanisms of fracture in soft materials. This discovery could soon lead to new, defect-free materials that are more resistant and durable as well as environmentally friendly. The article “Elastic instability behind brittle fracture” was recently published by Physical Review Letters.

“We have revealed that fracture propagates from the free surface of the material, starting from an elastic instability that breaks the symmetry of the object. Then, the drastically extends with an intricate network of cracks spreading like a turbulence phenomenon similar to what we observe in fluids, like during vortex formation,” explains Pasquale Ciarletta from the MOX Laboratory, Department of Mathematics at Politecnico di Milano.

This discovery stimulates significant applications in various technological sectors. For instance, in the production of micro and nano devices, where materials need to be extremely resistant and defect-free.

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