Lifeboat Foundation

Live coverage as the Polaris Dawn crew attempt the world’s first commercial spacewalk from the SpaceX Dragon capsule Resilience. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 5:58 a.m. EDT (0858 UTC) but the time is subject to change.

Aboard Resilience are mission commander, Jared Isaacman, retired U.S. Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, and two SpaceX Lead Space Operations Engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Isaacman and Gillis will take turns emerging from the Dragon’s hatch while Poteet and Menon remain inside. The entire spacecraft will be depressurised for the Extravehicular Activity (EVA).

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Game Developer jourverse, who is currently working on a tutorial series focused on building a traffic system in Unreal Engine 5, shared a demo project file for this procedural road network integrated with vehicle AI for obstacle avoidance, using A* for pathfinding.

The developer explained that both the A* algorithm and the road editor mode are implemented in C++, with no use of neural networks. Vehicle AI operations like spline following, reversing, and performing 3-point turns are handled through Blueprints. The vehicle AI navigates using two paths: the green spline for the main route and the blue spline for obstacle avoidance. The main spline leverages road network nodes to determine the path to the target via A* on FPathNode, which includes adjacent road nodes.

For obstacle detection, the vehicle employs polynomial regression to predict its future position. Upon detecting an obstacle, a grid of sphere traces is generated to map the obstacle’s location, and another A* algorithm is employed to create a path around the obstacle.

Dr. Sam Parnia talks about reviving people adter they died. Very informative. Fast forward a little to listen to it.

Researchers at SWC have mapped how the brain transforms sensations into action.

Read the story: https://sainsburywellcome.org/web/research-news/brain-wide-d…discovered.

Full paper in https://nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07908-w.

Continue reading “Brain-wide dynamics linking sensation to action during decision-making” »

Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed an innovative method to realize gravitational wave detection by utilizing Mössbauer resonance. Their findings, recently published in Science Bulletin, highlight a new approach that could revolutionize the study of gravitational waves.

Most atoms are made from positively charged protons, neutral neutrons and negatively charged electrons. Positronium is an exotic atom composed of a single negative electron and a positively charged antimatter positron. It is naturally very short-lived, but researchers including those from the University of Tokyo successfully cooled and slowed down samples of positronium using carefully tuned lasers.

Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have created the first two-dimensional version of the Bose glass, a novel phase of matter that challenges statistical mechanics. The details of the study have been published in Nature.

In an exciting development for quantum computing, researchers from the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and Argonne National Laboratory have introduced a classical algorithm that simulates Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) experiments.

Yet, the current flow along these topologically protected, one-dimensional edges has proven to be far from robust. With the QAHE breaking down in magnetically doped topological insulators at temperatures higher than 1 Kelvin, well below the temperatures predicted by theory.

A new class of materials, known as intrinsic magnetic topological insulators (MTIs), for example MnBi₂Te₄, possess both non-trivial topology and intrinsic magnetism and are predicted to offer more robust QAHE at higher temperatures than magnetically doped topological insulators.

In MnBi₂Te₄ it has been shown that the QAHE can survive up to 1.4 K, and interestingly, this can rise to 6.5 K with the application of stabilizing magnetic fields, providing hints at the mechanisms that are driving the breakdown of topological protection.