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NASA’s plan to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon during the first crewed lunar flyby of the 21st century took one giant leap this week with the unveiling of four astronauts for the Artemis II mission.

In a news conference Monday at Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston the space agency announced the first black man, the first woman and the first Canadian on any crewed Moon mission—the agency’s first since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The Apollo 8-style Artemis 2 mission will see NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glove and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, embark on a 10-day trip around the Moon.

Continue reading “NASA Names Astronauts For First Crewed Moon Mission In Over 50 Years” »

After almost two years of waiting for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket to fly again, things are really starting to move quickly now, it seems.

The Super Heavy first stage booster section of Starship was moved to the launch site over the weekend and now the Federal Aviation Administration lists Monday, April 10 as the target launch date for Starship in its current Operations Plan Advisory for air traffic controllers.

The advisory also lists next Tuesday and Wednesday as potential backup launch dates.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an eleventh-hour scramble to secure further funding failed, the satellite company announced on Tuesday, marking the end of a sudden spiral that followed a botched high-profile launch attempt out of Britain in January.

Virgin Orbit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, documents show.

Virgin Orbit said it had failed to secure sufficient funding to stay in business and the decision comes less than a week after it laid off most of its staff and ceased operations.

Continue reading “Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Files For Bankruptcy After Failed Satellite Launch” »

The off-world chopper flew to its highest altitude and speed on its 49th mission on the Red Planet.

NASA’s record-breaking Mars Ingenuity helicopter has soared to new heights and flown faster. The off-world helicopter has flown for almost two years, massively exceeding its original mission parameters.

On its latest flight, Sunday, April 2, Ingenuity flew to its highest altitude yet and faster than on any of its previous missions. The latest flight.

Continue reading “NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter breaks records once again” »

The team was able to produce blur-free, high-resolution images of the universe by incorporating this AI algorithm.

Before reaching ground-based telescopes, cosmic light interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why, the majority of advanced ground-based telescopes are located at high altitudes on Earth, where the atmosphere is thinner. The Earth’s changing atmosphere often obscures the view of the universe.

The atmosphere obstructs certain wavelengths as well as distorts the light coming from great distances. This interference may interfere with the accurate construction of space images, which is critical for unraveling the mysteries of the universe. The produced blurry images may obscure the shapes of astronomical objects and cause measurement errors.

Researchers at MIT created Codon, which dramatically increases the speed of Python code by allowing users to run it as effectively as C or C++.

Python is one of the most popular computer languages, but it has a severe Achilles heel; it can be cumbersome compared to lower-level languages like C or C++. To rectify this, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) set out to change this through the development of Codon. This Python-based compiler allows users to write Python code that runs as efficiently as a program in C or C++.

Continue reading “MIT’s Codon compiler allows Python to ‘speak’ natively with computers” »

It also says that it has a healthy pipeline for chips in the future.

Search engine giant Google has claimed that the supercomputers it uses to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) models are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia Corporation’s. While processing power for most companies delving into the AI space comes from Nvidia’s chips, Google uses a custom chip called Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).

Google announced its Tensor chips during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when businesses from electronics to automotive faced the pinch of chip shortage.

Continue reading “AI chip race: Google says its Tensor chips compute faster than Nvidia’s A100” »

The resulting materials could be used for capturing greenhouse gases.

MIT researchers have used a computational model to identify about 10,000 possible metal-organic framework MOF structures that they classify as “ultrastable.” These states make them good candidates for applications such as converting methane gas to methanol.

“When people come up with hypothetical MOF materials, they don’t necessarily know beforehand how stable that material is,” said in a statement published on Tuesday Heather Kulik, an MIT associate professor of chemistry and chemical engineering and the senior author of the study.

This novel technology looks like a sci-fi device. But it’s real.

It seems like something from a science fiction movie: a specialized, electronic headband and using your mind to control a robot.

Oonal/iStock.

Continue reading “Mind control: 3D-patterned sensors allow robots to be controlled by thought” »