Lifeboat Foundation

The company aims to launch a larger and more powerful reusable rocket in 2025.

A Chinese company has made significant progress in developing its reusable rocket after successfully testing the first stage of its Hyperbola-2 launch vehicle in a desert. iSpace, a Beijing-based firm, conducted a “hop test” at the Jiuquan satellite launch center on Thursday, which lasted for about a minute and demonstrated the rocket’s ability to take off and land vertically. The company said the test was an essential step towards flying its larger and more powerful Hyperbola-3 reusable rocket in 2025.

As per SCMP.

Continue reading “SpaceX rival, China’s iSpace claims success in vertical landing rocket test” »

China has announced a plan to produce its first humanoid robots by 2025, as part of its push to develop the future industry.

China has long been eyeing the top spot in emerging fields like AI and quantum computing. Now, it has a new goal: to create realistic robots that can mimic human actions and emotions.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has unveiled a plan to produce China’s first humanoid robots by 2025. The program also aims to foster more startups in the sector, set industry norms, cultivate talent, and enhance international cooperation.

“We will have for the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human,” added Musk at the UK’s AI Safety Summit.

The latest advancements in artificial intelligence are also fanning an anxious frenzy around the technology replacing human jobs. And that’s something that came up in a candid discussion between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak around the sidelines of the AI Safety Summit.

Wikimedia Commons.

Continue reading “‘AI will do everything’: Elon Musk on the future of jobs” »

Set up in July, xAI aimed to take a path very different from OpenAI. How far it has succeeded will be known soon.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, is ready to showcase its first product to the world and will release it to a select group tomorrow, as per a tweet from Musk.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI when the organization worked as a non-profit and for the advancement of AI. Over the years, though, OpenAI started leaning towards profit and teamed up with Microsoft, which has poured billions into its growth. The Tesla CEO eventually fell out with his other co-founders and has often criticized OpenAI for its change in stance.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, to release first program tomorrow” »

A record-breaking superatomic semiconductor material allows particles to traverse it between 100 and 1,000 times faster than electrons pass through a silicon chip.

By Matthew Sparkes

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on Wednesday encountered the first of 10 asteroids on its long journey to Jupiter.

The spacecraft on Wednesday swooped past the pint-sized Dinkinesh, about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. It was “a quick hello,” according to NASA, with the spacecraft zooming by at 10,000 mph (16,000 kph).

Lucy came within 270 miles (435 kilometers) of Dinkinesh, testing its instruments in a dry run for the bigger and more alluring asteroids ahead. Dinkinesh is just a half-mile (1 kilometer) across, quite possibly the smallest of the space rocks on Lucy’s tour.

Researchers in Sweden have identified an epigenetic mechanism for over-consolidating fear memories in these circuits.

A study identified an epigenetic mechanism that explains why fear memories tend to become over-concentrated in certain circuits in the brain.

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a powerful fingerprint analysis and detection technique that plays an important role in the fields of food safety, environmental protection, bio-imaging and hazardous substance identification. Electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and chemical enhancement (CM) are the two recognized mechanisms of action for amplifying Raman signals.

EM originates from the localized surface plasmonic resonance effect of noble metal nanostructures such as gold, silver, and copper, while CM originates from the charge transfer between the substrate and the probe molecules. In principle, the charge transfer efficiency depends on the coupling of the incident laser energy to the energy levels of the substrate-molecule system.

Compared to EM-based SERS substrates, CM-based SERS substrates are usually made of two-dimensional materials including semiconductor oxides, metal carbides, and graphene and its evolutions, which have weaker signal enhancement capabilities. However, the advantages of CM-based SERS substrate, such as high specificity, homogeneity and biocompatibility, have attracted the attention of researchers.

Researchers in Germany and the U.S. have produced the first theoretical demonstration that the magnetic state of an atomically thin material, α-RuCl₃, can be controlled solely by placing it into an optical cavity. Crucially, the cavity vacuum fluctuations alone are sufficient to change the material’s magnetic order from a zigzag antiferromagnet into a ferromagnet. The team’s work has been published in npj Computational Materials.

A recent theme in material physics research has been the use of intense laser light to modify the properties of magnetic materials. By carefully engineering the laser light’s properties, researchers have been able to drastically modify the electrical conductivity and optical properties of different materials.

However, this requires continuous stimulation by high-intensity lasers and is associated with some practical problems, mainly that it is difficult to stop the material from heating up. Researchers are therefore looking for ways to gain similar control over materials using light, but without employing intense lasers.