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Jan 27, 2022

Unprecedented New Telescope Image Reveals Nearly 1,000 Mysterious Strands in Milky Way’s Center

Posted by in category: space

‘A watershed in furthering our understanding of these structures,’ researcher says.

An unprecedented new telescope image of the Milky Way galaxy’s turbulent center has revealed nearly 1,000 mysterious strands, inexplicably dangling in space.

Stretching up to 150 light years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced, side by side like strings on a harp. Using observations at radio wavelengths, Northwestern University ’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered the highly organized, magnetic filaments in the early 1980s. The mystifying filaments, he found, comprise cosmic ray electrons gyrating the magnetic field at close to the speed of light. But their origin has remained an unsolved mystery ever since.

Jan 27, 2022

NASA’s First Test to Lower the Sound of Sonic Booms Was Successful

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, physics, transportation

The Concorde’s successor might be quieter.

NASA has completed the first test of the works on lowering the volume of supersonic flights in an effort to lift the ban on commercial supersonic flights, NASA’s Glenn Research Center announced.

The sonic booms happen when the merge of shock waves, created by breaking the sound barrier at the speed of 767 mph (1,235 kph). The huge amount of sound energy, approximately 110 decibels, generated by sonic booms sounds like thunderclaps or explosions and can be heard from 30 miles (48 km) away, which is why supersonic commercial flights are banned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). physicists confirm that they have achieved a stage in nuclear fusion called “burning plasma”.

Jan 27, 2022

Fusion Scientists Make ‘Burning Plasma’ Breakthrough With 129-Laser Experiment

Posted by in categories: innovation, physics

Jan 27, 2022

Tesla Shows How Bioweapon Defense Mode Cleans the Cabin Air

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military

A standard feature on its Model S, Model X, and Model Ys since 2016.

As Tesla explains in the description accompanying the video, it uses highly efficient particulate air (HEPA) filters in its car models S, X, and Y. The air filtration system removes more than 99 percent of particulates and is something we also saw in some other EV concepts last year.

Continue reading “Tesla Shows How Bioweapon Defense Mode Cleans the Cabin Air” »

Jan 27, 2022

Tesla Cybertruck delayed until at least next year, Elon Musk confirms

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

Jan 27, 2022

Stem cell platform speeds up drug discovery

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Physiologically accurate assays help researchers discover and develop new therapies.

Jan 27, 2022

Tesla Confirms: First Cars From Giga Berlin Will Use 2170 Cells

Posted by in category: transportation

Tesla released an update regarding the Tesla Giga Berlin-Brandenburg plant in Grünheide near Berlin, Germany.

Jan 27, 2022

Ultrahigh-voltage power networks spell the next frontier

Posted by in category: energy

Country’s top two utility operators make massive investments in green energy

China said it will continue accelerating domestic grid network construction this year with a focus on ultrahigh-voltage power transmission networks.

It will mark an attempt to further ensure power supply stability and boost green power consumption in the country.

Jan 27, 2022

What lies beyond the Standard Model?

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Physicists must swing between crafting the mind-bending ideas about reality that make up theories and advancing technologies to the point where new experiments can test those theories. 2021 was a big year for advancing the experimental tools of physics.

First, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, was shut down and underwent some substantial upgrades. Physicists just restarted the facility in October, and they plan to begin the next data collection run in May 2022. The upgrades have boosted the power of the collider so that it can produce collisions at 14 TeV, up from the previous limit of 13 TeV. This means the batches of tiny protons that travel in beams around the circular accelerator together carry the same amount of energy as an 800,000-pound (360,000-kilogram) passenger train traveling at 100 mph (160 kph). At these incredible energies, physicists may discover new particles that were too heavy to see at lower energies.

Some other technological advancements were made to help the search for dark matter. Many astrophysicists believe that dark matter particles, which don’t currently fit into the Standard Model, could answer some outstanding questions regarding the way gravity bends around stars – called gravitational lensing – as well as the speed at which stars rotate in spiral galaxies. Projects like the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search have yet to find dark matter particles, but the teams are developing larger and more sensitive detectors to be deployed in the near future.

Jan 27, 2022

Meta Is Making a Monster AI Supercomputer for the Metaverse

Posted by in categories: encryption, information science, internet, robotics/AI, security, supercomputing

Though Meta didn’t give numbers on RSC’s current top speed, in terms of raw processing power it appears comparable to the Perlmutter supercomputer, ranked fifth fastest in the world. At the moment, RSC runs on 6,800 NVIDIA A100 graphics processing units (GPUs), a specialized chip once limited to gaming but now used more widely, especially in AI. Already, the machine is processing computer vision workflows 20 times faster and large language models (like, GPT-3) 3 times faster. The more quickly a company can train models, the more it can complete and further improve in any given year.

In addition to pure speed, RSC will give Meta the ability to train algorithms on its massive hoard of user data. In a blog post, the company said that they previously trained AI on public, open-source datasets, but RSC will use real-world, user-generated data from Meta’s production servers. This detail may make more than a few people blanch, given the numerous privacy and security controversies Meta has faced in recent years. In the post, the company took pains to note the data will be carefully anonymized and encrypted end-to-end. And, they said, RSC won’t have any direct connection to the larger internet.

To accommodate Meta’s enormous training data sets and further increase training speed, the installation will grow to include 16,000 GPUs and an exabyte of storage—equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video—later this year. Once complete, Meta says RSC will serve training data at 16 terabytes per second and operate at a top speed of 5 exaflops.