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“Houston, we have a new record.”

NASA’s Artemis I Orion capsule broke a new spaceflight record. The uncrewed Orion reached a distance from Earth of 249,666 miles (from 401,798 kilometers) on Saturday, November 26, at 10:17 am. ET, meaning it surpassed a record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 for the furthest distance traveled from Earth by a spacecraft designed to carry humans.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft broke a massive record.

The previous record was set by Apollo 13’s crewed Odyssey command module in 1970 when it traveled 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth. Orion crossed that threshold at 8:40 am. ET on November 26 before going on to extend the record.

Continue reading “NASA’s Orion beats Apollo 13’s distance record for a human-rated spacecraft” | >

Apple cut one of the few ways to avoid censorship in China, airdrops.

Apple’s recent iOS update quietly, and completely unannounced, stopped offering the AirDrop service to Chinese phones and tablets. Airdrops are a file transfer service that sends specific files, directly between phones, without the need for a network. In the wave of anti-government protests larger than ever before, protesters are having to communicate without the use of a crucial tool: AirDrops.

AirDrop, a file-sharing feature on Apple iOS devices, has aided dissent in many authoritarian countries. The phones form a local network of devices, that are independent of any external sources.

Tomas Ragina/iStock.

Continue reading “Apple limits airdrops from Chinese phones, kneecapping government protesters” | >

The neuroscience of perception has recently been revolutionized with an integrative modeling approach in which computation, brain function, and behavior are linked across many datasets and many computational models. By revealing trends across models, this approach yields novel insights into cognitive and neural mechanisms in the target domain. We here present a systematic study taking this approach to higher-level cognition: human language processing, our species’ signature cognitive skill. We find that the most powerful “transformer” models predict nearly 100% of explainable variance in neural responses to sentences and generalize across different datasets and imaging modalities (functional MRI and electrocorticography). Models’ neural fits (“brain score”) and fits to behavioral responses are both strongly correlated with model accuracy on the next-word prediction task (but not other language tasks). Model architecture appears to substantially contribute to neural fit. These results provide computationally explicit evidence that predictive processing fundamentally shapes the language comprehension mechanisms in the human brain.

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Telecommunications have reshaped many aspects of our lives over the past few decades by providing incredibly convenient ways to share and access information. One of the most important enablers for this transformation has been the adoption and improvement of broadband technologies, which cram enormous amounts of data over wide frequency bands to achieve unprecedented transfer speeds. Today, most large cities have fiber optics-based networks that distribute high-speed internet directly to every home.

Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to deploy fiber optic links to and , due to the associated costs and civil engineering work required. Such places could benefit from a different approach to optical broadband communications: free-space optics. The main idea in free-space optical (FSO) communications is to set up aligned transmitter–receiver pairs where needed and use air as the medium to carry the signals.

While there are still many challenges to address in FSO systems (such as low energy efficiency, impact of weather, and high background noise), scientists worldwide are continuously trying out new ways of solving these issues and achieving higher data rates.

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NEW DELHI: Among all the protests that have erupted across China following the strict quarantine measures enforced by the government for Covid-19, one form that has stood out is the display of a physics equation.

In images widely being circulated on social media, students of Beijing’s Tsinghua University can be seen holding sheets on which is written one of the Friedmann equations.

What these equations have to do with the subject of the protests is open to speculation. Many on social media have suggested that it is a play on the words “free man”. Another view is that it symbolises a free and “open” China, because the Friedmann equations describe an “open” (expanding) universe.

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Summary: Researchers discovered a structure within the octopus nervous system by which the intramuscular nerve cords, which help the cephalopod to sense its arm movements, connect arms on the opposite side of the animal.

Source: University of Chicago.

Octopuses are not much like humans — they are invertebrates with eight arms, and more closely related to clams and snails. Still, they have evolved complex nervous systems with as many neurons as in the brains of dogs, and are capable of a wide array of complicated behaviors.

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As Amazon prepares to debut its long-delayed Prime Air drone delivery service, it’s also showing off a smaller, quieter drone that will be ready in 2024 and could be making regular deliveries in major cities by the end of the decade.

Why it matters: Consumers want their stuff fast, and under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ vision, they could get it delivered in as little as 30 minutes while helping the environment by taking CO2-emitting trucks off the street.

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