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But it gets weirder.

The light from the table sitting just one meter away from you is also taking some time to reach you. Since its half as far away as the chair, you are seeing it as it was 330 picoseconds ago. That’s half as far back in the past as the chair. Ok, fine, but they both appear to you in the now. What you perceive as the “now” is really layer after layer of light reaching your eye from many different moments in the past. Your “now” is an overlapping mosaic of “thens.” What you imagine to be the real world existing simultaneously with you is really a patchwork of moments from different pasts. You never live in the world as it is. You only experience it as it was, a tapestry of past vintages.

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The gentle system uses a soft micro finger that allows for safe interaction with insects and other microscopic objects.

Entomophilous out there, ever wanted to cuddle a bug? Brush through the tiny wings of a dragonfly? Tickle insects? Researchers in Japan have created what you’ve always wanted — a soft micro-robotic finger that allows humans to directly interact with insects at previously inaccessible scales.

Previously, we did have access to insect environments. For example, microbots could interact with the environment at much smaller scales, and microsensors were used to measure forces exerted by insects during flight or walking. However, most of these studies only focused on measuring insect behavior instead of direct insect-microsensor interaction.

Now, researchers from Ritsumeikan University in Japan have developed a soft micro-robotic finger that can enable direct interaction with the microworld. Led by Professor Satoshi Konishi, the study was published in Scientific Reports.

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MK30 has custom-designed propellers that will reduce the its perceived noise by another 25 percent.

Amazon unveiled its next-generation delivery drone MK30 on Thursday and it promises increased range, expanded temperature tolerance, and the capability to fly in light rain. MK30 is due to come into service in 2024, the company wrote in a blog post.

Amazon.

The company kickstarted its drone delivery idea with the 2013 announcement of Prime Air. Back then, drones delivering packages up to five pounds to houses in less than half an hour seemed too good to be true. Amazon’s promises were no science fiction though. The company’s current fleet of delivery drones flies 400 feet above the ground at speeds up to 50 mph carrying packages up to five pounds within a range of nine miles.

Continue reading “Amazon unveils new delivery Prime Air drone — and it can fly in rain” | >

The embattled company finally declares its insolvency.

The head of the FTX cryptocurrency platform Sam Bankman-Fried has officially declared the company bankrupt and resigned from his position in a statement. FTX in a not-surprising move has finally declared its insolvency. After a long stretch of financial difficulties, after having saved many other cryptocurrency companies.

The company had been doling out Bitcoin at a rapid rate and found itself in trouble earlier this year. The head of the company, Sam Bankman-Fried had made headlines by saying he would give away his billions to help other cryptocurrency companies.

Bitcoin, who lost millions on FTX’s bid to be bought by Binance as their decision-makers decided not to bail out the company when it began to flounder.

Continue reading “FTX cryptocurrency platform goes bankrupt and Bankman-Fried resigns” | >

Twitter might attract FTC fines for non-compliance.

The world’s richest person Elon Musk has warned staff at this newly acquired social media company that bankruptcy was very much a possibility at Twitter. The result has been an exodus of top executives at the company, The Guardian.

Nearly two weeks after finally agreeing to acquire Twitter, Musk held an all-hands meeting at the company and once again spoke about the amount of money the company was losing. According to The Information, Musk warned that the current cash outflow rate at the company would lead to a negative balance of billions of dollars by 2023. His idea of Twitter Blue subscriptions was the only way to keep the company alive.

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Similar to a mouse racing through a maze, making “yes” or “no” decisions at every intersection, researchers have developed a way for machines to swiftly learn all the twists and turns in a complex data system.

“Our method may help improve the diagnosis of urinary diseases, the imaging of cardiac conditions and analysis of financial risks,” reported Abd-AlRahman Rasheed AlMomani of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona, campus.

The research was accepted for the Nov. 11 edition of the journal Patterns with Jie Sun and Erik Bollt of Clarkson University’s Center for Complex Systems Science. The goal of the work is to more efficiently analyze binary (“Boolean”) data.

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Spin glasses are alloys formed by noble metals in which a small amount of iron is dissolved. Although they do not exist in nature and have few applications, they have nevertheless been the focus of interest of statistical physicists for some 50 years. Studies of spin glasses were crucial for Giorgio Parisi’s 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The scientific interest of spin glasses lies in the fact that they are an example of a complex system whose elements interact with each other in a way that is sometimes cooperative and sometimes adversarial. The mathematics developed to understand their behavior can be applied to problems arising in a variety of disciplines, from ecology to machine learning, not to mention economics.

Spin glasses are , that is, systems in which individual elements, the spins, behave like small magnets. Their peculiarity is the co-presence of ferromagnetic-type bonds, which tend to align the spins, with antiferromagnetic-type bonds, which tend to orient them in opposite directions.

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Elon feels that Starship is moving too slow so he is now throwing a lot more resources at it.

While Elon Musk earns daily headlines over changes at Twitter, a significant reorganization is underway at his space company’s Texas launch facility.

SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell and vice president Mark Juncosa – two of the most influential executives at the company aside from Musk himself – are now overseeing the facility and operations of the company’s Starbase location, people familiar with the situation told CNBC.

Senior director of Starship operations Shyamal Patel is leaving the site to move to the company’s Cape Canaveral facilities, after spending more than two years working on the next-generation rocket in Texas, those people said. Patel was previously based at the Cape, before a promotion and move to Starbase.

Continue reading “SpaceX shakes up Starship leadership in Texas as push for the rocket’s next milestone intensifies” | >