Toggle light / dark theme

It is the first in a series of private launches that will culminate in the first crewed Starship spaceflight.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission will include the first-ever commercial spacewalk. The mission, funded and commanded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is part of the Polaris Program, a series of launches that will include the first-ever crewed Starship spaceflight.

The first of these, Polaris Dawn, was originally slated for late 2022. As is often the case with rocket launches, several factors have come into play, pushing the mission back to no earlier than March 2023, as per an update to the Polaris Program’s website first reported by Space.com.


Source: Polaris Program.

The new innovative features allow for advanced image editing using artificial intelligence.

Adobe announced new advancements in its Photoshop at its annual Adobe Max conference for technology. These new innovations make the image editing application even smarter in its abilities, and more collaborative. Along with these announcements came a whole new wave of AI advancements and capabilities incorporated into the software.


Adobe.com/Blog.

The flagship desktop app powered by Adobe Sensei AI features numerous improvements, including the one click Delete option and the Fill tool to remove and replace objects with a single click. Along with the AI feature, these improvements were made in time to be introduced at the fall conference. It allows users to remove unwanted elements in their pictures quickly with a shortcut, using Shift + Delete. Another updated feature is the photo restoration neural filter that uses machine learning to detect and get rid of scratches and other small flaws on old photographs.

‘You’re in a world made of marshmallows!’

A Google app that allows people to communicate with artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been made available in the United Kingdom (U.K.) for a limited trial period.

You’re in a world made of marshmallows! As you take a step, a gentle ‘squish’ comes out under your feet. The marshmallow horizon stretches out in all directions. The sky is a gooey, sticky pink.


Andrey Suslov/iStock.

A team of scientists from Korea and Egypt have discovered a better way to grow insect-hunting fungi in a lab, according to research published Wednesday in Frontiers in Microbiology.

The fungi can be grown using grains like brown rice but they do not produce much cordycepin, prompting the researchers to suggest insects—which are a richer protein source and the fungi target in nature—as a better alternative. fungi, which infect and zombify insects, are difficult to cultivate but contain chemicals that could help fight cancer and viruses and possibly help treat Covid-19.

Scientists suggest the geopolitical fallout of discovering extraterrestrials could be more dangerous than the aliens themselves.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project collects data from radio telescopes.

The trouble is that the receiver might not be quite as intelligent.


The consequences of a successful search for extraterrestrial intelligence should be seriously considered to avoid conflict, suggests a new study.

Reservoir computing (RC) is an approach for building computer systems inspired by current knowledge of the human brain. Neuromorphic computing architectures based on this approach are comprised of dynamic physical nodes, which combined can process spatiotemporal signals.

Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have recently created a new RC system based on memristors, that regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while also recording the amount of charge that previously flowed through it. This RC system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, has been found to achieve remarkable results, both in terms of performance and efficiency.

“The basic architecture of our memristor RC system comes from our earlier work published in Nature Communications, where we validated the feasibility of building analog reservoir layer with dynamic memristors,” Jianshi Tang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In this new work, we further build the analog readout layer with non-volatile memristors and integrate it with the dynamic memristor array-based parallel reservoir layer to implement a fully analog RC system.”

Summary: A new theory suggests glial cells, specifically astrocytes, play a key role in cognitive processing.

Source: University Health Network.

A team of scientists from the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the University Health Network in Toronto, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has developed the first computer model predicting the role of cortical glial cells in cognition.

Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

Each map is a tremendous resource for astronomers, but when viewed in sequence as a time-lapse, they serve as an even stronger resource for trying to better understand the universe. Comparing the maps can reveal distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time, what’s known as time-domain astronomy.

Thanks in large part to delays suffered by Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, a small fleet of European satellites are simultaneously converging on the United States to hitch rides into orbit with SpaceX.

SpaceX launching European payloads is nothing new. The company has occasionally launched spacecraft built in Europe for European space agencies or companies, but the combination is exceedingly rare. For several reasons, however, what was once alien is beginning to become commonplace, and that fact is about to be made even clearer over the remainder of 2022.

SpaceX kicked off a string of six or seven launches of spacecraft built by or for Europe on October 15th. Over the weekend, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket – 70 meters (230 ft) tall, 3.7 meters (12 ft) wide, and capable of producing up to 770 tons (1.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff – successfully launched the Hotbird 13F communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for the French satcom company Eutelsat.