Lifeboat Foundation

The contract will run through 2030 and makes SpaceX over $4.9 billion in total.

You haven’t seen the tail end of SpaceX launches to the International Space Station (ISS) quite yet. NASA awarded the Elon Musk-founded company a $1.4 billion contract to send five more astronaut missions to the ISS, per NASA’s press release.

The contract, part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap), runs through 2030 and brings the total value of the signed agreement with SpaceX to over $4.9 billion.

Continue reading “NASA Awards SpaceX More Crew Flights to Space Station” »

When you hit the jackpot-or don’t.

Imagine receiving $10.5 million while expecting a $100 refund to be transferred to your bank account and no one, except you, recognizes it until seven months have passed. That’s recently what happened in Melbourne, Australia when a cryptocurrency company bestowed a fortune to a woman, initially reported by 7NEWS. Back in May 2021, Crypto.com, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, transferred the amount to Thevamanogari Manivel. Upon receiving the money, Manivel and her sister Thilagavathy Gangadory started spending it like greased lightning.

It took the company seven months to realise its mistake. By the time they did, millions had already been spent.

Continue reading “Crypto platform accidentally transfers $10.5m to Melbourne woman — now they want it back” »

It can generate 1.3 gigawatts of clean energy.

Hornsea 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm located in the North Sea, has gone fully operational, a press release from its builder, Orsted, said. In its bid to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the U.K. is banking heavily on wind-generated power. To this effect, it commissioned the Hornsea One project, which was the largest offshore wind farm in the world at the time of achieving fully operational status in 2020. Two years later, the Hornsea 2 project is fully operational and has claimed the bragging rights for being the largest offshore wind farm in the world.

The Hornsea zone, an area of the North Sea covering more than 2,000 km2, is also set to include Hornsea 3. The 2.8 GW project is planned to follow Hornsea 2 having been awarded a contract for difference from the UK government earlier this year.

Hornsea 2 has played a key role in the ongoing development of a larger and sustainably competitive UK supply chain to support the next phase of the UK’s offshore wind success story. In the past five years alone, Ørsted has placed major contracts with nearly 200 UK suppliers. Ørsted has invested GBP 4.5 billion in the UK supply chain to date and expects to make another GBP 8.6 billion of UK supply chain investments over the next decade.

Continue reading “Hornsea 2, the world’s largest windfarm, enters full operation” »

It ended up nothing like Ever Given.

The Suez Canal was briefly blocked again after a tanker, Affinity V, ran aground very close to where Ever Given was stuck for nearly a week last year. The blockage of the Suez Canal made global headlines in March of 2021 when one of the largest containers ever built, Ever Given, ran aground. It took authorities six days to get the giant ship afloat again, but the incident had stalled marine cargo traffic on the shortest route between Europe and Asia.

Continue reading “The Suez Canal: the Water Bridge Connecting Europe and Asia” »

Ariel, small British carmaker responsible for the iconic Atom and Nomad, revealed its newest car Thursday, simply called the Hipercar. A big departure from the exoskeleton-like vehicles normally associated with the brand, the Hipercar is an all-electric sports car with a real(-ish) interior and body panels. Even crazier than the absurd bodywork is the option for a turbine range extender.

For trained mathematical brains, the infinite is if anything even more bamboozling. Mathematicians have known for well over a century now that infinity isn’t just one thing, it is infinitely many. There is an unending tower of ever greater infinities stretching up all the way to… well, whatever you’d like to call it.

That isn’t even the worst of it. Although the existence of this tower of infinities is a logical consequence of mathematics as we know it, that same mathematics is powerless to describe it completely. Chip away at the plaster to reveal the structure underneath and you see that crucial load-bearing beams are missing in the lower levels, suggesting that the foundations of mathematics itself are unstable.

Mathematicians have long argued about how best to shore the infinite tower up. Some say we should simply leave well alone and hope for the best. Others have proposed fixes, variously deemed too costly, unlikely to work or not in keeping with the original style. No one has yet made anything like a breakthrough. Except, perhaps, until now. After decades of apparent stalemate, serious progress seems to have been made on the baffling question that lies at the heart of it all: a nearly 150-year-old unproven conjecture known as the continuum hypothesis.

Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

A datacentre that fits in the palm of your hand? However, right now, DNA storage is an expensive chemical process that researchers are trying to make a practical proposal.

More than $54 billion in state funding and billions more from the federal government will be poured into projects and programs.

Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.

“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a study published today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”

A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the unattainable temperature where all motion stops. That’s about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space, which is still warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang.