Lifeboat Foundation

With ultrafast decoy targets launching from the biggest plane ever made.

The U.S.-based aerospace company Stratolaunch announced that the company has signed a research contract with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), which is a part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), on hypersonic flight test services.

The DoD has been focused on hypersonic missiles for a long time now, mainly because of the significant threats they present such as difficulties in detecting, tracking, and intercepting due to being able to reach high speeds with the ability to maneuver along a flight trajectory.

Continue reading “The Pentagon Just Struck a Deal to Test New Hypersonic Aircraft Systems” »

Like a cybernetic pelican.

In all our coverage of air taxis that include wing designs, propulsion technologies, flight endurance, top speeds, we have surely not come across something so radical as this intriguing piece called PHRACTYL. If this appears to you like a bird that has mistakenly grown a pair of propellers at first glance, you are right on spot.

While birds have been the source of inspiration for human flight, after the success of the Wright Brothers, the flat wide wings have become a standard in aviation and technological advancements have happened on getting more lift from these wings. However, the engineers at PHRACTYL have dumped this conventional wisdom for a radically unique design that resembles a bird’s wing. But that’s not where they have stopped. The tail and the landing gear are no different, giving the aircraft the appearance of a bird.

Continue reading “A New Bird-Shaped Air Taxi Can Take Off With a Nearly Vertical Trajectory” »

After DeepMind’s breakthrough in protein folding last year, Alphabet will double down on artificial intelligence in biology and health with its new venture.

A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older.

Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up. The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.

Toni Wright, one of the 750 participants in a clinical trial to test the drug, said she liked what she saw.

The brain is considered a very expensive organ to run.

Your brain may be leaking … energy, according to a new study that may explain why your noggin consumes 20% of the energy needed to keep your body running.

The study researchers found that tiny sacs called vesicles that hold messages being transmitted between brain cells may be constantly oozing energy, and that leakage is likely a trade-off for the brain being ready to fire at all times, according to a new study published Dec. 3 in the journal Science Advances.

Recently, a research team at Osaka University has successfully demonstrated the generation of megatesla (MT)-order magnetic fields via three-dimensional particle simulations on laser-matter interaction. The strength of MT magnetic fields is 1–10 billion times stronger than geomagnetism (0.3–0.5 G), and these fields are expected to be observed only in the close vicinity of celestial bodies such as neutron stars or black holes. This result should facilitate an ambitious experiment to achieve MT-order magnetic fields in the laboratory, which is now in progress.

Since the 19th century, scientists have strived to achieve the highest magnetic fields in the laboratory. To date, the highest magnetic field observed in the laboratory is in the kilotesla (kT)-order. In 2020, Masakatsu Murakami at Osaka University proposed a novel scheme called microtube implosions (MTI) to generate ultrahigh magnetic fields on the MT-order. Irradiating a micron-sized hollow cylinder with ultraintense and ultrashort laser pulses generates hot electrons with velocities close to the speed of light. Those hot electrons launch a cylindrically symmetric implosion of the inner wall ions towards the central axis. An applied pre-seeded magnetic field of the kilotesla-order, parallel to the central axis, bends the trajectories of ions and electrons in opposite directions because of the Lorentz force. Near the target axis, those bent trajectories of ions and electrons collectively form a strong spin current that generates MT-order magnetic fields.

In this study, one of the team members, Didar Shokov, has extensively conducted three-dimensional simulations using the supercomputer OCTOPUS at Osaka University’s Cybermedia Center. As a result, a distinct scaling law has been found relating the performance of the generation of the magnetic fields by MTI and such external parameters as applied laser intensity, laser energy, and target size.

A giant Tesla Megapack project operated by Neoen in Australia has finally been turned on after a fire set back the battery system this summer.

Tesla’s energy storage products have been particularly popular in Australia, where the electric grid is in great need of stabilization.

Its famous “Tesla Big Battery” in partnership with Neoen in South Australia has had a tremendous success that other states are trying to replicate.

These longstanding challenges are both related to how functionals behave when presented with a system that exhibits “fractional electron character.” By using a neural network to represent the functional and tailoring our training dataset to capture the fractional electron behaviour expected for the exact functional, we found that we could solve the problems of delocalization and spin symmetry-breaking. Our functional also showed itself to be highly accurate on broad, large-scale benchmarks, suggesting that this data-driven approach can capture aspects of the exact functional that have thus far been elusive.

For years, computer simulations have played a central role in modern engineering, making it possible to provide reliable answers to questions like “will this bridge stay up?” to “will this rocket make it into space?” As technology increasingly turns to the quantum scale to explore questions about materials, medicines, and catalysts, including those we’ve never seen or even imagined, deep learning shows promise to accurately simulate matter at this quantum mechanical level.

The ATLAS Experiment at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.