Lifeboat Foundation

It will be able to deliver images sharp enough to see the torch engraved on a dime from nearly 160 kilometers away.

The Giant Magellan Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever engineered, has secured a new $205M funding infusion that will be used to accelerate its construction. When finished, it will be four times more powerful than the James Webb Space Telescope.

Continue reading “$1B Giant Magellan Telescope to Have 4x the Resolution of James Webb” »

Ignore the ribbons, this is a very promising breakthrough for VR.

Researchers from Stanford University and Nvidia have teamed up to help develop VR glasses that look a lot more like regular spectacles. Okay, they are rather silly looking due to the ribbons extended from either eye, but they’re much, much flatter and compact than your usual goggle-like virtual reality headsets today.

Continue reading “Researchers find way to shrink a VR headset down to normal glasses size” »

“Machines Like Us” argues that the artificial intelligence community needs to revisit symbolic reasoning to solve AI’s “common sense” problem.

Physicists love to smash particles together and study the resulting chaos. Therein lies the discovery of new particles and strange physics, generated for tiny fractions of a second and recreating conditions often not seen in our universe for billions of years. But for the magic to happen, two beams of particles must first collide.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced the first successful demonstration of a new technique that improves particle beams. Future particle accelerators could potentially use the method to create better, denser particle beams, increasing the number of collisions and giving researchers a better chance to explore rare physics phenomena that help us understand our universe. The team published its findings in a recent edition of Nature.

Ever since Archimedes, mathematicians have been fascinated by equations that involve a difference between squares. Now two mathematicians have proven how often these equations have solutions, concluding a decades-old quest.

The accelerator would smash together this heavier version of the electron and, researchers hope, discover new particles.

An international collaboration of scientists has created and observed an entirely new class of vortices—the whirling masses of fluid or air.

Led by researchers from Amherst College in the U.S. and the University of East Anglia and Lancaster University in the U.K., their new paper details the first laboratory studies of these “exotic” whirlpools in an ultracold gas of atoms at temperatures as low as tens of billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

The discovery, announced this week in the journal Nature Communications, may have exciting future implications for implementations of quantum information and computing.

Having a virtual telescope the size of Earth continues to pay off.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has released new observations that are once again at the cutting edge of science. The team that gave us the first image of our very own supermassive black hole has now revealed the most detailed radio image of a blazer, J1924-2914.

A blazar, not to be confused with a bright dinner jacket, is an active supermassive black hole whose jet is being shot towards us. The EHT has delivered observations with unprecedented angular resolution: it can resolve structures within 3 light-years of the black hole. Not bad given the host galaxy is located over 4 billion light-years from us.

Continue reading “Astronomers Reveal Most Detailed Radio Image Of A Supermassive Black Hole Jet Yet” »

SpaceX ignited engines on both the first and second stages of its Starship launch system on Wednesday, signaling that it is getting closer to a test flight of the massive rocket later this year.

On Monday evening at 5:20 pm local time in South Texas, engineers ignited a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy booster that serves as the rocket’s first stage. This is the first time the company has conducted a static fire test of the booster, which will ultimately be powered by 33 Raptor rocket engines.

About three hours later, on a separate mount at its “Starbase” facility in Texas, SpaceX ignited two engines on the Starship upper stage of the rocket. The company later shared a short video on Twitter of the evidently successful test.