As humanity’s spaceward expansion accelerates in the coming decades, somebody’s going to have to keep all those commercial astronauts alive.
WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman says it’s still considering whether to rejoin a Blue Origin-led team for a second Artemis lunar lander competition or to go on its own.
In a media briefing March 30 about the company’s overall contributions to the Artemis program, executives said they were “encouraged and excited” about NASA’s plans to procure a second lander through the new Sustaining Lunar Development effort announced March 23. That lander will join the one being developed by SpaceX and based on its Starship vehicle through Option A of the Human Landing System (HLS) program.
Northrop Grumman competed for the original HLS award as part of a “National Team” led by Blue Origin that also included Lockheed Martin and Draper. Northrop’s role in that effort was to provide a transfer element that would transport the lunar module from the Gateway to low lunar orbit.
It was Blue Origin’s fourth crewed spaceflight, and its first that didn’t feature a celebrity passenger.
A New Shepard rocket-capsule combo lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas on Thursday morning (March 31), carrying six people to suborbital space.
Project Harbour Club, by Levs Architecten, is an interesting new development in Amsterdam that involved renovating and extending a shipping terminal originally constructed in 1901. Most notably, the project transformed former industrial wine silos that were located on the site into unique rooftop homes.
Project Harbour Club is located in Amsterdam’s Cruquiuseiland, in the city’s eastern docklands. It’s made up of the original dock terminal building, a new entrance, a six-story L-shaped residential building that slots neatly into the site, and the three silo homes.
The silos were originally used to store bulk wine for the Dutch market. To make them safe for people to live in, they were first carefully cleared of any traces of harmful residues, had insulation fitted, generous glazing cut into place, and a comfortable and light-filled interior installed. This is spread over three floors and contains a dining area, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom.
Scientists from the University of Surrey and Imperial College London have achieved an increase in energy absorption in ultra-thin solar panels by 25%, a record for panels of this size.
The team, which collaborated with AMOLF in Amsterdam, used solar panels just one micrometer thick with a disordered honeycomb layer on top of the silicon panel. The biophilic design draws inspiration from butterfly wings and bird eyes to absorb sunlight from every possible angle, making the panels more efficient.
The research led to a 25% increase in levels of energy absorption by the panels, making these solar panels more efficient than other one-micrometer-thick panels. They published their findings in the American Chemical Society’s journal, Photonics.
Chalcogenide catalyses reduction of nitroaromatics used in everything from paints, plastics and pharmaceuticals.
Neural networks keep getting larger and more energy-intensive. As a result, the future of AI depends on making AI run more efficiently and on smaller devices.
That’s why it’s alarming that progress is slowing on making AI more efficient.
The most resource-intensive aspect of AI is data transfer. Transferring data often takes more time and power than actually computing with it. To tackle this, popular approaches today include reducing the distance that data needs to travel and the data size. There is a limit to how small we can make chips, so minimizing distance can only do so much. Similarly, reducing data precision works to a point but then starts to hurt performance.
What a time to be alive… We are on the verge of discovering the fifth dimension and it will change everything we know about the Universe.
Scientists are sometimes questioned if they conduct fresh experiments in the lab or continue to repeat previous ones for which they have certain outcomes. While most scientists undertake the former, scientific advancement also relies on conducting the latter and validating whether what we think we know remains true in light of fresh knowledge.
