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Mikhail Kokorich is the founder of Destinus. This serial entrepreneur has been dubbed Russia’s Elon Musk by his public relations team. The Russian businessman says his business, Destinus, is developing a hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions transcontinental delivery drone that can travel at speeds up to Mach 15.

Destinus plans to combine the technological advancements from a spaceplane with the ordinary and straightforward physics from a glider to create a hyperplane that will meet the many demands of a hyper-connected world.

This hyperplane will use clean hydrogen fuel to transport cargo between Europe and Australia in mere hours. The hyperplane will be fully autonomous; it will take off from ordinary runways, traveling leisurely to the coast before accelerating to supersonic speeds.

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First predicted in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are tiny ripples in spacetime generated by titanic and powerful cosmic events. The great physicist believed that no equipment would ever be sensitive to detect these faint cosmic ripples. Fortunately, Einstein was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that the detection of gravitational waves has been easy.

The history of a planned array to be built in Europe during the late 1980s, the reasons this failed, and the parallels with current detectors, are documented in a new paper published in The European Physical Journal H, authored by Adele La Rana, University of Verona, and INFN Section of Sapienza University, Italy.

La Rana explains that following the announcement of the first detections of by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration in 2016 and 2017, questions arose regarding “the missed opportunity” of having an array of two or more long-based GW interferometers in Europe.

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Universe has an abundance of gravitational wave sources. Recently, an international team of scientists unveiled a tsunami of gravitational waves. This discovery is the most significant number of gravitational waves ever detected.

Scientists detected 35 new gravitational waves. These waves were formed by merging black holes or neutron stars and black holes smashing together. The observation was made by the LIGO and Virgo observatories between November 2019 and March 2020.

This brings the total number of detections to 90 after three observing runs between 2015 and 2020.

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Australia gets its own space force.

The Australian government yesterday launched the Space Command, a new defense agency with echoes of the US’ Space Force that has been tasked with securing the country’s place in an “already contested” cosmos.

Australian Minister for Defence Peter Dutton said the new defense arm would be modest to start with, although he gave no detailed staffing or budget figures.

In a speech to the Australian Air Force, he said that space “will undoubtedly become a domain that takes on greater military significance in this century.”

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Elon Musk signaled plans to scale Tesla to the “extreme” while teasing the release of Tesla’s “Master Plan Part 3” on Twitter one day before opening the automaker’s first European factory.

On Monday, Musk revealed on Twitter the themes that will dominate the next installment in Tesla’s long-term playbook: artificial intelligence and scaling the automaker’s operations.

“Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI,” Musk tweeted. “But I will also include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.”

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TEL AVIV: Israel has made a small but significant step towards a laser-based system that is capable of intercepting missiles, with the announcement that the country’s “Iron Beam” system officially has a budget.

The program, which has existed in some form of R&D for more than a decade, has faced headwinds as a result of a long-running conflict between proponents and opponents of laser-based defense systems. But the technology appears to have matured to the point the government is now willing to put real money behind it.

Defense sources here say that the initial effort will be to develop an electric 100–150 kW solid-state laser that will be capable of intercepting rockets and missiles. The idea is to use two laser guns to create the needed power.

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Putin’s war on Ukraine is entering week four. What is the Russian president’s thinking, and what is his endgame? If anyone would know, it would be Dmitry Peskov. He has served as Putin’s chief spokesperson for more than two decades. He was at the president’s side during his rise to power. As a close confidante of Putin’s, Peskov is also a high-profile target for Western sanctions. He joins the program from Moscow for an exclusive interview.

Originally aired on March 22, 2022

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Putin’s war on Ukraine grinds on, into its fourth week. Civilian casualties are mounting, families have been ripped apart, and vast areas are destroyed. President Zelensky says Putin has turned his country’s sky into a source of death. But whether Putin wins or loses, it’s clear there’s no returning to the status quo ante. What will emerge from this crisis in the center of Europe? The fate of democracy is at stake. What can a new world order look like? Scholar and author Francis Fukuyama joins the show to discuss whether the U.S.-led world order can survive — and whether America has the moral authority and the will to lead.

Originally aired on March 18, 2022

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