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The US officials were left stunned when a Financial Times report revealed that Beijing had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August last year. The test demonstrated that China has now garnered the ability to strike any point of earth in no time and that too without letting the target know about any such imminent attack. This bold portrayal of the hypersonic program had dumbstruck the US, whose own hypersonic program runs far behind that of China.

Top Chinese scientist loaded with crucial data defects to the US

However, what has now come as a blessing in disguise for America is the defection of a top Chinese scientist to the West. A report published by Daily Express revealed that a senior rocket technician, connected to the state-owned Aviation Industry Corp of China, recently defected to the US with the help of the UK’s top intelligence agency.

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A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—wi…

Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined. Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars […].

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Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined.

Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars and trucks.

According to data released by the LEVA, the US saw nearly 790,000 electric bike imports in 2021. That marks a 70% increase from the 463,000 imports in 2020.

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Iron that rusts in water theoretically shouldn’t corrode in contact with an “inert” supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide. But it does.

The reason has eluded to now, but a team at Rice University has a theory that could contribute to new strategies to protect iron from the environment.

Materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering found through atom-level simulations that iron itself plays a role in its own corrosion when exposed to supercritical CO2 (sCO2) and trace amounts of water by promoting the formation of reactive species in the fluid that come back to attack it.

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According to our current Cosmological models, the Universe began with a Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago. During the earliest periods, the Universe was permeated by an opaque cloud of hot plasma, preventing atoms from forming. About 380,000 years later, the Universe cooled to a temperature of about-270 °C (−454 °F), which converted much of the energy generated by the Big Bang into light. This afterglow is now visible to astronomers as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), first observed during the 1960s.

One peculiar characteristic about the CMB that attracted a lot of attention was the tiny fluctuations in temperature, which could provide information about the early Universe. In particular, there is a rather large spot in the CMB that is cooler than the surrounding afterglow, known as the CMB Cold Spot. After decades of studying the CMB’s temperature fluctuations, a team of scientists recently confirmed the existence of the largest cold spots in the CMB afterglow – the Eridanus Supervoid – might be the explanation for the CMB Cold Spot that astronomers have been looking for!

The research was conducted by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an international team of researchers made up of 300 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries. The research team was led by András Kovacs, an astrophysicist with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. The results of their study, titled “The DES view of the Eridanus supervoid and the CMB cold spot,” appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on December 17th, 2021.

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Learnings For Regenerative Morphogenesis, Astro-Biology And The Evolution Of Minds — Dr. Michael Levin, Tufts University, and Dr. Josh Bongard, University of Vermont.

Xenobots are living micro-robots, built from cells, designed and programmed by a computer (an evolutionary algorithm) and have been demonstrated to date in the laboratory to move towards a target, pick up a payload, heal themselves after being cut, and reproduce via a process called kinematic self-replication.

In addition to all of their future potential that has been mentioned in the press, including Xenobot applications for cleaning up radioactive wastes, collecting micro-plastics in the oceans, and even helping terraform planets, Xenobot research offers a completely new tool kit to help increase our understanding of how complex tissues/organs/body segments are cooperatively formed during the process of morphogenesis, how minds develop, and even offers glimpses of possibilities of what novel life forms we may encounter one day in the cosmos.

Continue reading “Xenobots — Novel Synthetic Life Forms At The Intersection Of Biology & Information Science” | >

This is a bit interesting. As we all know, education has been crushed by the pandemic measures. Jeff Bezos has been operating one free preschool program in Washington State where Amazon is based. Now he is adding three more such programs in Texas.

I assume he picked Texas because Blue Origin is based there and he wishes to focus more on Blue Origin. Elon Musk regularly donates to education in Texas as well, likely because Starship is currently based in Texas.

Houston city council member Karla Cisneros said the partnership will help support the development and success of some of the city’s neediest children and help the future workforce be prepared for jobs. “We are helping women get back to work, and we are giving young children a good shot at a better life,” Cisneros said in the release.

The Bezos Academy opened its first school in Des Moines, Washington in October 2020. The preschool program has three other locations opening in Texas this year, including two in Dallas.

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A Lancaster physicist has proposed a radical solution to the question of how a charged particle, such as an electron, responded to its own electromagnetic field.

This question has challenged physicists for over 100 years but mathematical physicist Dr. Jonathan Gratus has suggested an alternative approach — published in the Journal of Physics A — with controversial implications.

It is well established that if a point charge accelerates it produces electromagnetic radiation. This radiation has both energy and momentum, which must come from somewhere. It is usually assumed that they come from the energy and momentum of the charged particle, damping the motion.

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Surgeries require a lot of planning, practice, and precision. Doctors cannot afford to get distracted or lose focus when operating on a person. The use of AI in surgery aims to support doctors and supply them with the necessary information and surgical tools without disturbing them at any point.

Mixed reality makes it possible to use technology to assist doctors during surgeries and minimize risks.

Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino first introduced the term mixed reality in 1994 in their paper titled A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. MR combines computer vision, cloud computing, graphical processing, etc., to blend the physical and virtual worlds. Many companies have been developing MR applications that can be used in various industries.

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