The reusable spaceplane concept seemed to die with the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle. Could the spaceplane rise again in the 21st Century?
Update (8:15 p.m. Thursday): SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than 9:40 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 23, for this launch. This also means weather odds decline from 80% “go” to 60% “go.”
SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station are set for the company’s next launch on Friday, a unique mission that will hug the Florida coast as it flies a southern trajectory.
If everything goes as planned, a previously flown Falcon 9 will vault off Launch Complex 40 at 9:24 a.m. and turn southeast, placing its mission on a sun-synchronous – or nearly polar – trajectory. Friday’s launch window will remain open for about an hour.
Brink Bionics completed a very successful [Indiegogo](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/impulse-neuro-controller-for-pc-gaming#/) crowdfunding campaign in 2020 and gained the confidence to [take part in the CES](
CES booths are looking a bit different this year…#CES2021 #CES #ShelterInPlace pic.twitter.com/dcTSWLTxio— Brink Bionics (@BrinkBionics) January 13, 2021
Continue reading “Impulse neuro controller reduces PC gaming reaction times” »
Great new episode with University of Arizona planetary geophysicist Erik Asphaug who talks candidly about what we know and don’t know about the structure of our inner solar system. Well worth a listen.
Planetary geophysicist Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona discusses what we really know about our solar system; its age; its formation; and its evolution. Asphaug also addresses some major puzzles. Is our solar system truly anomalous? Is the composition and spacing of our eight planets also anomalous? And what we need to do to further planetary science.
Lean, mean bricklaying machine.
Construction is difficult to automate because of the complex, individualized and customized work it requires.
Continue reading “Construction could be revolutionized by a robot that lays 3,000 bricks a day” »
LONDON — Artificial intelligence researchers don’t like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it’s so hard to answer.
There are some obvious contenders when it comes to commercial AI labs. U.S. Big Tech — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade. There’s also DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk as a founding investor.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Facebook AI Research are fighting it out to be the top AI research lab in the world.
Continue reading “Artificial intelligence researchers rank the top A.I. labs worldwide” »
The race is on. Tech startups across the globe are competing to deliver to the rest of us what Google employees already enjoy : regular at-home COVID tests.
At-home medical testing was gaining steam pre-pandemic and is now a red-hot market with more than two dozen companies developing at-home COVID tests.
The ultimate goal of the Old World alchemist was to turn inexpensive metals into gold. Modern-day physicists at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics (Rochester, NY), have turned aluminum and other metals goldin color if not chemistry. A femtosecond laser processing technique created by professor Chunlei Guo and his assistant Anatoliy Vorobeyv alters the surface properties of aluminum, platinum, titanium, tungsten, silver, and gold to create tints of gold, blue, gray, black, and even multicolored irridescence.
