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Apr 1, 2021

Virgin Galactic rolls out latest generation of spaceship

Posted by in category: space travel

Company officials say it will likely be summer before the ship begins glide flight testing at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico.


Virgin Galactic has reached space twice before — the first time from California in December 2018. The company marked its second successful glide flight over Spaceport America last June.

RELATED: 1st private space crew paying $55M each to fly to International Space Station

Continue reading “Virgin Galactic rolls out latest generation of spaceship” »

Apr 1, 2021

Two tech companies announce their move to Northern Nevada

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, employment, finance, government

In Wednesday’s announcement, StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer said the COVID-19 pandemic created new demand for her company’s expertise. “When the pandemic first hit, we reached out to the federal government and started looking at ways we could help take seven of our laboratories around the United States and start offering COVID testing on a local basis, not only to support nursing homes, but Indian Tribal Communities as well as just the general public.”

PayCertify is a financial technology (FinTech) firm that “encompasses both a complete merchant and consumer experience front to back, pulling analytics and valuable insights to connect data sets in real-time from both the consumer and merchant side of the transaction.”

The two companies are expected to bring a combined 200 biotech and fintech jobs to the region.

Mar 31, 2021

Candela P-30 Hydrofoil Ferry Is All-Electric, Aims for World’s Fastest

Posted by in category: transportation

Traffic in and around big cities is getting more clogged, and the rising levels of pollution definitely don’t help with the quality of life in these areas. But what if there was a clean, efficient means of transportation that didn’t require new infrastructure or significant urban change?

Mar 31, 2021

Researchers discover new type of ancient crater lake on Mars

Posted by in category: space

An ancient crater lake in the southern highlands of Mars appears to have been fed by glacial runoff, bolstering the idea that the Red Planet had a cold and icy past.

Mar 31, 2021

Bones evolved to act like batteries, 400-million-year-old fish suggest

Posted by in categories: education, evolution

The earliest bones, however, were very different from human skeletons today. In the prehistoric past, bone was more like concrete, growing on the exterior of fish to provide a protective shell. But according to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the first bones with living cells—like those found in humans—evolved about 400 million years ago and acted as skeletal batteries: They supplied prehistoric fish with minerals needed to travel over greater distances.

The fossilized creatures in the analysis are known as osteostracans. “I affectionately call them beetle mermaids,” says Yara Haridy, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Museum of Nature and lead author of the study. These fish had a hard, armor-encased front end and a flexible tail growing out the back. They had no jaws, and their bone tissue encased their bodies. These kinds of fish are critical to understanding the origins of the hard parts that shaped vertebrate evolution.

Mar 31, 2021

A new strategy to enhance the performance of silicon heterojunction solar cells

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells are among the most promising solar technologies on the market. These solar cells have numerous advantageous properties, including a nearly optimum bandgap, high efficiency and stability. Notably, they can also be fabricated using raw materials that are widely available and easy to attain.

In recent years, many companies and engineers specifically focused their research efforts on Si heterojunction (SHJ) . These solar cells, which consist of amorphous silicon layers deposited on crystalline silicon surfaces, have been found to achieve remarkable power conversion efficiencies (PCE).

Researchers at Beijing University of Technology, the Hanergy Chengdu Research and Development Center, and Jiangsu University in China recently carried out a study aimed at closely examining the structure of the c-Si/a-Si:H in high-efficiency SHJ solar cells. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, offers valuable insight that could help to improve the performance of SHJ solar cells further, by allowing engineers greater control over the c-Si/a-Si:H interface.

Mar 31, 2021

Assessing how much data iOS and Android share with Apple and Google

Posted by in category: mobile phones

The School of Computer Science and Statistics in Dublin, Ireland, has begun investigating how much user data iOS and Android send to Apple and Google, respectively. Overall, they discovered that, even when the devices are idle or minimally configured, each tends to share an average of 4.5 minutes’ worth of data every day.

For instance, Apple and Google both receive the devices’ IMEI, hardware serial number, SIM and IMSI, handset phone number and other items. Moreover, Android and iOS continue to transmit telemetry to their , even if the user specifically opts not to share this data. In fact, as soon as the user inserts a SIM card into either , corresponding user data beacons out to the parent companies of each.

Meanwhile, users have no way to avoid iOS devices sharing with Apple the MAC addresses of nearby devices—such as other handsets or home gateway—as well as GPS location. Indeed, these users do not even have to log in for the device to share their data. On the other hand, Google collects a much larger amount of data from nearby devices than Apple. As a comparison, Google receives about 1MB of data versus 42KB for Apple. While idle, the Android Pixel sends around 1MB every 12 hours, while iOS shares 52KB of data. Furthermore, Google even collects about 20 times more handset data than Apple, and the majority of users in the US have Android devices.

Mar 31, 2021

Microsoft wins $22 billion deal making headsets for US Army

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, entertainment

Microsoft won a nearly $22 billion contract to supply U.S. Army combat troops with its augmented reality headsets.

Microsoft and the Army separately announced the deal Wednesday.

The technology is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, which were originally intended for the video game and entertainment industries.

Mar 31, 2021

Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines

Posted by in category: particle physics

The “xenobots” can swim, navigate tubes, move particles into piles and even heal themselves after injury, a new study reports.

Mar 31, 2021

Study shows promise of quantum computing using factory-made silicon chips

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

The qubit is the building block of quantum computing, analogous to the bit in classical computers. To perform error-free calculations, quantum computers of the future are likely to need at least millions of qubits. The latest study, published in the journal PRX Quantum, suggests that these computers could be made with industrial-grade silicon chips using existing manufacturing processes, instead of adopting new manufacturing processes or even newly discovered particles.

For the study, researchers were able to isolate and measure the quantum state of a single electron (the ) in a silicon transistor manufactured using a ‘CMOS’ technology similar to that used to make chips in processors.

Furthermore, the spin of the electron was found to remain stable for a period of up to nine seconds. The next step is to use a similar manufacturing technology to show how an array of qubits can interact to perform quantum logic operations.