Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk hopes to send first humans to Mars aboard a Starship craft within the next four years.

Ever wondered if your urine could help with food security in Africa? We go to Malawi this week to hear how a ‘magic liquid’ is helping farmers cope with the high cost of synthetic fertilisers, while keeping the marketplaces cleaner and smelling fresher.

In this gold rush, space is still a high-risk business, no matter how you slice it.

This is alarming news since now sniffer dogs’ jobs are at stake.

Space manifolds form the boundaries of dynamic channels to provide fast transport to the innermost and outermost reaches of the solar system. Such features are an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, providing a window to the apparently erratic nature of comets and their trajectories. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Nataša Todorović and a team of researchers in Serbia and the U.S. revealed a notable and unexpected ornamental structure of manifolds in the solar system. This architecture was connected in a series of arches spreading from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. The strongest manifolds were found linked to Jupiter with profound control on small bodies across a wide and previously unknown range of three-body energies. The orbits of these manifolds encountered Jupiter on rapid time-scales to transform into collisional or escaping trajectories to reach Neptune’s distance merely within a decade. In this way, much like a celestial highway, all planets generate similar manifolds across the solar system for fast transport throughout.

Navigating chaos in the solar system

In this work, Todorović et al. used fast Lyapunov indicator (FLI); a dynamic quantity used to detect chaos, to detect the presence and global structure of space manifolds. They captured the instabilities acting on orbital time scales with the sensitive and well-established numerical tool to define regions of fast transport in the solar system. Chaos in the solar system is inextricably linked to the stability or instability of manifolds forming intricate structures whose mutual interaction can enable chaotic transport. The general properties can be described relative to the planar, circular and restricted three-body problem (PCR3BP) approximating the motion of natural and artificial celestial bodies. While this concept is far from being fully understood, modern geometric insights have revolutionized spacecraft design trajectories and helped build new space-based astronomical observatories to transform our understanding of the cosmos.

At a time when more companies are building machine learning models, Arthur.ai wants to help by ensuring the model accuracy doesn’t begin slipping over time, thereby losing its ability to precisely measure what it was supposed to. As demand for this type of tool has increased this year, in spite of the pandemic, the startup announced a $15 million Series A today.

The investment was led by Index Ventures with help from newcomers Acrew and Plexo Capital, along with previous investors Homebrew, AME Ventures and Work-Bench. The round comes almost exactly a year after its $3.3 million seed round.

As CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel explains, data scientists build and test machine learning models in the lab under ideal conditions, but as these models are put into production, the performance can begin to deteriorate under real-world scrutiny. Arthur.ai is designed to root out when that happens.

Mojo Vision has developed prototypes for contact lenses that enable people to see augmented reality images as overlays on the real world. And now it has teamed up with Menicon, Japan’s largest and oldest maker of contact lenses, to further develop the product.

Saratoga, California-based Mojo Vision has developed a smart contact lens with a tiny built-in display that lets you view augmented reality images on a screen sitting right on your eyeballs. It’s a pretty amazing innovation, but the company has to make sure that it works with contact lenses as they have been built for decades. The partnership with Menicon will help the company do that, Mojo Vision chief technology officer Mike Wiemer said in an interview with VentureBeat.

“It’s a development agreement, and it could turn into a commercial agreement,” Wiemer said. “I’m very excited to work with them.”

Researchers have found a way to protect highly fragile quantum systems from noise, which could aid in the design and development of new quantum devices, such as ultra-powerful quantum computers.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them. Using the mathematics of quantum theory, they discovered a simple setup where entangled particles can be prepared and stabilized even in the presence of noise by taking advantage of a previously unknown symmetry in quantum systems.

Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionize future technology by preserving quantum effects in noisy environments, which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers.

wello presented a future vision of mobility at CES 2020 with a solar-powered cross between a bike and an electric car. the réunion-based startup presented its compact tricycle designed specifically for people in urban areas, to help alleviate congestion on the roads by offering an alternative to cars.