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SpaceX was awarded an eight-launch, $733 million contract by the U.S. Space Force on Friday, as part of an ongoing program intended to foster competition among launch providers.

The award includes seven launches for the Space Development Agency and one for the National Reconnaissance Office, all anticipated to use Falcon 9s and occur no earlier than 2026.

The massive new contract is part of a U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC) program with the catchy name of “National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1.” This third round of contracts was split into two lanes last year: Lane 1, for lower-risk missions and near-Earth orbits; and Lane 2, for heavy-lift missions and the more demanding orbits.

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This sounds very promising! The researchers are investigating the use of nuclear microreactors to power faster and more efficient electric propulsion systems.☢️🚀

To develop spacecraft that can “maneuver without regret,” the U.S. Space Force is providing $35 million to a national research team led by the University of Michigan. It will be the first to bring fast chemical rockets together with efficient electric propulsion powered by a nuclear microreactor.

The newly formed Space Power and Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness and Resilience Institute involves eight universities, and 14 industry partners and advisers in one of the nation’s largest efforts to advance space power and propulsion, a critical need for national defense and space exploration.

Right now, most spacecraft propulsion comes in one of two flavors: chemical rockets, which provide a lot of thrust but burn through fuel quickly, or electric propulsion powered by solar panels, which is slow and cumbersome but fuel efficient. Chemical propulsion comes with the highest risk of regret, as fuel is limited. But in some situations, such as when a collision is imminent, speed may be necessary.

Continue reading “Space Force funds M institute for versatile propulsion at U-M” | >

A multi-institutional team of climatologists, meteorologists and Earth scientists has found evidence that dropping diamond dust from an airplane into the atmosphere could cool the planet. In their study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the group used 3D climate models to compare aerosols that might be used to cool the planet.

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Jeramy Windle

In the context of sensory modalities, eyes work like tiny antennae, picking up light, electromagnetic waves traveling at blistering speeds. When humans look at the world, their eyes catch these waves and convert them into signals the brain reads as colors, shapes, and movement. It’s a seamless process, that allows people to see details clearly even when there’s a lot happening around them.

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The goal of UBTech is to reduce human labor to only 10% by deploying humanoid robots, with human workers focusing on higher-level tasks such as collaboration and tool management.

UBTech aims for humanoid robots — like Walker S1 — to handle 20% of factory work, reducing human roles to 10%.

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Although UBTech is leaving 10% of work for humans in management, other AI tech is being specifically developed for that niche: OpenAI’s new framework, Swarm, allows AI agents to collaborate and independently execute complex tasks, potentially boosting business efficiency.

Artificial intelligence agents are everywhere, quietly reshaping industries and automating tasks we didn’t think possible a few years ago. Unlike basic automation, these AI agents can handle complex jobs, think independently and learn from their environment. The result? Healthcare, finance and logistics businesses are seeing rapid gains in efficiency — and, in some cases, doing away with manual work altogether.

What are AI agents exactly? They’re software programs that carry out specific tasks without constant supervision. Whether handling customer requests, diagnosing medical conditions or predicting market trends, AI agents are versatile workhorses. Instead of waiting for humans to input every command, these agents operate autonomously, reacting to real-time data and adjusting their actions accordingly.

Microsoft recently unveiled new AI tools allowing healthcare organizations to build customized AI agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, and patient triage. These agents are designed to streamline workflows and improve efficiency, helping healthcare providers manage workloads and enhance patient care.

Continue reading “AI Explained: AI Agents Are Quietly Taking Over Everyday Tasks” | >

A team of Chinese researchers, led by Wang Chao from Shanghai University, has demonstrated that D-Wave’s quantum annealing computers can crack encryption methods that safeguard sensitive global data.

This breakthrough, published in the Chinese Journal of Computers, emphasizes that quantum machines are closer than expected to threatening widely used cryptographic systems, including RSA and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The research team’s experiments focused on leveraging D-Wave’s quantum technology to solve cryptographic problems. In their paper, titled “Quantum Annealing Public Key Cryptographic Attack Algorithm Based on D-Wave Advantage,” the researchers explained how quantum annealing could transform cryptographic attacks into combinatorial optimization problems, making them more manageable for quantum systems.

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How do we assess quantum advantage when exact classical solutions are not available?

A quantum advantage is a demonstration of a solution for a problem for which a quantum computer can provide a demonstrable improvement over any classical method and classical resources in terms of accuracy, runtime…

Today, algorithms designed to solve this problem mostly rely on what we call variational methods, which are algorithms guaranteed to output an energy for a target system which cannot be lower than the exact solution — or the deepest valley — up to statistical uncertainties. An ideal quality metric for the ground state problem would not only allow the user to benchmark different methods against the same problem, but also different target problems when tackled by the same method.

So, how can such an absolute metric be defined? And what would be the consequences of finding this absolute accuracy metric?

Continue reading “Assessing quantum advantage for ground state problems” | >

Electromagnetic radiation of extremely high energies is produced not only in the jets launched from active nuclei of distant galaxies, but also in jet-launching objects lying within the Milky Way, called microquasars. This latest finding by scientists from the international High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC) radically changes the previous understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the formation of ultra-high-energy and in practice marks a revolution in its further study.

Since the discovery of cosmic radiation by Victor Hess in 1912, astronomers have believed that the celestial bodies responsible in our galaxy for the acceleration of these particles up to the highest energies are the remains of gigantic supernova explosions, called supernova remnants.

However, a different picture comes from the latest data from the HAWC observatory: The sources of radiation of extremely high energies turn out to be microquasars. Astrophysicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow played a key role in the discovery.

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