Lifeboat Foundation

The CASC announced its plans to build a reusable space transport system last year, which would involve building a series of spacecraft that take off and land like regular planes, but can reach any corner of the earth within an hour by flying at least five times the speed of sound at a suborbital altitude.

Friday’s test of an experimental vessel is a step towards the development of a hypersonic vehicle that could reach any corner of the Earth within an hour.

Hubble is back!

The Hubble Space Telescope has powered on once again! NASA was able to successfully switch to a backup computer on the observatory on Friday (July 16) following weeks of computer problems.

On June 13, Hubble shut down after a payload computer from the 1980s that handles the telescope’s science instruments suffered a glitch. Now, over a month since Hubble ran into issues, which the Hubble team thinks were caused by the spacecraft’s Power Control Unit (PCU), NASA switched to backup hardware and was able to switch the scope back on.

China is playing the long game. It plans to become the leading power in space sometime in the 2040s, through a mixture of its own perseverance and America’s decline.

The eagle and the rabbitHalf a century on, the race back to the Moon looks markedly different from the first.

The chip world’s most important machines are made near corn fields in the Netherlands. The U.S. is trying to block China from buying them.

The one-of-a-kind, 180-ton machines are used by companies including Intel Corp., South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and leading Apple Inc. supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make the chips in everything from cutting-edge smartphones and 5G cellular equipment to computers used for artificial intelligence.

China wants the $150-million machines for domestic chip makers, so smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese tech companies can be less reliant on foreign suppliers. But ASML hasn’t sent a single one because the Netherlands—under pressure from the U.S.—is withholding an export license to China.

Continue reading “China Wants a Chip Machine From the Dutch. The U.S. Said No” »

The US Marine Corps are testing tiny drones capable of performing a range of duties – including striking remote enemy targets with military-grade grenades. The application adds another reason to react fast to any buzzing sounds swiftly approaching from above… See More.

US Marines test the Australian Drone40, a high-tech, multifunctional drone capable of delivering military grenade payloads above targets.

Continue reading “US Marines testing high-tech drones flying low-tech military grenades” »

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) are rapidly becoming an indispensable part of physics research, with domain applications ranging from theory and materials prediction to high-throughput data analysis. In parallel, the recent successes in applying ML/AI methods for autonomous systems from robotics to self-driving cars to organic and inorganic synthesis are generating enthusiasm for the potential of these techniques to enable automated and autonomous experiments (AE) in imaging. Here, we aim to analyze the major pathways toward AE in imaging methods with sequential image formation mechanisms, focusing on scanning probe microscopy (SPM) and (scanning) transmission electron microscopy ((S)TEM).

A New Yorker review of “Roadrunner,” a documentary about the deceased celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, reveals that a peculiar method was used to create a voice over of an email written by Bourdain. In addition to using clips of Bourdain’s voice from various media appearances, the filmmaker says he had an “A.I. model” of Bourdain’s voice created in order to complete the effect of Bourdain ‘reading’ from his own email in the film. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

On Twitter, some media observers decided to start the panel right away.

“This is unsettling,” tweeted Mark Berman, a reporter at the Washington Post, while ProPublica reporter and media manipulation expert Craig Silverman tweeted “this is not okay, especially if you don’t disclose to viewers when the AI is talking.” Indeed, “The ‘ethics panel’ is supposed to happen BEFORE they release the project,” tweeted David Friend, Entertainment reporter at The Canadian Press.

Now just need to go to rat monkey human.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have imaged an entire mouse brain across five orders of magnitude of resolution, a step which researchers say will better connect existing imaging approaches and uncover new details about the structure of the brain.

The advance, which was published on June 9 in NeuroImage, will allow scientists to connect biomarkers at the microscopic and macroscopic level. It leveraged existing advanced X-ray microscopy techniques at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne, to bridge the gap between MRI and electron microscopy imaging, providing a viable pipeline for multiscale whole brain imaging within the same brain.

Continue reading “Researchers image an entire mouse brain for the first time” »

Argonne researchers across the laboratory complex are using AI to design better materials and processes, safeguard the nation’s power grid, accelerate medical treatments, automate traditional research, and drive discovery.

Armed with some of the world’s brightest minds and best computing resources, Argonne is at the forefront of AI research, playing an integral role in applying innovative AI methods to solve problems and change lives.