Circa 2010
Most massive antimatter nucleus yet identified in particle experiments.
A group of researchers has outlined a surprisingly simple method for recreating the conditions near a neutron star, a breakthrough that could lead to new unimagined scientific discoveries revolving around the mysterious role of antimatter, a report from New Atlas explains.
The team of physicists designed a device, detailed in a paper in the journal Communications Physics, that fires two lasers at each other. The result is that the energy from the two lasers is simultaneously converted into matter, in the form of electrons, as well as antimatter, in the form of positrons.
Circa 2017
Antimatter sounds mysterious and powerful. In science fiction, it often has properties like defying gravity or taking on opposite colors. But in reality, antimatter is really no different than regular matter, except that antimatter atoms have positrons instead of electrons and antiprotons instead of protons. At CERN in Switzerland, scientists have actually been able to create antimatter and store it in a magnetic field that keeps it from touching regular matter. If that happens, the antimatter annihilates, producing a burst of energy. In sci-fi like Star Trek, this energy is used to power spaceships. We’re still very far from something like that, but it’s still pretty incredible that we can create something that was for a long time just a hypothesis.
When people think of artificial intelligence, the images that often come to mind are of the sinister robots that populate the worlds of “The Terminator,” “i, Robot,” “Westworld,” and “Blade Runner.” For many years, fiction has told us that AI is often used for evil rather than for good.
But what we may not usually associate with AI is art and poetry — yet that’s exactly what Ai-Da, a highly realistic robot invented by Aidan Meller in Oxford, central England, spends her time creating. Ai-Da is the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, and on Friday she gave a public performance of poetry that she wrote using her algorithms in celebration of the great Italian poet Dante.
The recital took place at the University of Oxford’s renowned Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Ai-Da’s poem was produced as a response to the poet’s epic “Divine Comedy” — which Ai-Da consumed in its entirety, allowing her to then use her algorithms to take inspiration from Dante’s speech patterns, and by using her own data bank of words, create her own work.
Humor can be quite useful.
Let’s see how.
Suppose you are having a bad day (I realize this seems a bit dour and gloomy, but the venerated gallantry of well-placed humor will turn this around, wait and see).
While on the way home from work, you opt to use a ridesharing or ride-hailing service. After settling into the car and getting ready to have a quiet and solemnly introspective ride home, the driver suddenly speaks up and tells you an entertaining joke that causes you to laugh out loud. The merriment of the humorous anecdote sparks you to get out of your dismally sour mood. It was one of the best jokes you have ever heard, a knee-slapping and side-splitting piece of humor.
Things are looking up, and when you arrive home, your perspective and attitude about the world have shifted into one of peacefulness and content.
Facebook has been rife with “Star Trek” Thanksgiving memes for the last week or more which in and of itself is puzzling. “Star Trek” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about when commemorating the first harvest feast shared by this country’s Pilgrim colonists and local Native Americans.
But it’s reasonable to assert that “Star Trek” and Thanksgiving are at least tangentially linked since the latter is a celebration of home and hearth whereas “Star Trek” is a celebration of humankind’s exploration of the cosmos. Certainly, this time of year represents an ideal time of year to be thankful for home and shelter.
As for “Star Trek”?
The Facebook meme’s link to “Star Trek” reminds us that we should also celebrate our home planet during this time of thanksgiving. With each passing observation, extrasolar planet hunters using both ground-and space-based telescopes are teaching us that earthlike analogs are very few and far between.
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T turns out Britain was ripe for the birth of the Industrial Revolution.
Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? Was it because they are particularly ingenious and industrial people or just a happenstance of history?
Various theories have been proposed over time, but which, if any, hit the nail on the head?
Let’s take a look at one particularly interesting one.
What was the Industrial Revolution? The Industrial Revolution is widely accepted to have occurred between the 1760s and the First World War. It was a period of time marked by massive technological, socioeconomic, and geopolitical changes across the world.
And the prototype design is already completed.
China’s space program has completed a prototype design for a powerful nuclear reactor, a report from the South China Morning Post reveals.
The country’s space program is building the device to keep up with other space agencies that have also drawn plans to go nuclear, such as NASA, which recently made a call for private firms to develop a nuclear fission system to power missions on the Moon within 10 years.
China and the U.S. enter a new space race China’s space program, which has already built some of the components for its full reactor, wants to power future missions to the Moon and Mars with nuclear energy. China’s reactor will be able to generate one megawatt of electric power, making it 100 times more powerful than the device NASA wants to send to the Moon by 2030. NASA’s nuclear fission system will be capable of providing roughly 40 kilowatts of power, which the U.S. space agency says would be enough to power 30 households for a decade.
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Deepsea submersible diving could compete with space tourism.
A form of luxury tourism is hitting the deep sea thanks to a small handful of firms providing state-of-the-art private submersibles to high-paying customers.
One example, Triton Submarines, builds its vessels with a view to maximizing the awe-inducing effect of experiencing the Earth from its watery depths. “A submersible is a visual tool, so the more compelling we can make the visual experience, the more effectively we have done our job,” Triton President Patrick Lahey explains in an email interview.
That description draws comparisons to space tourism, which in the case of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, is designed to induce the overview effect in passengers. It’s an effect so profound, Blue Origin and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, that it convinced him to pledge $10 billion towards slowing climate change.