No pressure.
We’re just weeks away from the next generation of astronomy.
When the James Webb Space Telescope launches in December, it will signal the beginning of a new day for the study of the universe, and officials at NASA and elsewhere think it could discover signs of atmospheres capable of supporting life on alien worlds beyond our solar system. But what will the process of evaluating these planets look like, and how long will it take?… See more.
Including ‘cloud, AI, and machine learning-enabled automation’.
The US National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) announced on Thursday that it has chosen Microsoft to build advanced chips for the military.
“Historically, the security requirements associated with developing microelectronics have limited the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) ability to leverage the latest innovations,” wrote in a blog Tom Keane, Corporate Vice President, Azure Global, Microsoft Azure.
“Through a recent DoD-sponsored project, Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) using Advanced Commercial Capabilities, the goal is to leverage commercial best practices to help accelerate the development process and bring reliable, secure state-of-the-art microelectronic design and manufacturing to national security and defense applications.”
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Did you see the full “Beaver Moon?” Here it is, captured by photographers around the world as our satellite rose spectacularly—and from some locations was eclipsed by the Earth.
If you were in Europe it looked liked any other rising full Moon—spectacular, for sure, though nothing out of the ordinary… if you can call a glowing orbiting orb “ordinary.”
For those in North America, Australia, and eastern Asia the full Moon went a copper-reddish color at all but a slither of its surface entered Earth’s shadow in space.
As part of its recently announced rebranding, Facebook is doubling down on its vision of the metaverse, an immersive virtual-reality environment for gaming, work meetings, and socializing. In promotional materials, Mark Zuckerberg and his friends enter the metaverse via the company’s own Oculus headsets, and are transformed into cartoon-y animated torsos, often while arranged around a virtual boardroom.
According to Zuckerberg, the metaverse promises an at-work reality better than our own, with lush backdrops and infinite personal customization (as long as that customization stops at the waist for humanoid characters). Borrowing elements from world-building games and environments like Second Life and Fortnite, and inspiration from science-fiction referents like Ready Player One and the Matrix, the insinuation is that working within the metaverse will be fun. (This despite the irony that all of these virtual worlds are positioned as dystopias by their creators.)
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This is a farm in China.
This is a Mcdonalds in New York.
This is an apartment complex in Mumbai.
And this is a skyscraper in London.
What do all these have in common? Well as it turns out. All of these places’ successes or failures…
Economic booms or collapses…
And even population growth or famines…
Might soon be decided by the nation of Morocco.
And probably not for the reasons that you might think. In fact, this future economic trajectory was likely decided by a tiny little creature a couple centuries ago.
This a bat. In the modern world, we view bats as things that both control insect population, as well as creatures that spread rare diseases.
When we look into the night sky, we see the universe as it once was. We know that in the past, the universe was once warmer and denser than it is now. When we look deep enough into the sky, we see the microwave remnant of the big bang known as the cosmic microwave background. That marks the limit of what we can see. It marks the extent of the observable universe from our vantage point.
The cosmic background we observe comes from a time when the universe was already about 380,000 years old. We can’t directly observe what happened before that. Much of the earlier period is fairly well understood given what we know about physics, but the earliest moments of the big bang remain a bit of a mystery. According to the standard model, the earliest moments of the universe were so hot and dense that even the fundamental forces of the universe acted differently than they do now. To better understand the big bang, we need to better understand these forces.
One of the more difficult forces to understand is the weak force. Unlike more familiar forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, the weak is mostly seen through its effect of radioactive decay. So we can study the weak force by measuring the rate at which things decay. But there’s a problem when it comes to neutrons.
Freshwater is scarce in many parts of the world. While currently there is enough fresh water on earth to support consumption, it is not available in a way where supply meets demand. To solve this issue, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed a new device that can harvest drinking water 24 hours around the clock, with no energy input, even under the blazing sun.
It consists of a specially coated glass pane, which both reflects solar radiation and also radiates away its own heat through the atmosphere to outer space. The resulting device thus cools itself down to as much as 15 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. At the bottom of the pane, the moisture in the air condenses into the water which is collected.
The glass pane is coated with layers of a specially designed polymer and silver, which allows it to firstly reflect sunlight away to prevent it from heating up. The coating causes the pane to emit infrared radiation at a specific wavelength window to the outer space, with no absorption by the atmosphere nor reflection back onto the pane.
Commercial storage: Many customers want as many functions and high performance as possible, but want to pay as little as possible. Franz-Josef Feilmeier, CEO of Fenecon, explains how this fits together.
Elon Musk said “orbit is not easy” after congratulating the California-based company Astra Space for reaching orbit after several failed attempts.
Scientists have been experimenting with the creation of nuclear energy for decades and have used nuclear fission — the process of breaking atoms apart — to power everything from devasting atomic bombs to clean nuclear energy.
However, this kind of nuclear energy is different from cosmic inspired nuclear fusion in one significant way: it’s not self-sustaining. Creating enough energy on Earth to power this kind of reaction has been just out of reach for decades.
But that could soon be changing. First reported in August 2021, nuclear scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have come closer than ever before to prove that self-sustaining nuclear fusion — or fusion ignition — is really possible.
