The turbine will be taller than the GE building in New York’s Rockefeller Center, and each of its blades longer than an American football field.
Strange behavior caught by two radio observatories may send theorists back to the drawing board.
Fourteen years ago, the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered. By now, many hundreds of these energetic, millisecond-duration bursts from deep space have been detected (most of them by the CHIME radio observatory in British Columbia, Canada), but astronomers still struggle to explain their enigmatic properties. A new publication in this week’s Nature “adds a new piece to the puzzle,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University, Canada). “In this field of research, surprising twists are almost as common as new results.”
Most astronomers agree that FRBs are probably explosions on the surfaces of highly magnetized neutron stars (so-called magnetars). But it’s unclear why most FRBs appear to be one-off events, while others flare repeatedly. In some cases, these repeating bursts show signs of periodicity, and scientists had come up with an attractive model to explain this behavior, involving stellar winds in binary systems.
Much of the recent progress in AI has come from building ever-larger neural networks. A new chip powerful enough to handle “brain-scale” models could turbo-charge this approach.
Chip startup Cerebras leaped into the limelight in2019when it came out of stealth to reveal a 1.2-trillion-transistor chip. The size of a dinner plate, the chip is called the Wafer Scale Engine and was the world’s largest computer chip. Earlier this year Cerebras unveiled the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2), which more than doubled the number of transistors to 2.6 trillion.
Now the company has outlined a series of innovations that mean its latest chip can train a neural network with up to 120 trillion parameters. For reference, OpenAI’s revolutionary GPT-3 language model contains 175 billion parameters. The largest neural network to date, which was trained by Google, had 1.6 trillion.
As a recent New York Times article highlighted, self-driving cars are taking longer to come to market than many experts initially predicted. Automated vehicles where riders can sit back, relax, and be delivered to their destinations without having to watch the road are continuously relegated to the “not-too-distant future.”
There’s not just debate on when this driverless future will arrive, there’s also a lack of consensus on how we’ll get there, that is, which technologies are most efficient, safe, and scalable to take us from human-driven to computer-driven (Tesla is the main outlier in this debate). The big players are lidar, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and radar. Last week, one lidar maker showcased some new technology that it believes will tip the scales.
Continue reading “An ‘Uncrashable’ Car? Luminar Says Its Lidar Can Get There” »
These kinds of seaplanes will be mainly used for passenger transport but could also improve search and rescue operations at sea, thanks to the advantage of offering versatile loading and unloading. This multi-purpose flying vessel concept was inspired by the new needs and demands of potential operators worldwide.
History, however, shows that – like everything – the ground-effect marine crafts also have their drawbacks. The ship hovering just above the water is not able to tilt too much during the flight (so as not to hit the water), so any change of flight direction must be planned early enough because its execution takes quite a long time.
Continue reading “Aquas, a flying ship that moves passengers and cargo at speed up to 200 km/h” »
When it encounters oncoming traffic, it will autonomously fly to the side of the track and let traffic pass.
The California-based startup HyPoint has collaborated with the aircraft developer Piasecki Aircraft Corporation (PiAC) to develop hydrogen fuel cell systems for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle applications. The ultimate goal is to deliver a customizable, FAA-certified, zero carbon-emission hydrogen fuel cell system to the global eVTOL market.
Through the partnership, Piasecki will gain an exclusive license to the technology created as part of the partnership, while HyPoint will maintain ownership of its underlying hydrogen fuel cell technology.
HyPoint’s revolutionary approach uses compressed air for both cooling and oxygen supply to deliver a hydrogen fuel cell system that significantly outperforms existing battery and hydrogen fuel cell alternatives. According to the company, the new system will offer eVTOL makers four times the energy density of existing lithium-ion batteries, double the specific power of existing hydrogen fuel cell systems, and that costs up to 50% less relative to the operative costs of turbine-powered rotorcraft.
Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US$3.5-billion facility wasn’t designed to serve as a power-plant prototype, however, but rather to probe fusion reactions at the heart of thermonuclear weapons. After the United States banned underground nuclear testing at the end of the cold war in 1,992 the energy department proposed the NIF as part of a larger science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, designed to verify the reliability of the country’s nuclear weapons without detonating any of them.
With this month’s laser-fusion breakthrough, scientists are cautiously optimistic that the NIF might live up to its promise, helping physicists to better understand the initiation of nuclear fusion — and thus the detonation of nuclear weapons. “That’s really the scientific question for us at the moment,” says Mark Herrmann, Livermore’s deputy director for fundamental weapons physics. “Where can we go? How much further can we go?”
Here Nature looks at the NIF’s long journey, what the advance means for the energy department’s stewardship programme and what lies ahead.
Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of military and aerospace contractor Raytheon Technologies, is working on environmental control and life support technologies for a “privately owned and operated low Earth orbit outpost,” according to SpaceNews.
There’s plenty of money being poured into developing a commercial presence in space right now. The small firm was awarded a $2.6 million contract by a mysterious unnamed customer — a sign, in spite of its opacity, that the race to commercial orbit is heating up.
A Chinese military satellite appears to have gotten smashed by a disintegrating Russian rocket, Space.com reports, in what’s likely the worst orbital collision since 2009.
The collision illustrates the growing danger of derelict spacecraft parts and other jetsam in Earth’s orbit, where they can smash functional equipment — as well as the extraordinary difficulty in figuring out what’s going on in Earth’s orbit.
According to an investigation by Harvard astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, Chinese satellite Yunhai 1–02 likely crashed into a piece of space junk earlier this year.
