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Elon Musk has said that SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype may fly for the first time this week, as the company continues its efforts to get the ambitious spacecraft up and running ahead of planned flights to the Moon and Mars.

Starship is SpaceX’s proposed spacecraft to transport up to 100 humans at a time – or maybe more – to the Red Planet. The company has been rapidly building prototypes of the giant steel rocket at a test site in Boca Chica, Texas, with the goal of eventually finding a design that works.

Continue reading “SpaceX May Fly A First Full-Size Prototype Of Its Mars Starship Rocket ‘Later This Week’ Says Musk” »

Researchers in Spain and Italy have constructed the first-ever quantum phase battery – a device th.

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The UK says the Russian satellite launched “a projectile with the characteristics of a weapon”.

(Reuters) — Shares of Moderna Inc fell nearly 10% after it lost a bid to invalidate a U.S. patent owned by Arbutus Biopharma that poses a potential obstacle to Moderna’s efforts to develop next-generation vaccines, including a coronavirus vaccine.

Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Facebook, helped develop the deep learning algorithms that power many artificial intelligence systems today. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, LeCun discusses his current research into self-supervised machine learning, how he’s trying to build machines that learn with common sense (like humans) and his hopes for the next conceptual breakthrough in AI.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

Even healthy brains become less efficient as they age, but they do so at different rates for different tasks in different people. Understanding what contributes to this decline, and the ways in which that decline varies, can provide significant insight into the function of the brain.

In a new study, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas documented how some parts of the brain perform differently over time in response to various kinds of visual input.

A team from the Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) analyzed a phenomenon called neural dedifferentiation, in which regions of the brain that normally are specialized to perform distinct tasks become less selective in their responses to stimulus types.

A team of researchers from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS) has just announced that they managed to calculate how to create matter and antimatter using lasers.

This means that, by focusing high-powered laser pulses, we might soon be able to create matter and antimatter using light.

To break this down a bit, light is made of high-energy photons. When high-energy photons go through strong electric fields, they lose enough radiation that they become gamma rays and create electron-positron pairs, thus creating a new state of matter.

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Switzerland. Berkeley Lab researchers made key contributions to the effort, including the design of the trap’s crucial component—an octupole magnet—and computer simulations needed to identify real antihydrogen annihilation events against a noisy background.

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There’s a factory in Europe that makes antimatter! It’s the rarest, most expensive, and potentially the most dangerous material on earth. Scientists don’t know why this material is so rare. Anti-atoms took 72 years after we discovered antimatter to make. Why?

Continue reading “Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN” »