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Sep 6, 2020

Earth Should Be Dry – An Unexpected Meteorite Discovery Reveals the Origin of Earth’s Vast Oceans

Posted by in categories: materials, space

Meteorite material presumed to be devoid of water because it formed in the dry inner Solar System appears to have contained sufficient hydrogen to have delivered to Earth at least three times the mass of water in its oceans, a new study shows.

While the idea that enstatite chondrite (EC) meteorites contained enough hydrogen to provide water to the growing proto-Earth has been proposed, efforts to rigorously test this scenario have been hampered by difficulties in measuring hydrogen concentrations in ECs — an obstacle this study overcame.

According to models of Solar System formation, Earth should be dry. However, our blue planet’s vast oceans, humid atmosphere and well-hydrated geology boldly defy such predictions, making it unique among the other rocky planets of the inner Solar System.

Sep 6, 2020

California ISO Declares Stage 2 Emergency, Warns of Rotating Blackouts

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

California’s Independent System Operator declared a Stage 2 emergency Saturday, warning residents to expect rotating blackouts and advising them to conserve energy.

Stage 2 means, “The ISO has taken all mitigating action and is no longer able to provide its expected energy requirements.”

The declaration was due to high heat and increased demand, according to CAISO. In addition, CAISO said fires caused a generator and a solar farm to trip offline, highlighting the need for residents to reduce energy use.

Sep 6, 2020

Ultracold atoms can work together to shape or steer light

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

At these temperatures, the atoms move extremely slowly and can be controlled through quantum mechanical effects that are negligible at higher temperatures.

The team used lasers to excite the atoms and coax them into one shared motion. They found that when the atoms act collectively, they can shape and steer light through their electrical and magnetic interactions with it. The shared behavior allows them to act like a collection of electric charges or very small magnets that affect the light.

Sep 6, 2020

Elon Musk: I’m pretty confident, Giga Berlin will be the most environmental-friendly factory in the world

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Featured image: @tobilindh/Twitter

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now in Germany on a visit. During the trip, he met with several politicians, discussed a number of important issues, and visited Giga Berlin.

On September 3, Musk made his first visit to the construction site of Tesla’s plant in Grünheide, near Berlin. He arrived at 12:30 pm in a black Model X, where the media and film crews were already waiting for him. Apparently, he is very pleased with the progress of the construction, which was expressed in an enthusiastic greeting: “Deutschland roks! Yeah!”

Sep 6, 2020

SpaceX shares photo of gigantic Starship vacuum-optimized Raptor engine

Posted by in category: space travel

Featured Image Source: SpaceX

SpaceX is rapidly manufacturing multiple Starship prototypes at the South Texas facility located in Brownsville’s Boca Chica beach. An orbital-class Starship will be equipped with six powerful Raptor engines. Raptors are fueled by cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen which is a unique fuel combination in the aerospace industry. Each Raptor is capable of producing over 200 tons, or 2MN (meganewtons), of thrust at full throttle. Three of Starship’s Raptors will be sea-level engines for atmospheric flight, and three vacuum-optimized Raptors for propulsion in space. Vacuum-optimized engines are more complex and different than sea-level engines; they’re specifically designed to have a higher performance in the vacuum of space. A visible difference between the two engines is that the bell nozzle is larger in the Raptor vacuum engine. Today, SpaceX shared a photograph showcasing the gigantic Raptor vacuum engine, pictured below.

Sep 6, 2020

Urban Aeronautics CEO has designed a made-in-Israel flying car

Posted by in categories: futurism, transportation

In industry speak, he said it has to have electrical Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) to be a flying car. According to the Deloitte website, eVTOL vehicles have the potential to improve the future of elevated mobility by moving people and cargo more quickly, quietly, and cost-effectively than traditional helicopters. A separate journal described eVTOL as a new means of transport that can fly like an aircraft and take off and land vertically like a helicopter, “sometimes called personal aerial vehicle.”

Yoeli’s company has two models: the CityHawk and the Falcon XP, both of which weigh more than a ton, not including the passengers.

So how did he get these cars to fly?

Sep 6, 2020

Inside Virgin Orbit, Richard Branson’s Small Satellite Bid To Match Musk And Bezos In The Billionaire Space Race

Posted by in categories: business, Elon Musk, satellites

Fellow rocket man Elon Musk reacted with sympathy. “Sorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,” he tweeted, adding that it took his firm, SpaceX, four attempts before reaching orbit in September 2008. Branson himself “waited an hour” before getting on the phone to CEO Dan Hart. “His brain, as it does, just immediately turns to – ‘well how quickly can you try again’?” Pomerantz recalls, describing the mood in the room as the sun set in California as “a big step forward that nevertheless was nowhere near as big as we wanted it to be – we are a way better company than we were the day we did that launch, but we didn’t get to orbit.”

Back Of A Napkin

But for Pomerantz, Branson, Virgin and the watching entrepreneurial world, including competitors like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, a larger question was answered: Could Richard Branson drop a rocket off the wing of a Virgin aircraft and call it a business?

Sep 5, 2020

The Brain Implants That Could Change Humanity

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

He was also scared because the experiment showed, in a concrete way, that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, one in which our thoughts could theoretically be snatched from our heads. What was going to happen, Dr. Gallant wondered, when you could read thoughts the thinker might not even be consciously aware of, when you could see people’s memories?


Opinion

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Sep 5, 2020

“Berry Curvature” Memory: Quantum Geometry Enables Information Storage in Metal

Posted by in categories: information science, internet, quantum physics, robotics/AI

The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques is changing the world dramatically with novel applications such as internet of things, autonomous vehicles, real-time imaging processing and big data analytics in healthcare. In 2020, the global data volume is estimated to reach 44 Zettabytes, and it will continue to grow beyond the current capacity of computing and storage devices. At the same time, the related electricity consumption will increase 15 times by 2030, swallowing 8% of the global energy demand. Therefore, reducing energy consumption and increasing speed of information storage technology is in urgent need.

Berkeley researchers led by HKU President Professor Xiang Zhang when he was in Berkeley, in collaboration with Professor Aaron Lindenberg’s team at Stanford University, invented a new data storage method: They make odd numbered layers slide relative to even-number layers in tungsten ditelluride, which is only 3nm thick. The arrangement of these atomic layers represents 0 and 1 for data storage. These researchers creatively make use of quantum geometry: Berry curvature, to read information out. Therefore, this material platform works ideally for memory, with independent ‘write’ and ‘read’ operation. The energy consumption using this novel data storage method can be over 100 times less than the traditional method.

This work is a conceptual innovation for non-volatile storage types and can potentially bring technological revolution. For the first time, the researchers prove that two-dimensional semi-metals, going beyond traditional silicon material, can be used for information storage and reading. This work was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Physics[1]. Compared with the existing non-volatile (NVW) memory, this new material platform is expected to increase storage speed by two orders and decrease energy cost by three orders, and it can greatly facilitate the realization of emerging in-memory computing and neural network computing.

Sep 5, 2020

Is Virtual Burning Man the Internet’s Ultimate Test?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, internet

The cyberdelic extravaganza is online for the first time because of the pandemic. But maybe that’s not as strange as it might seem.