After nine years of waiting for a gamma-ray burst, scientists have to go back to the drawing board.
Scientists detected the most energetic radiation and longest gamma-ray afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, providing insight into these mysterious events.
Article I just wrote about how going to Mars is actually good for protecting life on Earth, too.
People often lump going to Mars or the Moon into a this/that fight when it comes to bettering the life of the Earth and its inhabitants. But, it’s not that simple.
The technology we master in the pursuit of space colonization (starti n g at the Moon and Mars / space stations) will serve to advance that on Earth. The things we learn will help provide a guide for what to do on this future planet, and not just life beyond it. Sure, in-situ resource utilization/production will generate rocket fuel on extraterrestrial bodies. But, things like the NASA Kilopower nuclear reactor can lay the groundwork for alternative energies deployed on Earth at scale. I imagine thorium reactors will follow suit while we still try to deploy fusion at a consumer scale and not just a research basis.
Scientists from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter have developed a new understanding of how electrons behave in strong magnetic fields. Their results explain measurements of electric currents in three-dimensional materials that signal a quantum Hall effect – a phenomenon thus far only associated with two-dimensional metals. This new 3D effect can be the foundation for topological quantum phenomena, which are believed to be particularly robust and therefore promising candidates for extremely powerful quantum technologies. These results have just been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
Dr. Tobias Meng and Dr. Johannes Gooth are early career researchers in the Würzburg-Dresdner Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat that researches topological quantum materials since 2019. They could hardly believe the findings of a recent publication in Nature claiming that electrons in the topological metal zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe5) move only in two-dimensional planes, despite the fact that the material is three-dimensional. Meng and Gooth therefore started their own research and experiments on the material ZrTe5. Meng from the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) developed the theoretical model, Gooth from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids designed the experiments. Seven measurements with different techniques always lead to the same conclusion.
The citizen astronauts flying to space with Inspiration4 this September are hard at work training for their mission at SpaceX HQ.
It’s either some obscure fluid effect or black magic.
Just when I think I’ve seen every possible iteration of climbing robot, someone comes up with a new way of getting robots to stick to things. The latest technique comes from the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at UCSD, where they’ve managed to get a robot to stick to smooth surfaces using a vibrating motor attached to a flexible disk. How the heck does it work?
The U.S. Department of Justice is elevating investigations of ransomware attacks to a similar priority as terrorism in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack and mounting damage caused by cyber criminals, a senior department official told Reuters.
Internal guidance sent on Thursday to U.S. attorney’s offices across the country said information about ransomware investigations in the field should be centrally coordinated with a recently created task force in Washington.
“It’s a specialized process to ensure we track all ransomware cases regardless of where it may be referred in this country, so you can make the connections between actors and work your way up to disrupt the whole chain,” said John Carlin, principle associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.
Great new, lively episode with historian and author Jeff Shesol on the earliest and arguably darkest days of the Cold War and how they were inexorably intertwined with America’s space race with the former Soviet Union. The cast of characters includes Eisenhower, JFK, Khrushchev, and John Glenn. Please have a listen.
Historian and former Clinton presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol chats about his new book, “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War” just out from W.W. Norton. Shesol makes the case that the Cold War and the Space Race were inextricably intertwined in ways that are rarely appreciated in most conventional histories of the subjects. Shesol gives us a great inside look into this mostly-forgotten early era.
The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) researchers announced this week a natural language processing model called WuDao 2.0 that, per the South China Morning Post, is more advanced than similar models developed by OpenAI and Google.
The report said WuDao 2.0 uses 1.75 trillion parameters to “simulate conversational speech, write poems, understand pictures and even generate recipes.” The models developed by OpenAI and Google are supposed to do similar things, but they use fewer parameters to do so, which means WuDao 2.0 is likely better at those tasks.
Doctors are reporting improved survival in men with advanced prostate cancer from an experimental drug that delivers radiation directly to tumor cells. Few such drugs are approved now, but the approach may become a new way to treat patients with other hard-to-reach or inoperable cancers.
On Wednesday, the Houston-based firm organizing the mission announced it had reached an agreement with SpaceX to fly three additional private crew missions to the International Space Station. The missions will run through to 2023.
It’s an exciting chance for regular people to go to space. But beyond expanding space tourism, Axiom Space’s missions could serve another ambitious idea — to develop a successor to the International Space Station.
