Lifeboat Foundation

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will launch SpaceX’s tenth batch of Starlink broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

The funding agency has taken action in 16–20 cases where foreign ties were not properly reported.

Quantum information scientists have introduced a new method for machine-learning classifications in quantum computing. The non-linear quantum kernels in a quantum binary classifier provide new insights for improving the accuracy of quantum machine learning, deemed able to outperform the current AI technology.

The research team led by Professor June-Koo Kevin Rhee from the School of Electrical Engineering, proposed a quantum classifier based on quantum state fidelity by using a different initial state and replacing the Hadamard classification with a swap test. Unlike the conventional approach, this method is expected to significantly enhance the classification tasks when the training dataset is small, by exploiting the quantum advantage in finding non-linear features in a large feature space.

Quantum machine learning holds promise as one of the imperative applications for quantum computing. In machine learning, one fundamental problem for a wide range of applications is classification, a task needed for recognizing patterns in labeled training data in order to assign a label to new, previously unseen data; and the kernel method has been an invaluable classification tool for identifying non-linear relationships in complex data.

On March 12th 2020 a space telescope called Swift detected a burst of radiation from halfway across the Milky Way. Within a week, the newly discovered X-ray source, named Swift J1818.0–1607, was found to be a magnetar, a rare type of slowly rotating neutron star with one of the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.

Spinning once every 1.4 seconds, it’s the fastest spinning magnetar known, and possibly one of the youngest neutron stars in the Milky Way. It also emits radio pulses like those seen from pulsars—another type of rotating neutron star. At the time of this detection, only four other radio-pulse-emitting magnetars were known, making Swift J1818.0–1607 an extremely rare discovery.

In a recently published study led by a team of scientists from the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), it was found that the pulses from the magnetar become significantly fainter when going from low to high radio frequencies: It has a steep radio spectrum. Its radio emission is not only steeper than the four other radio magnetars, but also steeper than ~90% of all pulsars. Additionally, they found the magnetar had become over 10 times brighter in only two weeks.

SpaceX will launch its tenth set of Starlink internet satellites into orbit today (July 8) and you can watch it live online.

COVID-19 hospitalizations in Connecticut increased by 14 since Monday, but the state is reporting no new coronavirus-related deaths for the “first time in months,” Governor Ned Lamont announced at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m paid to worry,” the governor said when talking about the hospitalizations increasing. “I would worry if I saw our admissions in our hospitals going up and that’s why you saw hospitalizations going up. That’s not what happened. We’ve added between about 20 and 30 new COVID cases a day into our hospitals. That’s consistent. That’s been consistent for the last few weeks. What is happened is there are many fewer discharges. It’s not something I worry about, just something I note to you.”

According to the state Department of Health, 5,745 tests have been administered since yesterday, and just 57 new cases were reported. Lamont said the state’s positive test percentage remains around one percent.

In the next big step toward complete silicon independence, Apple is planning to dump AMD as a supplier of discrete GPUs in the near future, closely following its decision to dump Intel and the x86 machine architecture in favor of its own SoCs based on the Arm machine architecture. The company is developing its own line of discrete GPUs under the “Metal GPU Family,” a name borrowed from its own Metal graphics API.

This explosive bit of information comes from a WWDC 2020 presentation slide posted by Longhorn (@never_released) on Twitter. The slide suggests that along with the processor, Apple is making a clean break with its graphics hardware. The SoCs powering client-segment Macs, such as future iMacs or MacBooks, could feature iGPUs based on this graphics architecture, while larger platforms such as MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, and iMac Pros of the future could feature Apple’s own discrete GPUs.

You might think you’ve seen it all via live stream. Whether it’s historic astronaut launches, the strawberry moon, or new videogame console reveals, it’s easy to take our ability to see things unfold in real-time over the internet for granted.

And yet, there’s one frontier we’ve yet to fully breached — the deep sea. Communication through water isn’t quite as simple as through air and space.

Now, a new study shows that a type of aquatic internet can send data through light beams to allow divers to instantly stream footage from under the sea to the surface.

Continue reading “World’s First Underwater WiFi is Set Up” »

A candid conversation with the pioneering creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita

Throughout his 17-year career as a moviemaker, Stanley Kubrick has committed himself to pushing the frontiers of film into new and often controversial regions—despite the box-office problems and censorship battles that such a commitment invariably entails. Never a follower of the safe, well-traveled road to Hollywood success, he has consistently struck out on his own, shattering movie conventions and shibboleths along the way. In many respects, his latest film, the epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, stands as a metaphor for Kubrick himself. A technically flawless production that took three years and $10,500,000 to create, 2001 could have been just a super-spectacle of exotic gadgetry and lavish special effects; but with the collaboration of Arthur C.