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Apr 15, 2024
A balanced quantum Hall resistor provides a new measurement method
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: quantum physics
Researchers at the University of Würzburg have developed a method that can improve the performance of quantum resistance standards. It’s based on a quantum phenomenon called Quantum Anomalous Hall effect.
Apr 15, 2024
Polaris Dawn is getting closer and closer to being launch ready
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: space travel
Things are slowly falling into place for the Polaris Program’s first mission, Polaris Dawn. The mission is nearing milestones that might finally give it a launch date that will actually hold.
Polaris Dawn, a private mission being paid for by Shift4 CEO Jared Issacman, who also paid for and flew on Inspiration4 in 2021. The goal of the mission is to fly higher than any human spaceflight since Apollo, perform the first private spacewalk, and conduct numerous science experiments in orbit.
Like Inspiration4, Polaris is partnering with SpaceX to complete this. Currently, SpaceX is the only company capable of this sort of feat. To do so, the company has modified its Dragon spacecraft to support spacewalk operations and develop an upgraded spacesuit to be used in the vacuum of space.
Apr 15, 2024
Tesla is laying off more than 10% of its workforce, memo shows
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation
Tesla is the latest major company to lay off employees.
The company is eliminating “more than 10%” of staff globally, according to an internal memo sent by Elon Musk on Sunday, which was seen by Business Insider. The layoffs have come shortly after the carmaker posted lackluster delivery numbers.
Musk wrote in the email: “There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done. This will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth cycle.”
Apr 15, 2024
NASA’s New Solar Sail Spacecraft Will Shine So Bright We’ll See It From Earth
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: space travel
\r The most recent piece of news on this front comes from American space agency NASA, which announced last week that it is getting ready to launch a new kind of solar sail that may revolutionize such technologies.
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Apr 15, 2024
The Universe Could Be Eternal, According to This Controversial Theory
Posted by Arthur Brown in category: space
The idea of a static universe would mean our cosmos is eternal, and it isn’t expanding after all.
Apr 15, 2024
Martin Rees — Why Is There Anything At All?
Posted by Dan Breeden in category: futurism
Follow us on X for news, fascinating articles, and discussions with other followers: https://shorturl.at/imHY9
Why is there a world, a cosmos, something, anything instead of absolutely nothing at all? If nothing existed, there would be, well, ‘nothing’ to explain. To have anything existing demands some kind of explanation. Of all the big questions, this is the biggest. Why anything? Why not nothing? What can we learn from the absence of nothing?
Continue reading “Martin Rees — Why Is There Anything At All?” »
Apr 15, 2024
‘Cosmic Cannibals’ Expel Jets into Space at 40 percent the Speed of Light
Posted by Natalie Chan in category: space
For the first time, astronomers have measured the speed of fast-moving jets in space, crucial to star formation and the distribution of elements needed for life.
The jets of matter, expelled by stars deemed ‘cosmic cannibals’, were measured to travel at over one-third of the speed of light — thanks to a groundbreaking new experiment published in Nature today.
The study sheds new light on these violent processes, making clever use of runaway nuclear explosions on the surface of stars.
Apr 15, 2024
Mechanism found to Determine Which Memories Last
Posted by Natalie Chan in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience
Neuroscientists have established in recent decades the idea that some of each day’s experiences are converted by the brain into permanent memories during sleep the same night. Now, a new study proposes a mechanism that determines which memories are tagged as Important enough to linger in the brain until sleep makes them permanent.
Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study revolves around brain cells called neurons that “fire” – or bring about swings in the balance of their positive and negative charges — to transmit electrical signals that encode memories. Large groups of neurons in the hippocampus fire together in rhythmic cycles, creating sequences of signals within milliseconds of each other that can encode complex information.
Called “sharp wave-ripples,” these “shouts” to the rest of the brain represent the near-simultaneous firing of 15 percent of hippocampal neurons, and are named for the shape they take when their activity is captured by electrodes and recorded on a graph.
Apr 15, 2024
Q&A: How to Train AI when you Don’t Have Enough Data
Posted by Natalie Chan in categories: information science, robotics/AI, transportation
Artificial intelligence excels at sorting through information and detecting patterns or trends. But these machine learning algorithms need to be trained with large amounts of data first.
As researchers explore potential applications for AI, they have found scenarios where AI could be really useful—such as analyzing X-ray image data to look for evidence of rare conditions or detecting a rare fish species caught on a commercial fishing boat—but there’s not enough data to accurately train the algorithms.
Jenq-Neng Hwang, University of Washington professor of electrical and computer and engineering, specializes in these issues. For example, Hwang and his team developed a method that teaches AI to monitor how many distinct poses a baby can achieve throughout the day. There are limited training datasets of babies, which meant the researchers had to create a unique pipeline to make their algorithm accurate and useful.