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Tomographic 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that uses light to create three-dimensional objects. A projector beams light at a rotating vial containing photocurable resin, and within seconds the desired shape forms inside the vial. The light projections needed to solidify specific 3D regions of the polymer are calculated using tomographic imaging concepts.

The technology was first demonstrated by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2019, and a Swiss group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020. It is significantly faster than traditional 3D printing in layers, can print around existing objects, and does not require support structures.

Though incredible, the technology can get messy in the lab. The vial’s round shape makes it refract rays like a lens. To counter this, experts use a rectangular index-matching bath that provides a flat surface for rays to pass through correctly. The vial of resin must be dipped in and out of the bath for each use—creating a slimy situation.

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An international team of researchers have come up with a fusion-based spacecraft thruster that uses a hydrogen isotope called deuterium as a fuel source, as Popular Mechanics reports.

Their “direct fusion drive,” (DFD) — as detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed preprint — is theoretically able to speed up a spacecraft to a blistering 44 kilometers per second, covering the distance from here to Neptune and beyond in less than a decade.

While electric propulsion systems powered by the rays of the Sun have allowed us to explore the inner reaches of our solar system, venturing beyond Jupiter would require gigantic solar arrays, the team argues in its paper.

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Our physical space-time reality isn’t really “physical” at all, its apparent solidity of objects, as well as any other associated property such as time, is an illusion. As a renowned physicist Niels Bohr once said: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” But what’s not an illusion is your subjective experience, i.e., your consciousness; that’s the only “real” thing, according to proponents of Experiential Realism. It refers to interacting entangled conscious agents at various ontological levels, giving rise to conscious experience all the way down, and I’d argue all the way up, seemingly ad infinitum. It’s a “matryoshka” of embedded realities: conscious minds within larger minds.

#ExperientialRealism

So, why Experiential Realism? From the bigger picture perspective, we are here for experience necessary for evolution of our conscious minds. Our limitations, such as our ego, belief traps, political correctness, our very human condition define who we are, but the realization that we largely impose those limitations on ourselves gives us more evolvability and impetus to overcome these self-imposed limits to move towards higher goals and state of being.

We are what we’ve experienced — the sum of our experiences define who we are. In this sense, as free will agents, we are co-creators within this experiential matrix. Non-duality is the essence of Experiential Realism — experience and experiencer are one. How can you possibly separate your own existence from the world, the observer from the observed? Today, philosophers and scientists argue that information is fundamental but consciousness is required to assign meaning to it. That makes consciousness (our experience in a broader sense) the most fundamental, irreducible ground of existence itself, while some philosophers suggest consciousness is all that is.

Continue reading “From Fringe to Mainstream: Experiential Realism of the Evolving Conscious Mind” | >

DARPA awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 million contract to provide positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payloads for the Blackjack program.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 million contract to provide positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payloads for the Blackjack program.

Blackjack is a DARPA project to demonstrate the military utility of small satellites in low Earth orbit to provide communications, missile warning and PNT. Northrop Grumman’s contract was awarded April 28, according to sam.gov.

The company will supply two payloads that broadcast a new signal that is not dependent on the Global Positioning System.

Continue reading “Northrop Grumman to supply navigation payloads for DARPA’s Blackjack satellites” | >

NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, participated in the first media event following their mission and splashdown, where they answered questions about their historic mission on the International Space Station and return to Earth.

SpaceX ’s Crew Dragon, named Resilience, carrying Hopkins, Glover, Walker, and Noguchi, splashed down at 2:56 a.m. May 2 under parachutes in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Panama City, Florida, and was successfully recovered by SpaceX. After returning to shore, the astronauts immediately flew back to Houston, where they were greeted by their families and colleagues.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts answer questions about their historic mission on the International Space Station and their return to Earth. At around 14:15 Victor Glover discusses how it feels to be subjected to 4.5 Gs for over a minute on reentry after experiencing weightlessness for 167 days: “I felt really heavy!”

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A research team from Brown University has made a major step toward improving the long-term reliability of perovskite solar cells, an emerging clean energy technology. In a study to be published on Friday, May 7 in the journal Science, the team demonstrates a “molecular glue” that keeps a key interface inside cells from degrading. The treatment dramatically increases cells’ stability and reliability over time, while also improving the efficiency with which they convert sunlight into electricity.

“There have been great strides in increasing the power-conversion efficiency of solar ,” said Nitin Padture, a professor of engineering at Brown University and senior author of the new research. “But the final hurdle to be cleared before the technology can be widely available is reliability—making cells that maintain their performance over time. That’s one of the things my research group has been working on, and we’re happy to report some important progress.”

Perovskites are a class of materials with a particular crystalline atomic structure. A little over a decade ago, researchers showed that perovskites are very good at absorbing light, which set off a flood of new research into perovskite solar cells. The efficiency of those cells has increased quickly and now rivals that of traditional silicon cells. The difference is that perovskite light absorbers can be made at near , whereas silicon needs to be grown from a melt at a temperature approaching 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Perovskite films are also about 400 times thinner than silicon wafers. The relative ease of the manufacturing processes and the use of less material means perovskite cells can be potentially made at a fraction of the cost of silicon cells.

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The human cells grew inside all 132 of the embryos after just 24 hours. After ten days, 103 chimeric embryos remained. By day 19, however, only three chimeras were left alive – and they were then terminated.

“This knowledge will allow us to go back now and try to re-engineer these pathways that are successful for allowing appropriate development of human cells in these other animals,” Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, genetics professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California and co-author of the study, told NPR.

“We are very, very excited,” he added.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the scrolls. They presented their results in the journal PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021.

The scribes who created the scrolls did not sign their work. Scholars suggested some manuscripts should be attributed to a single scribe based on handwriting. “They would try to find a “smoking gun” in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter which would identify a scribe,” explains Mladen Popović, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. He is also director of the university’s Qumran Institute, dedicated to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, these identifications are somewhat subjective and often hotly debated.

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