Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past decade or so, the performance of batteries has skyrocketed and their cost has plummeted. Given that many experts see the electrification of everything as key to decarbonizing our energy systems, this is good news. But for researchers like Chueh, the pace of battery innovation isn’t happening fast enough. The reason is simple: batteries are extremely complex. To build a better battery means ruthlessly optimizing at every step in the production process. It’s all about using less expensive raw materials, better chemistry, more efficient manufacturing techniques. But there are a lot of parameters that can be optimized. And often an improvement in one area—say, energy density—will come at a cost of making gains in another area, like charge rate.

Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude.

The mission was previously scheduled for 2:40 a.m. ET on October 31. The latest delay allows SpaceX to evaluate an issue with its Falcon 9 rocket engines during a recent test launch. The rocket’s gas generators demonstrated abnormal behavior, NASA said in a statement, though it didn’t specify what went wrong.

SpaceX aborted a scheduled launch of its Falcon 9 rocket on October 2 after a gas generator saw an unexpected rise in pressure.

This isn’t the first time SpaceX has delayed Crew-1, the company’s first official, contracted astronaut mission for NASA. The mission was originally slated to launch as early as September. It was pushed back until Halloween to better coordinate with the schedules of other cosmonauts and astronauts going to and from the ISS.

Colder, Colder…

The process of sintering, or bonding the metals that make up the flexible circuits, usually happens at 572 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The skin surface cannot withstand such a high temperature, obviously,” Penn State engineer and lead author Hanyu “Larry” Cheng said in a press release. “To get around this limitation, we proposed a sintering aid layer — something that would not hurt the skin and could help the material sinter together at a lower temperature.”

Caltech’s OrbNet deep learning tool outperforms state-of-the-art solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is being applied to help accelerate the complex science of quantum mechanics—the branch of physics that studies matter and light on the subatomic scale. Recently a team of scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) published a breakthrough study in The Journal of Chemical Physics that unveils a new machine learning tool called OrbNet that can perform quantum chemistry computations 1,000 times faster than existing state-of-the-art solutions.

“We demonstrate the performance of the new method for the prediction of molecular properties, including the total and relative conformer energies for molecules in range of datasets of organic and drug-like molecules,” wrote the researchers.

Continue reading “AI Breakthrough Speeds Up Quantum Chemistry” »

* Unsecured home security cameras hijacked * Stolen images circulate on Discord * Everyone needs to take IoT security more seriously.

In Singapore it’s not at all uncommon today for people to have IP cameras all over their homes.

And, of course, the more people who installed internet-connected cameras throughout their private residences the more you would be considered odd if you hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon, and put cameras in your living room, kitchen, bedroom, sometimes even with a view of even more private areas of your house.

A Russian Soyuz booster arrived at its launch pad on the Kazakh steppe Sunday, the last stop before liftoff Wednesday with a three-person crew bound for the International Space Station.

The Soyuz-2.1a rocket emerged from its assembly building at sunrise Sunday for the railroad trek to pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After the Soyuz reached the pad, hydraulic cylinders raised the three-stage rocket vertical and gantry arms folded into position around the launcher.

Tesla is updating the interior of the Model 3 to let owners lock their Sentry Mode/TeslaCam storage device in the glovebox.

Sentry Mode is Tesla’s integrated surveillance system inside its vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car to record potential vandalism or other incidents.

Tesla owners have to plug a storage device in one of the USB ports in the center console and footage recorded by Sentry Mode and TeslaCam, the automaker’s dashcam feature, will be stored on it.

The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.

Satellite communication has been serving the terrestrial network as a complementor rather than a competitor for a considerable time. The best use-case scenario is the cellular backhaul over VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) to connect remotely installed BTS (Base Transceiver Station) of a cellular network through a geostationary satellite to the respective BSC (Base Station Controller) and ultimately the core network. This technology enabled MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) to increase their subscribers base in remote communities which could not be connected to their network grid through Microwave or Fibre transmission. Similar network architecture, commonly known as bent-pipe and FSS (Fixed Satellite Service), has been used by other networks requirements of ISP (Internet Service Providers), Government, Corporate, Oil & Gas, Mining sectors, where the DCE (Data Communication Equipment) and DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) are replaced from BTS and BSC to networking switches and routers.

However, all these communications are struggling to keep at par with development at terrestrial networks, and the main reason is staggering latency of around 530 milliseconds for a roundtrip of a message through the satellites at an altitude of around 37,000 kilometres, which is a big challenge for Industry 4.0 technologies. The arrival of the planned NGSO mega constellation appears to address the problem through claimed significantly lower latency of around 4 milliseconds, which is at par with fibre optics.

The integration of the networks of mega constellations with those on the ground is a complicated situation with multiple dynamics to analyse. Let us have a brief look at 4G LTE and 5G NR technology and analyse the integration for both backhaul and fronthaul interfaces through NGSO satellites with the core networks.