The reusable spaceplane concept seemed to die with the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle. Could the spaceplane rise again in the 21st Century?
Update (8:15 p.m. Thursday): SpaceX is now targeting no earlier than 9:40 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 23, for this launch. This also means weather odds decline from 80% “go” to 60% “go.”
SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station are set for the company’s next launch on Friday, a unique mission that will hug the Florida coast as it flies a southern trajectory.
If everything goes as planned, a previously flown Falcon 9 will vault off Launch Complex 40 at 9:24 a.m. and turn southeast, placing its mission on a sun-synchronous – or nearly polar – trajectory. Friday’s launch window will remain open for about an hour.
Brink Bionics completed a very successful [Indiegogo](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/impulse-neuro-controller-for-pc-gaming#/) crowdfunding campaign in 2020 and gained the confidence to [take part in the CES](https://twitter.com/BrinkBionics/status/1349458342087954433) just last week. The Waterloo, Canada-based startup has a single signature product for now, the Brink Bionics Impulse. It is described as a * neuro-controller for PC gaming, *and takes the form of a glove that uses built-in sensors to read your muscle bio-signals and applies AI to accurately predict your clicking intentions. They key claim for the product is that it can improve your gaming reaction speeds by as much as 80ms. Thus, the Impulse could be a boon to FPS, MOBA and RTS gamers on PC.
ToughDesk 500L RGB Battlestation is said to be a good choice for multi-monitor setups.
HEXUS® is a registered trademark.
Great new episode with University of Arizona planetary geophysicist Erik Asphaug who talks candidly about what we know and don’t know about the structure of our inner solar system. Well worth a listen.
Planetary geophysicist Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona discusses what we really know about our solar system; its age; its formation; and its evolution. Asphaug also addresses some major puzzles. Is our solar system truly anomalous? Is the composition and spacing of our eight planets also anomalous? And what we need to do to further planetary science.
SpaceX’s First Launch of 2021!!
Posted in internet
Lean, mean bricklaying machine.
Construction is difficult to automate because of the complex, individualized and customized work it requires.
But a company called Construction Robotics has developed a one-of-a-kind robot that can lay bricks six times faster than a human.
LONDON — Artificial intelligence researchers don’t like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it’s so hard to answer.
There are some obvious contenders when it comes to commercial AI labs. U.S. Big Tech — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade. There’s also DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk as a founding investor.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Facebook AI Research are fighting it out to be the top AI research lab in the world.
At-home COVID testing arrives
Posted in biotech/medical
The race is on. Tech startups across the globe are competing to deliver to the rest of us what Google employees already enjoy : regular at-home COVID tests.
At-home medical testing was gaining steam pre-pandemic and is now a red-hot market with more than two dozen companies developing at-home COVID tests.
The ultimate goal of the Old World alchemist was to turn inexpensive metals into gold. Modern-day physicists at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics (Rochester, NY), have turned aluminum and other metals goldin color if not chemistry. A femtosecond laser processing technique created by professor Chunlei Guo and his assistant Anatoliy Vorobeyv alters the surface properties of aluminum, platinum, titanium, tungsten, silver, and gold to create tints of gold, blue, gray, black, and even multicolored irridescence.