The US military is teaming up with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a rocket capable of delivering weapons around the world at 7,500 mph.
Einstein’s theory of special relativity gave us the speed limit of the Universe — that of light in a vacuum. But the absolute top speed of sound, through any medium, has been somewhat trickier to constrain.
It’s impossible to measure the speed of sound in every single material in existence, but scientists have now managed to pin down an upper limit based on fundamental constants, the universal parameters by which we understand the physics of the Universe.
That speed limit, according to the new calculations, is 36 kilometres per second (22 miles per second). That’s about twice the speed of sound travelling through diamond.
It looks like our food for the future will be bugs. A factory in France will grow bugs as a food source.
Enter the insects. Or, more appropriately in this case, enter Ÿnsect, the French company with big ambitions to help change the way the world eats. Ÿnsect raised $125 million in Series C funding in early 2019, and at the time already had $70 million worth of aggregated orders to fill. Now they’re building a bug-farming plant to churn out tiny critters in record numbers.
You’ve probably heard of vertical farms in the context of plants; most existing vertical farms use LED lights and a precise mixture of nutrients and water to grow leafy greens or other produce indoors. They maximize the surface area used for growing by stacking several layers of plants on top of one another; the method may not make for as much space as outdoor fields have, but can yield a lot more than you might think.
Continue reading “A New Factory in France Will Mass-Produce Bugs as Food” »
A team of astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (IfA) has produced the world’s largest three-dimensional astronomical imaging catalog of stars, galaxies and quasars. The team used data from UH’s Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) on Haleakalā. The PS1 3π survey is the world’s largest deep multi-color optical survey, spanning three-quarters of the sky. IfA astronomers applied novel computational tools to the catalog, to decipher which of the 3 billion objects are stars, galaxies or quasars. For the galaxies, the software also derived estimates of their distances.
The resulting 3D catalog is now available as a high-level science product through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. It is approximately 300 GB in size, and science users can query the catalog through the MAST CasJobs SQL interface, or download the entire collection as a computer-readable table.
Summary: Boosting levels of the DUSP4 protein could be a novel way of preventing and treating epilepsy.
Source: University of Illinois
Epileptic seizures often originate in small, localized areas of the brain where neurons abnormally fire in unison. These electrical impulses disrupt proper brain functioning and cause seizures. But what makes regions where seizures start different from parts of the brain where electrical impulses remain normal? More importantly, what prevents these epileptic centers from growing?
The electric-car maker could benefit from improving profitability on vehicle sales and huge growth in its nascent energy business.
This latest IoT security warning is hard to believe…
Warnings that our IoT devices might be spying on us are nothing new—remember the smart speaker fiasco last year? But at least we expect those devices to be listening and can exercise some caution. The latest such warning, though, takes these risks to a new level. It turns out that there may be surprising little spies hiding in our living rooms.
Last December, the FBI warned that the perilous state of IoT security means that “hackers can use an innocent device to do a virtual drive-by of your digital life.” A week earlier, that same FBI office had cautioned on the danger that smart TVs can allow “manufacturers, streaming services, and even hackers an open door into your home.”
Continue reading “FBI ‘Drive-By’ Hacking Threat Just Got Real: Here’s Why You Should Be Concerned” »
As tiny particles traveling at the speed of light, it’s going to take a serious machine to capture photons in action, and an international team of researchers have just pieced together one that is very much up for the job. Dubbed the world’s fastest UV camera, the device is capable of capturing ultra-fast events lasting just a picosecond, quick enough to see UV photons fly through the air in real time.
The device is the handiwork of Canada’s Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Institute of Research) and goes by the name of UV-CUP (compressed ultrafast photography). CUP is an emerging imaging technique that has been used to capture ultrafast events at speeds measured in trillions of frames a second, but has so far been limited to visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
“Many phenomena that occur on very short time scales also take place on a very small spatial scale,” says Jinyang Liang, who led the study. “To see them, you need to sense shorter wavelengths. Doing this in the UV or even X-ray ranges is a remarkable step toward this goal.”
Revelations from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe are building excitement for its sampling expedition, slated to happen in the coming weeks.
