Lifeboat Foundation

Orbion is a four-year-old startup in Houghton, Michigan, that specializes in Hall-effect plasma thrusters for small satellites.

WASHINGTON — Small satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies announced Sept. 15 it selected Orbion Space Technology to supply the electric propulsion system for the U.S. military’s Blackjack constellation.

Blue Canyon is producing four satellites for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Blackjack program. DARPA plans to launch as many as 20 small satellites to demonstrate that a mesh network in low Earth orbit can meet military requirements at lower cost and shorter design cycles than traditional Pentagon programs.

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IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.

Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.

The batteries will offer more range in the same size pack, but the automaker still has to solve the technology’s life-span problem.

Toyota has chosen to focus on hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles as the cornerstones of its green strategy, but that doesn’t mean the automaker is forgoing an electric vehicle altogether. In addition to an EV crossover coming from the automaker and its partner Subaru in the near future and a lineup of six EVs (some of which are pictured above), which are likely to land in China first, Toyota is currently working on a technological breakthrough that will reach far beyond its use in an EV: the solid-state battery.

Researchers perfect a battery that will let electric vehicles charge faster and drive farther while lasting a lot longer, but don’t expect to see it anytime soon.

For years, solid-state batteries have been heralded as the answer to many of the issues surrounding EVs. The battery technology allows for greater energy density, which translates into more range from the same size pack as a lithium-ion battery. The problem has been that the failure rate is far too high after repeated charging. Also, they’re super expensive. But Samsung may have solved the first issue.

BOSTON, July 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Solid-state batteries keep on attracting tremendous attention and investment with the maturing technologies and closeness to mass production. Even with the influence of COVID-19, the potential market size is expected to grow to over $6 billion by 2030, according to IDTechEx’s report “Solid-State and Polymer Batteries 2020–2030: Technology, Patents, Forecasts, Players.”

Coming late 2020 or early 2021.

CEO Elon Musk is expected to detail the new battery tech at a “Battery Day” event for investors later this month. The long-rumored advancement could make it possible for Tesla to sell its vehicles at more competitive prices.

A Chinese virologist who has alleged that COVID-19 was human-made in a lab in China released a report on Monday that she says backs up her explosive claim.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a former researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, posted a paper on the open-access repository website Zenote, that she claims shows how SARS-CoV-2 could be “conveniently created” in a laboratory setting in six months.

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Two dozen of the medicines are already under investigation. Also on the list: chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria.

Big Blue fears human rights violations and mass surveillance.