Lifeboat Foundation

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earthquakes that struck California last month caused more than $5 billion in damage to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a sprawling desert facility where some of the military’s most advanced weapons are tested, according to an estimate made public Wednesday.

A survey of nearly 3,600 buildings conducted over 13 days found that repairing or replacing damaged base buildings alone will cost about $2.2 billion, including hangars, repair facilities, offices, a laboratory, 22 ammunition magazines, an air traffic control tower and even a gym and pool, according to an overview presented to potential contractors at an Aug. 1 forum. It was posted Wednesday on the webpage of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southwest.

The base’s total repair and replacement cost of $5.2 billion includes buildings as well as furniture, tools, communications and other specialized equipment.

The prospect of reliving a past moment from Earth’s amazing history or skipping ahead of the future is a tantalising idea widely present in science fiction. But physicists who spend their days pondering the mysteries of time and space believe time travel might be within the realm of possibility. This does not mean scientists will develop TARDIS-like time travel machines straight out of Dr Who any time soon. Instead, the theoretical and physical frameworks are there to show moving forward in time can be achieved – with a small catch.

Great Scott!

Even the fallout from a Triassic nuclear war would have vanished without a trace by now.

We’re only a handful of months away from the year 2020, and with the way parts look and tech acts, it finally feels like we’re entering the future. It’s a future crafted by sophisticated 3D printers and machining centers, using materials provided by global-reaching supply chains and connected to an exponential rate of new superpowered gadgets. Nowadays, there’s really no reason to think any manufacturing feat is impossible. If something doesn’t exist, it’s just that we haven’t figured it out yet.

And this futuristic techtopia brimming with potential wouldn’t be possible if not for engineers—those dedicated, uber-creative folks plotting such a course, continuously improving the world around through the super power of… math.

Mathematics has been the indispensable fuel to make the impossible possible since at least the ancient Egyptians more than four thousand years ago. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the world’s oldest monument to its power. Amazingly, its geometrical elegance was calculated on papyrus scrolls, most of which have turned to dust long ago. Yet the universal language of math still speaks through its dimensions. And it will continue to do so for time immemorial.

Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning — in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger’s cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers.

Butterfly co-mimic pairs from the species Heliconius erato (odd columns) and Heliconius melpomene (even columns) sorted by greatest similarity (along rows, top left to bottom right) using machine learning.

J Hoyal Cuthill

Once, a diagnosis of extensively drug-resistant TB meant quick death. A three-drug regimen cures most patients in just months.

The EOR will also provide an unprecedented test for the current best model of cosmic evolution. Although there is plenty of evidence for dark matter, nobody has identified exactly what it is. Signals from the EOR would help to indicate whether dark matter consists of relatively sluggish, or ‘cold’, particles — the model that is currently favoured — or ‘warm’ ones that are lighter and faster, says Anna Bonaldi, an astrophysicist at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation near Manchester, UK. “The exact nature of dark matter is one of the things at stake,” she says.

Radioastronomers look to hydrogen for insights into the Universe’s first billion years.