Lifeboat Foundation

Hinted at in a brief tweet on August 28th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX’s massive Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle – set to be the most powerful rocket ever built upon completion – could eventually be followed by a rocket multiple times larger.

SpaceX is currently in the process of assembling the first full-fidelity prototypes of Starship, a 9m (30 ft) diameter, 55m (180 ft) tall reusable spacecraft and upper stage. Two prototypes – Mk1 and Mk2 – are simultaneously being built in Texas and Florida, respectively, while the beginnings of the first Super Heavy prototype has visibly begun to take shape at SpaceX’s Florida campus.

Once complete, Starship’s Super Heavy booster will be the single most powerful rocket booster ever built, standing at least 70m (230 ft) tall on its own and capable of producing as much as ~90,000 kN (19,600,000 lbf) of thrust with 30 250-ton-thrust and 7 200-ton-thrust Raptor engines installed. Assuming 31 throttleable 200-ton Raptors, Super Heavy’s minimum max thrust is a still record-breaking ~62,000 kN (13.7 million lbf).

Fusion energy startup First Light Fusion is working towards demonstrating “first fusion” before the end of the year, in their Oxford-based laboratory. If they succeed, they join only a few companies and research groups on the path to demonstrating “gain,” where the energy created outstrips the energy required to start the reaction, which they hope to do by 2024.

Demonstrating gain is the key marker of success and the proof required for the industry to start building the commercial infrastructure to scale the technology, but no company or research group has managed it yet. The history of fusion is littered with a few high-profile failures, prompting many to believe the “it’s always 30 years away” narrative, but with investment in the space heating up with more private investors starting to see the potential in recently-formed startups, belief in fusion is growing again.

In the fusion energy race, it’s arguably anybody’s game among the few key global leaders of both startups and publicly-funded research efforts. There’s the huge international research effort in the south of France, ITER, looking to demonstrate first plasma–not gain–at the end of 2025. And there’s the various startups with their different technological approaches attracting private funding worldwide, such as TAE with $600 million funding in Los Angeles, Boston-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems with $115 million raised in June and General Fusion with over $100 million based in British Columbia. In the U.K., Tokamak Energy has raised over $50 million.

In a study published in Scientific Reports, a group of researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil describes an important theoretical finding that may contribute to the development of quantum computing and spintronics (spin electronics), an emerging technology that uses electron spin or angular momentum rather than electron charge to build faster, more efficient devices.

The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP. Its principal investigator was Antonio Carlos Seridonio, a professor in UNESP’s Department of Physics and Chemistry at Ilha Solteira, São Paulo State. His graduate students Yuri Marques, Willian Mizobata and Renan Oliveira also participated.

The researchers observed that molecules with the capacity to encode information are produced in systems called Weyl semimetals when time-reversal symmetry is broken.

Vantablack is a coating so black, anything covered in it appears to disappear, replaced by the blackest of black voids.

Now, the company behind the coating, Surrey NanoSystems, has teamed up with BMW to see what it looks like when you paint a vehicle with Vantablack — and it’s about as trippy as you’d expect.

As part of continuing efforts to ensure their vehicles are the safest cars on the road, Tesla’s “Bug Bounty” program gives awards to security researchers that uncover vulnerabilities in the company’s various product systems. Perhaps one of the most impressive parts of that program, however, is Tesla’s ability to remedy the flaws quickly. In the most recent example of their dedication to security, a Bug Bounty find from April this year is now being patched via an over-the-air (OTA) update in 2019.32.

Last year, a Tesla Model S key fob was hacked by a team led by Lennert Wouters of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium (KU Leuven). The security flaw enabled would-be car thieves to clone a fob in less than two seconds, after which the vehicle could be driven off. Tesla subsequently offered a multi-part fix: PIN to Drive, a software update, and a new fob. Wouters again found a very similar flaw in the new fob, but this time the fix only required an OTA update which patched both the vehicle software and the fob’s configuration via radio waves.

A French startup is trying to streamline electric conversion with Tesla batteries in order to offer a relatively cheap way to convert older fossil fuel-powered cars.

Therefs nothing new about electric conversions, but they are often really complicated, which also makes them really expensive.

Continue reading “Startup offers ~$9,000 electric retrofits with Tesla batteries for fossil fuel-powered cars” »

Tesla CEO Elon Musk pointed to advances in artificial intelligence as evidence that we are smarter than computers in fewer and fewer realms.

Wow. The Chandra X-ray Observatory just celebrated its 20th anniversary of being launched into space! It roared into orbit on board the Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999.

Continue reading “Watch the expansion of the Cas A supernova remnant with your own eyes!” »