Lifeboat Foundation

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), a recently-discovered visitor from distant parts of our Solar System, is putting on a spectacular nighttime display.

Larsen & Toubro has finished the construction of 3,800-tonne ITER cryostat — the world’s largest steel vacuum chamber and a critical part of the ITER machine — for world’s first fusion reactor as a source of endless clean energy. The company says that the final components are ready to ship to the project site in France and here is what it means for the future of humanity.

A fleet of balloons launched by Google’s sister firm Loon will provide 4G access to remote areas of Kenya.

Just over a month after announcing its latest generation Ampere A100 GPU, Nvidia said this week that the powerhouse processor system is now available on Google Cloud.

The A100 Accelerator Optimized VM A2 instance family is designed for enormous artificial intelligence workloads and data analytics. Nvidia says users can expect substantive improvements over previous processing models, in this instance up to a 20-fold performance boost. The system maxes out at 19.5 TFLOPS for single-precision performance and 156 TFLOPS for AI and high performance computing applications demanding TensorFloat 32 operations.

The Nvidia Ampere is the largest 7 nanometer chip ever constructed. It sports 54 billion transistors and offers innovative features such as multi-instance GPU, automatic mixed precision, an NVLink that doubles GPU-to-GPU direct bandwidth and faster memory reaching 1.6 terabytes per second.

What is more powerful than suction cup and even a vacuum pump, but was not invented by humans?

Answer: a gecko’s foot. NASA has decided to copy the lizard’s incredible gripping technology, which relies on electrostatic attractions, in its Gecko Gripper robot. This is not coming from an internet troll trying to sell car insurance. The space agency partnered with OnRobot, which specializes in finger-like robotic grippers, to create a device that can (so far) lift 14 pounds. The radiation-resistant pads could literally mean a huge step forward for getting around in space.

Researchers from the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) have discovered and theoretically explained a new physical effect: amplitude of mechanical vibrations can grow without external influence. The scientific group offered their explanation on how to eliminate the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou paradox.

The scientists of SPbPU explained it using a simple example: to rock a swing, you have to keep pushing it. It is generally believed that it is impossible to achieve oscillatory resonance without constant external influence.

However, the scientific group of the Higher School of Theoretical Mechanics, Institute of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics SPbPU discovered a new physical phenomenon of ‘ballistic resonance,” where mechanical oscillations can be excited only due to internal thermal resources of the system.

Astrophysicists have devised a clever way to count up the photons in space, stretching back to the cosmos’ adolescence.

But, he added, the method took about 10 minutes to produce 1,024 random strings, whereas current cryptographic processes would need far faster number generators.

The new technique’s first real-world use will come when it’s incorporated into NIST’s randomness beacon, a public source of randomness for researchers studying unpredictability, Bierhorst said.

But he added that he hopes the experimental setup could one day be shrunk enough to fit on a computer chip and help in the creation of “unhackable” messages.

Image: pixabay.