Lifeboat Foundation

Crew-8 marks the fifth flight for Endeavour, the maximum number of flights Crew Dragon spacecraft have been qualified for. But this spacecraft, what NASA and SpaceX refer to as the “fleet leader,” could potentially prove itself worthy of more flights — possibly many more. According to NASA officials, Crew Dragon might be able to fly up to 15 times, depending on the results of a requalification campaign the agency and SpaceX will undertake this year and next.

Related: SpaceX launches Crew-8 astronaut mission to International Space Station for NASA (video)

During a press briefing on Feb. 28 to discuss the Crew-8 mission, Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said SpaceX is currently performing qualification tests of “every single” component on the Dragon spacecraft in order to determine how many flights the spacecraft might be capable of making.

The first was to continue with a legacy vendor. Three companies — Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic — control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public.

The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.

Most people know about solids, liquids, and gases as the main three states of matter, but a fourth state of matter exists as well. Plasma—also known as ionized gas—is the most abundant, observable form of matter in our universe, found in the sun and other celestial bodies.

Creating the hot mix of freely moving electrons and ions that compose a plasma often requires extreme pressures or temperatures. In these extreme conditions, researchers continue to uncover the unexpected ways that plasma can move and evolve. By better understanding the motion of plasma, scientists gain valuable insights into solar physics, astrophysics, and fusion.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the University of Rochester, along with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a new class of plasma oscillations—the back-and-forth, wave-like movement of electrons and ions. The findings have implications for improving the performance of miniature particle accelerators and the reactors used to create fusion energy.

Shared with Dropbox.

NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin arrived at the International Space Station, as the SpaceX Dragon, named Endeavour, docked to the complex at 2:28 a.m. EST on March 5 while the station was 260 statute miles over Newfoundland.

Following Dragon’s link up to the Harmony module, the astronauts aboard the Dragon and the space station conducted standard leak checks and pressurization between the spacecraft in preparation for hatch opening.

A group of Tohoku University researchers has developed a theoretical model for a high-performance spin wave reservoir computing (RC) that utilizes spintronics technology. The breakthrough moves scientists closer to realizing energy-efficient, nanoscale computing with unparalleled computational power.

Details of their findings were published in npj Spintronics on March 1, 2024.

The brain is the ultimate computer, and scientists are constantly striving to create neuromorphic devices that mimic the brain’s processing capabilities, low power consumption, and its ability to adapt to neural networks. The development of neuromorphic computing is revolutionary, allowing scientists to explore nanoscale realms, GHz speed, with low energy consumption.

ShortGPT

Layers in large language models are more redundant than you expect.

As AI is increasingly integrated into our lives, scientists building the tech are still trying to understand it, the MIT Tech Review reports.

The new hardware reimagines AI chips for modern workloads and can run powerful AI systems using much less energy than today’s most advanced semiconductors, according to Naveen Verma, professor of electrical and computer engineering. Verma, who will lead the project, said the advances break through key barriers that have stymied chips for AI, including size, efficiency and scalability.

Chips that require less energy can be deployed to run AI in more dynamic environments, from laptops and phones to hospitals and highways to low-Earth orbit and beyond. The kinds of chips that power today’s most advanced models are too bulky and inefficient to run on small devices, and are primarily constrained to server racks and large data centers.

Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has announced it will support Verma’s work, based on a suite of key inventions from his lab, with an $18.6 million grant. The DARPA funding will drive an exploration into how fast, compact and power-efficient the new chip can get.

The goal of science is to understand and master the Universe around us, but could our skill grow so great that we could learn to warp reality itself?

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