Lifeboat Foundation

Those padded walls will help in low gravity, no doubt, and in the crew capsule, all six people get a window seat. “You’ll listen to the countdown and then feel the engine ignite and rumble under you as you climb through the atmosphere,” reads a description from Blue Origin. The capsule is 530 cubic feet.

The first crewed Blue Origin flight will simply reach the edge of space — a landmark called the Kármán Line — and then return. This the company’s reusable suborbital flight system, will launch the crew capsule to its destination before it descends to Earth, landing softly in the Texas dirt, thanks to parachutes. Blue Origin is also working on a heavy-lift launch vehicle designed to reach Earth orbit, called New Glenn, but that’s unlikely to fly before 2020.

The video — seen above — was shot by an Amazon representative and sent to Inverse. There’s no denying, it looks remarkably comfortable.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos’ Space Firm Debuts Video of Cushy Space Tourist Capsule” »

Without the Higgs, the Standard Model of particle physics comes crashing down.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is building its Starship rocket and launch site in south Texas. The project has proved complicated.

A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.

This is a very focused group, if you’re concerned about existential risks for humanity.

Continue reading “Existential Risk Public Group” »

That’s why more than 100 repositories, communities, societies, institutions, infrastructures, individuals and publishers (including Springer Nature, the publishers of Nature) have signed up since last November to the Enabling FAIR Data Project’s Commitment Statement in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences for depositing and sharing data (see http://). The principles state that research data should be ‘findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable’ (FAIR)2. The idea is not new, but aligning this broad community around common data guidelines is a radical step.

All disciplines should follow the geosciences and demand best practice for publishing and sharing data, argue Shelley Stall and colleagues.

Noise and imperfections in a quantum system can result in the presence and propagation of errors through the system. A reliable quantum processor will need to be able to correct for these errors and error syndromes. Rosenblum et al. used higher quantum states of a superconducting-based quantum circuit to demonstrate a method for the fault-tolerant measurement of an error-correctable logical qubit. Such fault-tolerant measurements will allow more frequent interrogations of the state of the logical qubit, ultimately leading to the implementation of more quantum operations and more complex entangled quantum circuits.

Science, this issue p. 266

A critical component of any quantum error–correcting scheme is detection of errors by using an ancilla system. However, errors occurring in the ancilla can propagate onto the logical qubit, irreversibly corrupting the encoded information. We demonstrate a fault-tolerant error-detection scheme that suppresses spreading of ancilla errors by a factor of 5, while maintaining the assignment fidelity. The same method is used to prevent propagation of ancilla excitations, increasing the logical qubit dephasing time by an order of magnitude. Our approach is hardware-efficient, as it uses a single multilevel transmon ancilla and a cavity-encoded logical qubit, whose interaction is engineered in situ by using an off-resonant sideband drive. The results demonstrate that hardware-efficient approaches that exploit system-specific error models can yield advances toward fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Continue reading “Fault-tolerant detection of a quantum error” »

Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to allow communication between brains and computer devices. The “Brain Talker” is a new model that looks set to make the technology go mainstream.

Atomic BECs were first achieved in 1995. Although it has become easier to realize atomic BECs since their discovery, they still require very low temperatures for operation. For most purposes, this is too expensive and impractical. Alternatively, negatively charged quatrons are quasi-particles composed of a hole and three electrons which form a stable BEC when coupled to light in triple quantum layer structures in semiconductor microcavities. This allows for both the greater experimental control found in quantum optics, and the benefits of matter wave systems, such as superconductivity and coherence. Moreover, due to the extremely small effective mass of the quasi-particles, quatrons can be used to achieve superconducting BECs at room temperature.

The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.