He thinks he’s figured out a way to travel to the past.
The U.S. Army this week has banned TikTok from government-owned devices as scrutiny over the platform’s relationship with China grows.
Forecasters predict near-ideal weather conditions Monday night for the first launch at Cape Canaveral this year, when SpaceX plans to send another 60 Starlink broadband satellites into orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
FULL STORY: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/02/good-weather-predicted…h-of-2020/
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is kicking off the new year with an ultra busy month of tests and missions, including a major test for the company’s first crewed mission to fly NASA astronauts to and back from the International Space Station (ISS).
To drum up hype ahead of the big day, Musk posted a simulated video on Monday showing how the eventual manned launch will look.
SEE ALSO: Why Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists Universally Oppose Moving to Mars.
This year birthed some of the most mind-bending military tech we’ve ever seen.
Whether you’re a war hawk or a pacifist, it’s hard to deny the last year’s mind-bending advances in warfare technology.
Any FDA-approved drug must first pass through three phases of development, to show safety and efficacy. At our launch party, Dr. Cole Marta, a principal investigator at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Los Angeles MDMA phase 3 study site, explains the process of drug development and what happens after a drug gets to market, including factors such as cost to the patient and insurance coverage. How would *you* like to see psychedelic medicines legally come to market?
The accelerator-on-a-chip demonstrated in Science is just a prototype, but Vuckovic said its design and fabrication techniques can be scaled up to deliver particle beams accelerated enough to perform cutting-edge experiments in chemistry, materials science and biological discovery that don’t require the power of a massive accelerator.
“The largest accelerators are like powerful telescopes. There are only a few in the world and scientists must come to places like SLAC to use them,” Vuckovic said. “We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool.”
Team members liken their approach to the way that computing evolved from the mainframe to the smaller but still useful PC. Accelerator-on-a-chip technology could also lead to new cancer radiation therapies, said physicist Robert Byer, a co-author of the Science paper. Again, it’s a matter of size.
Today, medical X-ray machines fill a room and deliver a beam of radiation that’s tough to focus on tumors, requiring patients to wear lead shields to minimize collateral damage.
On a hillside above Stanford University, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory operates a scientific instrument nearly 2 miles long. In this giant accelerator, a stream of electrons flows through a vacuum pipe, as bursts of microwave radiation nudge the particles ever-faster forward until their velocity approaches the speed of light, creating a powerful beam that scientists from around the world use to probe the atomic and molecular structures of inorganic and biological materials.
Now, for the first time, scientists at Stanford and SLAC have created a silicon chip that can accelerate electrons—albeit at a fraction of the velocity of that massive instrument—using an infrared laser to deliver, in less than a hair’s width, the sort of energy boost that takes microwaves many feet.
Researchers believe they have identified specific neurons that are responsible for conscious awareness. Previous studies have implicated both thalamocortical circuits and cortico-cortico circuits in consciousness. The new study reports these networks intersect via L5p neurons. Directly activating L5p neurons made mice react to weaker sensory stimuli. The researchers say if consciousness requires L5p neurons, all brain activity without them must be unconscious.
Quantum computers, quantum cryptography and quantum (insert name here) are often in the news these days. Articles about them inevitably refer to entanglement, a property of quantum physics that makes all these magical devices possible.
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” a name that has stuck and become increasingly popular. Beyond just building better quantum computers, understanding and harnessing entanglement is also useful in other ways.
For example, it can be used to make more accurate measurements of gravitational waves, and to better understand the properties of exotic materials. It also subtly shows up in other places: I have been studying how atoms bumping into each other become entangled, to understand how this affects the accuracy of atomic clocks.
Moon Phases 2020
Posted in space
🌖 What will the Moon look like throughout 2020? Using data from our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to visualize with unprecedented fidelity, NASA Goddard’s Dial-a-Moon shows you the Moon each hour: https://go.nasa.gov/37sKofB
Watch a full year of Moon phases from the Northern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2udsqPY
From the Southern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2QHYt1U