It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018.
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When NASA set out to study identical twin astronauts, leaving one on Earth and sending the other to the International Space Station (ISS) for a year, they expected that the rigours of microgravity would have largely negative impacts.
But on board the ISS, Scott Kelly, 51, underwent a very strange transformation which has left scientists scratching their heads.
The telomeres in his white blood cells got longer. Telomeres are the protective caps which sit at the end of chromosomes, protecting the DNA inside, like the plastic aglets on the end of shoelaces.
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A new study from the Army Research Lab may help AI-infused weapons and tools better understand their human operators.
In World War II, the Allies had a big problem. Germany’s new bombers moved too quickly for the anti-aircraft methods of the previous war, in which soldiers used range tables and hand calculations to line up their guns. Mathematician Norbert Wiener had a theory: the only way to defeat the German aircraft was to merge the gun and its human operators — not physically but perceptually, through instruments. As Weiner explained in the video below, that meant “either a human interpretation of the machine, or a machine interpretation of the operator, or both.” This was the only way to get the gun to fire a round on target — not where the plane was but where it was going to be. This theoretical merger of human and machine gave rise to the field of cybernetics, derived from the Greek term cyber, to steer, and the English term net, for network.
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Ultra-secure online communications, completely indecipherable if intercepted, is one step closer with the help of a recently published discovery by University of Oregon physicist Ben Alemán.
Alemán, a member of the UO’s Center for Optical, Molecular, and Quantum Science, has made artificial atoms that work in ambient conditions. The research, published in the journal Nano Letters, could be a big step in efforts to develop secure quantum communication networks and all-optical quantum computing.
“The big breakthrough is that we’ve discovered a simple, scalable way to nanofabricate artificial atoms onto a microchip, and that the artificial atoms work in air and at room temperature,” said Alemán, also a member of the UO’s Materials Science Institute.
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In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents an external observer from measuring both the position and speed (referred to as momentum) of a particle at the same time. They can only know with a high degree of certainty either one or the other—unlike what happens at large scales where both are known. To identify a given particle’s characteristics, physicists introduced the notion of quasi-distribution of position and momentum. This approach was an attempt to reconcile quantum-scale interpretation of what is happening in particles with the standard approach used to understand motion at normal scale, a field dubbed classical mechanics.
In a new study published in EPJ ST, Dr. J.S. Ben-Benjamin and colleagues from Texas A&M University, USA, reverse this approach; starting with quantum mechanical rules, they explore how to derive an infinite number of quasi-distributions, to emulate the classical mechanics approach. This approach is also applicable to a number of other variables found in quantum-scale particles, including particle spin.
For example, such quasi-distributions of position and momentum can be used to calculate the quantum version of the characteristics of a gas, referred to as the second virial coefficient, and extend it to derive an infinite number of these quasi-distributions, so as to check whether it matches the traditional expression of this physical entity as a joint distribution of position and momentum in classical mechanics.
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