Nearly 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, there’s a point where the charged particles from the Sun no longer reach into the uncharged particles of interstellar space, or the pockets of space that exist between the various star systems of the universe.
This point, known as a heliopause, marks the very edge of the solar system where human beings themselves live.
The heliopause border around the solar system was first “discovered” by scientists using NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as far back as 30 years ago. But recently, a newer NASA spacecraft, the New Horizons space probe, has found actual evidence of that point in space.
A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture.
Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti are developing new kinds of computer processors that rely on the mathematics of subatomic particles to potentially perform calculations difficult for classical computers to do. These devices use superconductors as the basis for their qubits. A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.
Payloads on the flight will collect valuable data to improve technologies for future exploration missions. This flight will be specifically be used to study how dust disperses in microgravity. Understanding dust dynamics can help abate the damage that is caused by particles contaminating hardware and habitats. Swoop in: https://go.nasa.gov/2Gr79YT
A longstanding problem in optics holds that an improved resolution in imaging is offset by a loss in the depth of focus. Now, scientists are joining computation with X-ray imaging as they develop a new and exciting technique to bypass this limitation.
The upcoming Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project at Argonne will put this problem under one of the brightest spotlights imaginable. The upgrade will make the APS, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, 500 times brighter than it is today, further enhancing the capabilities of its X-rays to study the arrangements of atoms and molecules in a wide range of biological and technological materials.
“A whole variety of X-ray imaging experiments ultimately will need something like this as they all push the resolution to finer length scales in the future,” said Chris Jacobsen, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow and professor of physics at Northwestern University. With the Upgrade in place, the APS’s X-rays could allow scientists to study systems like the brain’s full network of synaptic connections, or the entire volume of an integrated circuit down to its finest details.
Today, I will talk about the recent creation of really intelligent machines, able to solve difficult problems, to recreate the creativity and versatility of the human mind, machines not only able to excel in a single activity but to abstract general information and find solutions that are unthinkable for us. I will not talk about blockchain, but about another revolution (less economic and more mathematical), which is all about computing: quantum computers.
Quantum computing is not really new, as we have been talking about it for a couple of decades already, but we are just now witnessing the transition from theory to realization of such technology. Quantum computers were first theorized at the beginning of the 1980s, but only in the last few years, thanks to the commitment of companies like Google and IBM, a strong impulse has been pushing the development of these machines. The quantum computer is able to use quantum particles (imagine them to be like electrons or photons) to process information. The particles act as positive or negative (i., the 0 and the 1 that we are used to see in traditional computer science) alternatively or at the same time, thus generating quantum information bits called “qubits”, which can have value either 0 or 1 or a quantum superposition of 0 and 1.
How atoms arrange themselves at the smallest scale was thought to follow a ‘drum-skin’ rule, but mathematicians have now found a simpler solution.
Atomic arrangements in different materials can provide a lot of information about the properties of materials, and what the potential is for altering what they can be used for.
However, where two materials touch – at their interface – complex interactions arise that make predicting the arrangement of atoms difficult.
It’s pretty cool how NASA knows the spacecraft is in interstellar space.
It’s only the second object made by humans to ever reach this distance, following Voyager 1 in 2012.
The long journey: Since launching more than 40 years ago back in 1977, the probe has traveled 11 billion miles to get to cross into interstellar space. While it launched before Voyager 1, its flight path put Voyager 2 on a slower path to reach this milestone.
What does that mean? No, Voyager 2 hasn’t left the solar system. Our solar system is huge and goes way beyond its last planet. Instead, it means Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, the pocket of particles and magnetic fields created by our closest star. Solar wind, the charged plasma particles that come out from the sun, generates this bubble.
We’ve discovered water on the asteroid Bennu! Our OSIRIS-REx mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up Bennu.
Recently analyzed data from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up its scientific target, the asteroid Bennu.
During the mission’s approach phase, between mid-August and early December, the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) on its journey from Earth to arrive at a location 12 miles (19 km) from Bennu on Dec. 3. During this time, the science team on Earth aimed three of the spacecraft’s instruments towards Bennu and began making the mission’s first scientific observations of the asteroid. OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission.
Data obtained from the spacecraft’s two spectrometers, the OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (OVIRS) and the OSIRIS-REx Thermal Emission Spectrometer (OTES), reveal the presence of molecules that contain oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together, known as “hydroxyls.” The team suspects that these hydroxyl groups exist globally across the asteroid in water-bearing clay minerals, meaning that at some point, Bennu’s rocky material interacted with water. While Bennu itself is too small to have ever hosted liquid water, the finding does indicate that liquid water was present at some time on Bennu’s parent body, a much larger asteroid.
Inspired by the insulation on a humble electrical cable, researchers have found that tiny ceramic particles can make plastic-backed cladding fire-safe.
How do you make a light-weight cladding material that doesn’t catch fire? It’s a question the building industry globally is wrestling with in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower blaze in London that cost the lives of 72 people.
But according to new research, the answer is under your desk in the plastic insulation around the electrical cable powering your computer.
