Lifeboat Foundation

Taiwan has been the world’s hardware hub for decades, so the shift toward AI makes the most of the existing inexpensive engineering talent. A refocus on AI, however, reduces reliance on hardware, which can easily be made somewhere else, such as China, at lower costs. Multinational tech companies have already shown interest in tapping Taiwan’s talent in software, including AI.

To move things along further, the government of Hsinchu County, near Taipei, will open a 126,000-square-meter (about 1.3 million square feet) AI business park near one of Taiwan’s major all-purpose high-tech zones and two top universities.

“[The park] will not just help [promote] industry-academia cooperation, but also let AI-oriented startups and companies have a demo space to verify AI product services,” says Shirley Tsai, a research manager with IDC Taiwan’s enterprise solution group. “It will be helpful as well to attract the companies who are interested in the AI field and then accelerating the AI ecosystem.”

A photo comparison from 2012 and 2019 show what Martian weather has done to the Curiosity rover.

NASA has announced that they have selected Axiom Space, an American company headquartered in Houston, Texas, to design, build and launch three large pressurized modules and a large Earth observation window to the International Space Station (ISS).

This partnership between NASA and Axiom is issued under Appendix I of NASA Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships 2 (NextSTEP-2) public-private partnership program witch the agency hopes will help stimulate commercial development of deep space exploration capabilities.

Continue reading “NASA selects Axiom Space to build commercial space station segment” »

NASA is sharing information about its myco-architecture program, in which experimental fungus-based building technologies could be the feasible future of Mars habitats. “Science fiction often imagines our future on Mars and other planets as run by machines, with metallic cities and flying cars rising above dunes of red sand,” NASA says. “But the reality may be even stranger.”

The myco-architecture (myco is the prefix meaning “fungus”) NASA is excited about isn’t only a new way to make furniture, although it can do that, the agency says. Mushroom House—not its real name—is an integrated habitat with layers. The tough, complex fibers made by fungal mycelia are building blocks of furniture, interior walls, and the innermost layer of the outer shell.

Hubble welcomes the Year of the Rat with a view of its own favorite rodents, NGC 4676A and B, and highlights the planetary origins of the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year timetable.

For more information, visit https://nasa.gov/hubble.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Bradley A Hague (GSFC intern): Producer / Editor.

The Airbus-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft has been closed up inside the payload fairing of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in preparation for liftoff from Cape Canaveral in February on a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA.

Technicians inside the Astrotech payload processing facility encapsulated the Solar Orbiter spacecraft — designed with thermal shielding to protect against the heat of the sun — inside the Atlas 5’s payload fairing Jan. 20. The spacecraft inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s 4-meter-diameter (13.1-foot) aerodynamic nose shroud will soon travel to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility, where crane will hoist the payload package atop the launcher.

Valued at nearly $1.7 billion, the Solar Orbiter mission will travel closer to the sun than Mercury, where it will join NASA’s Parker Solar Probe for tandem observations of the solar wind and giant solar eruptions that can affect communications and electrical grids on Earth, plus satellite operations.

To map Earth’s atmosphere, satellite data must be carefully collected, processed, and archived. We cover its journey from outer space to the ground.

The U.S. isn’t the only nation preparing for space warfare.

NASA is sending a pair of astronauts on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station today (Jan. 25) to finish fixing a complicated science experiment. Here’s how to watch it live.

NASA TV began streaming the spacewalk around 5:30 a.m. EST (1030 GMT) as European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan complete their final spacewalk preparations. You can watch it live here on Space.com. The spacewalk is expected to start around 6:50 a.m. EST (1150 GMT), when the astronauts will switch their spacesuits over to battery power before heading out of the airlock.