Lifeboat Foundation

In partnership with NASA, the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works team is solving one of the most persistent challenges of supersonic flight – the sonic boom. NASA awarded Lockheed Martin Skunk Works a contract in February 2016 for the preliminary design of X-59, designed to reduce a sonic boom to a gentle thump.

In 2018, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works was selected for the design, build and flight test of the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD). The X-59 aircraft will collect community response data on the acceptability of the quiet sonic boom generated by our design, helping NASA establish an acceptable commercial supersonic noise standard to overturn current regulations banning supersonic travel over land. This would open the door to an entirely new global market for aircraft manufacturers, enabling passengers to travel anywhere in the world in half the time it takes today.

Continue reading “X-59 QueSST” »

Researchers at the University of Vienna study the relevance of quantum reference frames for the symmetries of the world.

According to one of the most fundamental principles in physics, an observer on a moving train uses the same laws to describe a ball on the platform as an observer standing on the platform – physical laws are independent on the choice of a reference frame. Reference frames such as the train and the platform are physical systems and ultimately follow quantum-mechanical rules. They can be, for example, in a quantum state of superposition of different positions at once. So, what would the description of the ball look like for an observer on such a “quantum platform”? Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences proved that whether an object (in our example, the ball) shows quantum features depends on the reference frame. The physical laws, however, are still independent of it. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Physical systems are always described relative to a reference frame. For example, a ball bouncing on a railway platform can be observed either from the platform itself or from a passing train. A fundamental principle of physics, the principle of General Covariance, states that the laws of physics which describe the motion of the ball do not depend on the reference frame of the observer. This principle has been crucial in the description of motion since Galileo and central to the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It entails information about symmetries of the laws of physics as seen from different reference frames.

Early November 2018, Conrad Holton visited Japan at the invitation of Hamamatsu Photonics to attend the three-day Photon Fair, the company’s big event looking at its technologies and vision for the future. The Fair is held every five years near its headquarters in Hamamatsu City, about 150 miles southwest of Tokyo. In addition to thousands of customers, suppliers, and students who attended, the event was open to the public for one day to show the many technologies just emerging from the company’s research labs and how these technologies might impact fields ranging from the life sciences to transportation and manufacturing.

An interview with the CEO of Hamamatsu Photonics shows how an engineering company with a singular focus on photonics can succeed.

The imperative of developing artificial intelligence (AI) could not be more clear when it comes to exploring space beyond the Solar System. Even today, when working with unmanned probes like New Horizons and the Voyagers that preceded it, we are dealing with long communication times, making probes that can adapt to situations without assistance from controllers a necessity. Increasing autonomy promises challenges of its own, but given the length of the journeys involved, earlier interstellar efforts will almost certainly be unmanned and rely on AI.

The field has been rife with speculation by science fiction writers as well as scientists thinking about future missions. When the British Interplanetary Society set about putting together the first serious design for an interstellar vehicle — Project Daedalus in the 1970s — self-repair and autonomous operation were a given. The mission would operate far from home, performing a flyby of Barnard’s Star and the presumed planets there with no intervention from Earth.

We’re at an interesting place here because each step we take in the direction of artificial intelligence leads toward the development of what Andreas Hein and Stephen Baxter call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), which they describe in an absorbing new paper called “Artificial Intelligence for Interstellar Travel,” now submitted to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The authors define AGI as “[a]n artificial intelligence that is able to perform a broad range of cognitive tasks at similar levels or better than humans.”

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence and the Starship” »

A collaboration of researchers from MIT and Microsoft have developed a system that helps identify lapses in artificial intelligence knowledge in autonomous cars and robots. These lapses, referred to as “blind spots,” occur when there are significant differences between training examples and what a human would do in a certain situation — such as a driverless car not detecting the difference between a large white car and an ambulance with its sirens on, and thus not behaving appropriately.

A concrete or steel wall along the southern border of the U.S. is not impenetrable; daily news programs show how concrete walls are burrowed under or driven over with car carriers and hydraulic ramps, while steel walls are breached with grappling hooks and inexpensive metal saws. And while a fiber-optic fence is also vulnerable to a physical cut, it can be discretely buried or placed along existing infrastructure, and (unlike concrete or steel) can fundamentally detect the location of a cut with high accuracy so that border patrol agents can be dispatched to understand the breach and apprehend the humans (easily distinguished from animals) crossing over the fence.

Let’s put our money and photonics technology to more effective use.

An aluminum alloy developed in the 1940s has long held promise for use in automobile manufacturing, except for one key obstacle. Although it’s nearly as strong as steel and just one-third the weight, it is almost impossible to weld together using the technique commonly used to assemble body panels or engine parts.

Aeronautics giant Airbus today announced that it is creating a global competition to encourage developers to find ways quantum computing can be applied to aircraft design.

Quantum computing is one of many next-generation computing architectures being explored as engineers worry that traditional computing is reaching its physical limits.

Computers today process information using bits, either 0s or 1s, stored in electrical circuits made up of transistors. Quantum computers harness the power of quantum systems, such as atoms that can simultaneously exist in multiple states and can be used as “quantum bits” or “qubits.” These can theoretically handle far more complex calculations.

Continue reading “Airbus wants to reinvent aircraft design with quantum computing challenge” »

Forget highway billboards… the future of ads might be floating in SPACE.