Lifeboat Foundation

“Virgin Spaceship Unity, set to begin test flights next month, includes a very special nod to the theoretical physicist.”

Read more

“The UK Space Agency is investing £4.12m in a National Propulsion Test Facility, giving the UK a new facility for space technology testing.”

Read more

“Kenyan policy makers and experts are rooting for the use of space technology to enhance wildlife and ecosystems management in the country.”

Read more

IBM just opened up access to one of its 5-qubit quantum processors for anyone to use by connecting it to the cloud. Here’s what it means for quantum research—and IBM’s top-line in years to come.

Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act.

Unlike most brain studies where scientists watch as people respond to cues or commands, Johns Hopkins researchers found a way to observe people’s brain activity as they made choices entirely on their own. The findings, which pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and action, are now online, and due to appear in a special October issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

“How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

Silver, silica and titania nanocomposite converts seawater into pure drinking water and hydrogen gas.

When a legendary mathematician found a mistake in his own work, he embarked on a computer-aided quest to eliminate human error. To succeed, he has to rewrite the century-old rules underlying all of mathematics.

Cloud syncing and sharing software company Dropbox today announced that it has released an image compression algorithm called Lepton under an Apache open source license on GitHub.

Lepton can both compress and decompress files, and for the latter, it can work while streaming — that is, files can be expanded back into full size as they are being sent over the network. So Lepton is important for user experience, given how it can more quickly transfer data and show content. But at the same time, it has an impact on the data center infrastructure where files often end up.

“We have used Lepton to encode 16 billion images saved to Dropbox, and are rapidly recoding our older images. Lepton has already saved Dropbox multiple petabytes of space,” Dropbox software systems architect Daniel Reiter Horn wrote in a blog post.

Continue reading “Dropbox open-sources Lepton, a compression algorithm that cuts JPEG file size” »