Lifeboat Foundation

The ASO-S observatory, which launched in early October, captured an image of a solar flare eruption.

China’s recently launched Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) beamed its first image back to Earth, a report from Space.com reveals. The new image shows an M-Class flare erupting on the Sun.

China’s ASO-S solar observatory launched to orbit aboard one of the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation’s (CASC’s) Long March-2C rockets on October 9. The country’s first dedicated solar observatory is positioned in a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth, flying at an altitude of approximately 430 miles (700 km).

This is “the first time that lower mantle minerals have ever been observed in nature.”

Researchers claim they have discovered a rare mineral that comes directly from Earth’s lower mantle-the region between the planet’s core and crust — in a new study published in Science.

However, thanks to a diamond-in which it was entrapped — the new mineral dubbed ‘davemaoite,’ managed to make the improbable voyage from at least 412 meters within the lower mantle.

Continue reading “In a first, researchers discovered a rare mineral that comes directly from Earth’s lower mantle” »

Within a 12 to 18 months time frame.

Twitter owner Elon Musk took to the social media platform on Sunday to share some very ambitious plans. “I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months,” he said.

CARINA JOHANSEN/Getty Images.

Continue reading “Twitter could soon exceed ‘a billion monthly users,’ says chief Elon Musk” »

Tesla Semi carried 81,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge.

Just a few days before Tesla begins shipping the truck, Elon Musk has verified that Tesla Semi, the company’s Class 8 semi-truck, has successfully completed a crucial voyage.

Although there is no reason to question the outcome, it would be interesting to learn more about speed and energy usage. We are pretty interested in seeing some impartial vehicle tests.

Continue reading “For the first time, Tesla just completed a full load 500-mile trip with its Semi truck” »

“Houston, we have a new record.”

NASA’s Artemis I Orion capsule broke a new spaceflight record. The uncrewed Orion reached a distance from Earth of 249,666 miles (from 401,798 kilometers) on Saturday, November 26, at 10:17 am. ET, meaning it surpassed a record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 for the furthest distance traveled from Earth by a spacecraft designed to carry humans.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft broke a massive record.

Continue reading “NASA’s Orion beats Apollo 13’s distance record for a human-rated spacecraft” »

Apple cut one of the few ways to avoid censorship in China, airdrops.

Apple’s recent iOS update quietly, and completely unannounced, stopped offering the AirDrop service to Chinese phones and tablets. Airdrops are a file transfer service that sends specific files, directly between phones, without the need for a network. In the wave of anti-government protests larger than ever before, protesters are having to communicate without the use of a crucial tool: AirDrops.

AirDrop, a file-sharing feature on Apple iOS devices, has aided dissent in many authoritarian countries. The phones form a local network of devices, that are independent of any external sources.

Continue reading “Apple limits airdrops from Chinese phones, kneecapping government protesters” »

The neuroscience of perception has recently been revolutionized with an integrative modeling approach in which computation, brain function, and behavior are linked across many datasets and many computational models. By revealing trends across models, this approach yields novel insights into cognitive and neural mechanisms in the target domain. We here present a systematic study taking this approach to higher-level cognition: human language processing, our species’ signature cognitive skill. We find that the most powerful “transformer” models predict nearly 100% of explainable variance in neural responses to sentences and generalize across different datasets and imaging modalities (functional MRI and electrocorticography). Models’ neural fits (“brain score”) and fits to behavioral responses are both strongly correlated with model accuracy on the next-word prediction task (but not other language tasks). Model architecture appears to substantially contribute to neural fit. These results provide computationally explicit evidence that predictive processing fundamentally shapes the language comprehension mechanisms in the human brain.

Telecommunications have reshaped many aspects of our lives over the past few decades by providing incredibly convenient ways to share and access information. One of the most important enablers for this transformation has been the adoption and improvement of broadband technologies, which cram enormous amounts of data over wide frequency bands to achieve unprecedented transfer speeds. Today, most large cities have fiber optics-based networks that distribute high-speed internet directly to every home.

Unfortunately, it is not always feasible to deploy fiber optic links to remote locations and rural areas, due to the associated costs and civil engineering work required. Such places could benefit from a different approach to optical broadband communications: free-space optics. The main idea in free-space optical (FSO) communications is to set up aligned transmitter–receiver pairs where needed and use air as the medium to carry the signals.

While there are still many challenges to address in FSO systems (such as low energy efficiency, impact of weather, and high background noise), scientists worldwide are continuously trying out new ways of solving these issues and achieving higher data rates.

Researchers have proposed what’s perhaps the most exotic explanation to date for the source of the universe’s seed magnetic field: cosmic strings.