Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell says that the company now expects Starbase to be ready for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt as early as June or July, pushing the schedule back another month or two.

To accomplish that feat, SpaceX will need to more or less ace a wide range of challenging and unproven tests and pass a series of exhaustive bureaucratic reviews, significantly increasing the odds that Starship’s orbital launch debut is actually closer to 3–6 months away. While SpaceX could technically pull off a miracle or even attempt to launch hardware that has only been partially tested, even the most optimistic of hypothetical scenarios are still contingent upon things largely outside of the company’s control.

Both revolve around the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which – in SpaceX’s case – is responsible for completing a ‘programmatic environmental assessment’ (PEA) of orbital Starship launches out of Boca Chica, Texas and issuing a launch license for the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. In some ways, both tasks are unprecedented, but the bureaucratic processes involved are still largely the same as those SpaceX has successfully navigated over the last two decades.

Discovery, Development & Delivery Of Safe, Effective & Affordable Vaccines For Global Public Health — Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., Director General, International Vaccine Institute (IVI)

Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., is the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI — https://www.ivi.int/), a nonprofit International Organization established in 1997 as an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), dedicated to the discovery, development and delivery of safe, effective and affordable vaccines for global public health.

Continue reading “Dr Jerome H. Kim, MD, Director General, IVI — Safe, Effective, Affordable Vaccines For Public Health” »

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The current state of affairs, however, is a bit more complicated. While quantum computers have officially gone from theory to fact—a remarkable achievement—none are yet practical.

To realize a useful quantum computer, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are pouring resources into machines that run on a menagerie of qubits. The most popular approach, favored by Google and IBM, involves tiny loops of superconducting wire. Honeywell and IonQ are pursuing atomic qubits made of trapped ions. Researchers in China are building intricate, Rube-Goldberg-like machines on lab benches to run quantum computations with mirrors and light.

Continue reading “The Ideal Qubit? Future Quantum Computers Could Crunch Data With Single Electrons on Neon Ice” »

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, 2022, it sent atmospheric shock waves, sonic booms, and tsunami waves around the world. Now, scientists are finding the volcano’s effects also reached space.

Analyzing data from NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm satellites, scientists found that in the hours after the eruption, hurricane-speed winds and unusual electric currents formed in the ionosphere —Earth’s electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of space.

“The volcano created one of the largest disturbances in space we’ve seen in the modern era,” said Brian Harding, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on a new paper discussing the findings. “It is allowing us to test the poorly understood connection between the lower atmosphere and space.”

Recent technological advances have enabled the creation of increasingly sophisticated sensors that can track movements and changes in real-world environments with remarkable levels of precision. Many engineers are now working to make these sensors thinner so that they can be embedded in a variety of devices, including robotic limbs and wearable devices.

Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have recently developed a thin sensor for computer vision applications, which is based on a micro lens array (MLA). MLAs are 1D or 2D arrays comprising several small lenses, which are generally arranged in either squared or hexagonal patterns.

“In this study, we combined an old technology, a micro lens array, with vision-based tactile sensors,” Xia Chen, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “This work builds on the work using the pinhole arrays to capture the image. We wanted to achieve a thin-format vision-based tactile sensor, as few studies so far focused on changing the imaging system of vison-based tactile sensor.”

Computational detective work by U.S. and German physicists has confirmed that cerium zirconium pyrochlore is a 3D quantum spin liquid.

Despite the name, quantum spin liquids are solid materials in which quantum entanglement and the geometric arrangement of atoms frustrate the natural tendency of electrons to magnetically order themselves in relation to one another. The geometric frustration in a quantum spin liquid is so severe that electrons fluctuate between quantum magnetic states no matter how cold they become.

Theoretical physicists routinely work with quantum mechanical models that manifest quantum spin liquids, but finding convincing evidence that they exist in actual physical materials has been a decades-long challenge. While a number of 2D or 3D materials have been proposed as possible quantum spin liquids, Rice University physicist Andriy Nevidomskyy has said there’s no established consensus among physicists that any of them qualify.

Just as countries import a vast array of consumer goods across national borders, so living cells are engaged in a lively import-export business. Their ports of entry are sophisticated transport channels embedded in a cell’s protective membrane. Regulating what kinds of cargo can pass through the borderlands formed by the cell’s two-layer membrane is essential for proper functioning and survival.

Nestled 30 feet underground in Menlo Park, California, a half-mile-long stretch of tunnel is now colder than most of the universe. It houses a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit—or 2 Kelvin—a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process. It is one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second—a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources.

Continue reading “Superconducting X-ray laser reaches operating temperature colder than outer space” »