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Mar 3, 2022

Elon Musk explains why Tesla hasn’t tried to make the world’s longest-range electric car: ‘That would’ve made the product worse’

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

The weight from the additional battery cells required to match the range of gas cars would slow the car down and make it less efficient, Musk said.

Mar 3, 2022

Blockchain Commons Announces Bitcoin Internship Program

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, blockchains, law

Blockchain Commons’ 2022 internship will focus around Bitcoin and blockchain technology, human-rights privacy, and decentralized identity.


Blockchain Commons, a not-for-profit benefit corporation focused on Bitcoin and decentralized architectures, announced this year’s edition of its annual internship program to be held remotely during the summer months. The program’s focuses include Bitcoin and blockchain technology, human-rights privacy and advocacy, and decentralized identity.

“We are looking for interns with a wide range of expertise including not just software engineers and hardware developers, but also pre-law students, library science students, and technical writers,” said Blockchain Commons founder Christopher Allen in a GitHub post announcing the internship.

Continue reading “Blockchain Commons Announces Bitcoin Internship Program” »

Mar 3, 2022

Tesla is considering a significant expansion of its Fremont Factory

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, employment, sustainability, transportation

Tesla’s Fremont Factory could have its production capacity increased, according to CEO Elon Musk. Tesla is “considering expanding [Fremont] significantly,” Musk said in a Tweet last night.

Following Musk’s heavily publicized jab at President Joe Biden on Tuesday night for not mentioning Tesla in the State of the Union Speech with the likes of Ford and GM, who received Biden’s praise for electric vehicle projects resulting in employment opportunities. While Biden commended Ford for $11 billion invested and 11,000 new jobs and GM for $7 billion and 4,000 new employment opportunities in Michigan, Musk hit back with a valid point.

“Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles & is investing more than double GM + Ford combined,” he said, alerting “the person running this account” to give Tesla more credit.

Mar 3, 2022

Dark energy: Neutron stars will tell us if it’s only an illusion

Posted by in categories: computing, cosmology, mathematics

A huge amount of mysterious dark energy is necessary to explain cosmological phenomena, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, using Einstein’s theory. But what if dark energy was just an illusion and general relativity itself had to be modified? A new SISSA study, published in Physical Review Letters, offers a new approach to answer this question. Thanks to huge computational and mathematical effort, scientists produced the first simulation ever of merging binary neutron stars in theories beyond general relativity that reproduce a dark-energy like behavior on cosmological scales. This allows the comparison of Einstein’s theory and modified versions of it, and, with sufficiently accurate data, may solve the dark energy mystery.

For about 100 years now, general relativity has been very successful at describing gravity on a variety of regimes, passing all experimental tests on Earth and the solar system. However, to explain cosmological observations such as the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe, we need to introduce dark components, such as and , which still remain a mystery.

Enrico Barausse, astrophysicist at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) and principal investigator of the ERC grant GRAMS (GRavity from Astrophysical to Microscopic Scales) questions whether dark is real or, instead, it may be interpreted as a breakdown of our understanding of gravity. “The existence of dark energy could be just an illusion,” he says, “the accelerated expansion of the Universe might be caused by some yet unknown modifications of general relativity, a sort of ‘dark gravity’.”

Mar 3, 2022

Putting the physics into science fiction

Posted by in categories: futurism, physics

Kate Gardner reviews sci-fi novel The EXODUS Incident by physicist Peter Schattschneider.

Mar 3, 2022

AI-generated faces have crossed the uncanny valley and are now more trustworthy than real ones

Posted by in categories: mathematics, robotics/AI

“We were really surprised by this result because our motivation was to find an indirect route to improve performance, and we thought trust would be that—with real faces eliciting that more trustworthy feeling,” Nightingale says.

Farid noted that in order to create more controlled experiments, he and Nightingale had worked to make provenance the only substantial difference between the real and fake faces. For every synthetic image, they used a mathematical model to find a similar one, in terms of expression and ethnicity, from databases of real faces. For every synthetic photo of a young Black woman, for example, there was a real counterpart.

Mar 3, 2022

Rockets set to lift off from Shetland Islands

Posted by in category: business

The Lamba Ness peninsular in Unst will be home to a new £43m spaceport, with builders set to start work in late March, after Shetland Islands Council gave the project planning permission. On-line soon! Warmongers and profiteers permitting!


Shetland Islands Council has given the £43m project planning permission businessInsider.

Mar 3, 2022

New satellite GOES-T helps track extreme weather on Earth — and in the cosmos

Posted by in category: space

The number 18 just hits different.


NASA and NOAA launch the weather satellite, the third in the GOES-R series to detect Earth and space weather.

Mar 3, 2022

Earthworms can reproduce in Mars soil simulant

Posted by in categories: food, space, sustainability

Space worms.


Two young worms are the first offspring in a Mars soil experiment at Wageningen University & Research. Biologist Wieger Wamelink found them in a Mars soil simulant that he obtained from NASA. At the start he only added adult worms. The experiments are crucial in the study that aims to determine whether people can keep themselves alive at the red planet by growing their own crops on Mars soils.

To feed future humans on Mars a sustainable closed agricultural ecosystem is a necessity. Worms will play a crucial role in this system as they break down and recycle dead organic matter. The poop and pee of the (human) Martian will also have to be used to fertilise the soil, but for practical and safety reasons we are presently using pig slurry. We have since been observing the growth of rucola (rocket) in Mars soil simulant provided by NASA to which worms and slurry have been added. ‘Clearly the manure stimulated growth, especially in the Mars soil simulant, and we saw that the worms were active. However, the best surprise came at the end of the experiment when we found two young worms in the Mars soil simulant’, said Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University & Research.

‘The positive effect of adding manure was not unexpected’, added Wamelink, ‘but we were surprised that it makes Mars soil simulant outperform Earth silver sand’. We added organic matter from earlier experiments to both sands. We added the manure to a sample of the pots and then, after germination of the rucola, we added the worms. We therefore ended up with pots with all possible combinations with the exception of organic matter which was added to all of the pots.

Mar 3, 2022

Earthworms have the potential to replace use of synthetic fertilisers

Posted by in category: food

Earthworms could have the potential to replace some high-cost mineral/synthetic fertilizers, new research suggests.

Researchers at University College Dublin have unearth fresh insight into the dweller’s importance for crops taking up nutrients.

The findings suggest a shortcut in the soil nitrogen cycle not previously recognized in which earthworms, when they are active, rapidly enrich soil and plants through nitrogen excreted in their mucus.