Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. Air Force has failed for a third time to conduct a successful test of the rocket booster on a prototype AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon hypersonic missile, or ARRW. This can only add to the palatable frustration within the service, as well as elsewhere in the U.S. military and in Congress, about the progress, or lack thereof, in the testing of various new hypersonic weapons.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Command’s Armament Directorate confirmed to The War Zone today that another attempted ARRW flight test had failed on Dec. 15, 2021. The Air Force says that it has not yet determined the cause of the issue that led to the test being aborted. The prototype missile never left the wing of the B-52H bomber carrying it.

Astronauts have one of the most competitive jobs in the world — 18,300 people applied to be part of NASA’s 2017 class of astronauts, and only 12 made the final cut. But the process of finding astronauts with “the right stuff” has changed over time, and a lot of us Earthlings have the wrong idea about what NASA is looking for.

“I think a lot of the public conception is that we choose super-geniuses or super-jocks or super-pilots,” says Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and physician. “I would say that the astronaut office right now is full of people who are comfortable to be with. I mean, don’t get me wrong — we’ve got a couple of super-geniuses, but the main [goal] is that we’ve chosen well-rounded, well-behaved, professional people who are adaptable and resilient, and just someone you could see exploring a brand new world or locking yourself in a garage with for six months.”

Health — operanewsapp.

Jupiter mission’s Ganymede flyby offers a dramatic ride-along. It is one of the highlights mission scientists shared in a briefing at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth’s oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA.

NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm, developed malware to hack iPhones by creating a “computer within a computer” capable of stealing sensitive data and sitting undetected for months or even years, researchers at Google have revealed.

The malware is part of NSO Group’s Pegasus software tool, which it is thought to have sold to countries including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates. US law-makers have called for sanctions against the firm.

An incredibly sophisticated piece of malware developed by the Israeli tech firm NSO Group works by creating an entirely separate computer inside the memory of an iPhone, allowing attackers to snoop and steal data.

Continue reading “NSO iPhone malware builds a computer inside your phone to steal data” »

Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.

However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.

Continue reading “Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms” »

Real holograms?

Science fiction has repeatedly promised a future filled with holographic 3D displays, but that fantasy has always eluded reality — until now. A startup says it has created a new “solid light” display that renders photos and videos in three dimensions.

Continue reading “New ‘Solid Light’ 3D Holographic Display Can Give Photos Depth” »

From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct.

That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness is unknown to us. This means that sometimes, we can totally miss huge structures that you’d think should be right under our noses.

A new set of such enormous structures has now been unveiled at the outer regions of the Milky Way disk: massive, spinning filaments with unclear provenance. Astronomers will be conducting follow-up surveys to try and solve the mystery.

Nio’s soon-to-arrive ET7 is practically tailor-made to challenge Tesla’s Model S, and now the company appears to have a (partial) answer to the Model 3. Electrek says Nio has introduced the ET5, a more affordable “mid-size” electric sedan. It starts at RMB 328,000 (about $51,450), or well under the roughly $70,000 of the ET7, but offers similarly grandiose range figures. Nio claims the base 75kWh battery offers over 341 miles of range using China’s test cycle, while the highest-end 150kWh “Ultralong Range” pack is supposedly good for more than 620 miles. You’ll likely pay significantly more for the privilege and may not see that range in real life, but the numbers could still tempt you away from higher-end Model 3s if long-distance driving is crucial.

You can expect the usual heapings of technology. The ET5 will have built-in support for autonomous driving features as they’re approved, and drivers get a “digital cockpit” thanks to Nreal-developed augmented reality glasses that can project a virtual screen equivalent to 201 inches at a 20-foot viewing distance. Nio has teamed with Nolo to make VR glasses, too, although it’s safe to say you won’t wear those while you’re driving.

Deliveries are expected to start September 2022. That’s a long way off, but Nio appears to be on track with its EV plans as it expects to deliver the ET7 on time (if only just) starting March 28th.