One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA’s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control. It didn’t look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with ..
Tag : Science
In this case, the team made a couple of key variations. The first is that it mostly performed what are called Clifford gates, which are relatively easy to simulate on classical hardware. But it sprinkled in a few non-Clifford gates (specifically T gates) of a specific type chosen in part because they are less prone ..
For qubits, the traps are far smaller and serve to hold a single electron in place. Critically, they can be manufactured; with the right wiring, electromagnetic interactions can trap a single electron in a small patch of silicon. Once trapped, the electron’s spin, which can be up, down, or a superposition of the two, can ..
The authors’ model, named pathway multinomial logit or “pathway MNL,” does not reveal causal effects, they caution, but the associations they uncover are informative for museum professionals. Multimedia guide users largely visited recommended artworks in the suggested order. Lisa van den Bos, product manager for digital education at the museum while the study was underway, ..
Here, its solution is grand in scope. It views the maker community, which is mostly interested in scratching personal itches, as a sign that the US public wants to make things again. The SNGA authors figure that they would be perfectly happy making things for science. “Establish national fellowships for skilled craftspeople,” they suggest, “practitioner-in-residence ..
Credit: Kathryn Ayres Credit: Kathryn Ayres There have been numerous accounts in recent years of orcas ramming boats—and sometimes sinking them. Scientists believe this may be a form of culturally learned behavior passed down through generations. Now we have fresh examples: orcas in the Gulf of California were filmed teaming up to ram sunfish with ..
A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can’t be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object. So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a ..
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It’s one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one ..
The Space Force originally estimated the Lane 1 launch providers would compete for at least 30 task orders over a five-year period. Officials put a ceiling of $5.6 billion on the Lane 1 contract to cover these 30 missions. The Space Force capped the Lane 2 contract at $13.7 billion last year, a number officials ..
This view of the payload deck of the Vikram-1 rocket’s upper stage was captured moments after orbital insertion Saturday. The rocket deployed two small CubeSats and hosted several more payloads that remained attached to the upper stage. Credit: Skyroot Aerospace This view of the payload deck of the Vikram-1 rocket’s upper stage was captured moments ..
