If you ask most satellite companies aside from SpaceX, they will tell you the world doesn’t have enough capacity for launching payloads into orbit. This is despite the blistering launch cadence we’ve seen around the world in recent years, led by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. ..
Tag : Science
Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant. That limits their relevance to behavior because, in real life, the rewards and consequences of strategic ..
The use of coal to generate electricity on the US grid has been plunging for nearly two decades, and the first Trump administration was unable to affect the trend. So his second administration has attempted more aggressive interventions to prop up coal use. One of its most direct means of doing so is to order ..
Credit: Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm Credit: Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm The precise composition of ancient Egyptian paints, binders, adhesives, and similar materials used to make artifacts is largely unknown, in part because a full analysis would require taking samples that would damage those valuable artifacts. The development ..
Almost a hundred years ago, physicists theorized out what free fall should do to a quantum wave. If the solution they came up with is wrong, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity flatly contradict each other. But testing it has been impossible because nobody has managed to build an interferometer that could perform the ..
It turns out Jean-Luc Picard was an even better starship helmsman than the writers knew. A physicist has gone through the details of a warp-speed trick from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and found a subtlety the show missed. But instead of a plot hole, the detail he found actually makes ..
Scientists have an indisputable playful side, evidenced by frequent allusions to popular culture in their research publications. That includes popular song lyrics. And the most popular musical group, in terms of how frequently their songs and lyrics appear in the scientific literature, is The Beatles, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ..
Google is one of the major players in AI (meaning machine learning) weather forecast model space. The models it and others generate have their strengths and weaknesses, but the main advantage is that they can have forecast performance similar to traditional models while requiring far less computing horsepower to run. That means they can be ..
In 2007, a piece of space debris punched a bullet-like hole through the radiator panel of the US space shuttle Endeavor. The shuttle program ended in 2011, but the space debris problem has only intensified as we launch more and more satellite constellations, telescopes, and spacecraft into orbit. That’s why Chinese scientists have devised a new ..
Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately-developed rocket into low-Earth orbit Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle. The two-stage rocket, named Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit. With Saturday’s success, Isar is the clear leader among ..
