The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox. Sign Me Up! Portugal green-lights Azores spaceport. The Portuguese government has granted the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium a license to build and ..
Tag : Science
Women in STEM: Inca Edition In the late 1500s, a few decades after the khipu in this recent study was made, an Indigenous chronicler named Guaman Poma de Ayala described how older women used khipu to “keep track of everything” in aqllawasai: places that basically functioned as finishing schools for Inca girls. Teenage girls, chosen ..
Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It’s the latest breakthrough to come out of the Virginia Tech lab of mechanical engineer Jonathan Boreyko. A few years ago, Boreyko’s lab experimentally ..
Light and lifting The researchers then built a few sheets of nanocardboard to test the output of their model. The actual products, primarily made of chromium, aluminum, and aluminum oxide, were incredibly light, weighing only a gram for a square meter of material. When illuminated by a laser or white LED, they generated measurable force ..
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries comply with environmental ..
Ars Technica: I’m skeptical of AI in general, particularly in a research context, but there are very specific instances where it can be extremely useful. This strikes me as one of them, largely because your basic model proved to be so robust. You got the same dynamics without introducing anything extra. Petter Törnberg: Yes. It’s ..
The company aims to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, although the talks are at an early stage. Altman will not personally invest. The new venture would be in direct competition with Neuralink, founded by Musk in 2016, which seeks to wire brains directly to computers. Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI, but Musk ..
The Vulcan rocket checks off several important boxes for the Space Force. First, it relies entirely on US-made rocket engines. The Atlas V rocket it is replacing uses Russian-built main engines, and given the chilled relations between the two powers, US officials have long desired to stop using Russian engines to power the Pentagon’s satellites ..
But Whitehouse presented a third line of evidence to dispute the 3.95-billion-year date: isotopes of hafnium in the same zombie zircon crystals. The technique relies on radioactive decay of lutetium-176 to hafnium-176. If the 2.8-billion-year age resulted from rejuvenation by later heating, it would have had to have formed from material with a hafnium isotope ..
What impressed the scientists the most, though, was the versatility of those disks. Reef-associated species of remora like Phtheirichthys lineatus are generalists and stick to various hosts, including other fish, sharks, or turtles. Other species living in the open sea are more specialized and attach to cetaceans, swordfish, or marlins. While most remoras attach to ..
