Companies are making sure we have a surplus of options for building qubits. If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons,…
AI is fantastic at spotting patterns, but human insight is the key. Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age…
“Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable.” Nearly a month since its launch, a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite built to save NASA’s Swift gamma-ray telescope from a fiery reentry is having problems of its own, the agency announced Tuesday. The Link satellite developed…
“We’re in the realm where we might be essentially killing off everything within that first hour or two.” Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. But exactly how that impact caused…
SpaceX will likely attempt to catch Starship back at the launch pad on its next flight. SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean.…
Museums are embracing data-driven curation and a shifting technology landscape. Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new…
Google’s AlphaFold can help ID what parts of a gene editing protein enable mistakes. A couple of decades after the discovery of systems that could selectively target DNA, we’re starting to see the first therapies based on gene editing. One challenge these developments have faced is safety. While we…
“These are things that tend to be really hard.” A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing. The…
Relativity Space announced plans to build a second rocket factory near Cape Canaveral, Florida. Welcome to Edition 9.04 of the Rocket Report! We’ve had to wait an extra week for SpaceX to get its 13th Starship test flight off the ground. A last-second abort on July 16 led engineers…
The resulting report is a near-random mixture of grievances and real problems. On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the…
