Look at chemistry of batteries and motors shows big opportunity for recycling. While recycling is a mathematically obvious response to the finite, non-renewable nature of many resources, the economic math is often challenging. For many materials, it can be hard to compete with virgin materials on a cost basis.…
“Dogfighting in space doesn’t quite have the drama of an aerial dogfight.” An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict. That was the announcement Wednesday from…
Three approaches to the issue of quantum results that can’t be verified classically. There are many algorithms for which it has been mathematically proven that a quantum computer can generate results that would take a classical computer an unreasonable amount of time to generate. Unfortunately, today’s quantum computers either…
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…
