pale blue dot
The mighty Saturn V, the rocket that took humans to the moon, remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status (as of 2018). It was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973. It was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines. With a thrust of 1,746,000 lbf (7,770 kN) in vacuum …
Continue reading “Why can’t we Remake the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine, which took humans to the Moon?”
Where is the coldest known place in the Universe? It may sound strange, but today, it is here on Earth: in 1995, in a laboratory in M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and his colleagues have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded, only half-a-billionth of a degree …
Continue reading “Soon, the ISS Will Be the Coldest Known Place in the Universe”
In 1981, when I was nine years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although I had to squint my eyes during some of the scary scenes, I loved it – in particular because I was fairly sure that Harrison Ford’s character was based on my dad. My father was …
Continue reading “What a fossil revolution reveals about the history of ‘big data’”
Today, I stumbled upon a Facebook page, titled “Wrong” by Freethink. Then I searched them on YouTube and saw that they also have a YouTube channel. They published great videos on interesting subjects. I would strongly recommend you to take a look at their very underrated YouTube channel and Facebook page.
Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you’re using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems. It is difficult to predict when this might happen, but most artificial intelligence (AI) specialists estimate that it is more likely than not within this century. …
Continue reading “Now it’s time to prepare for the Machinocene”
On January 13, 1993, Tracking and Data Relay Satellite 6 (TDRS-6), the American communications satellite launched by Space Shuttle Endeavour. TDRS-6 is still operational today, well past its intended design life”.
Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: compared with the breathtaking bridges that engineers build on Earth, asteroid-mining is a simple, small-scale operation requiring only modest technological advances. If anything is lacking, …
Continue reading “Want faster data and a cleaner planet? Start mining asteroids”
Using data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and a machine learning algorithm from Google, researchers discovered an 8th planet orbiting a distant star. The newly discovered planet is circling Kepler-90, a G-type main-sequence star (Sun-like star), 2,545 light-years from Earth. It is named Kepler-90i. According to the press release from NASA, Kepler-90i is “a sizzling …
