At the start of the month, Elon Musk announced that two of his companies — SpaceX and xAI — were merging, and would jointly launch a constellation of 1 million satellites to operate as orbital data centers. Musk’s reputation might suggest otherwise, but according to experts, such a plan isn’t a complete fantasy. However, if
Still, after astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams eventually docked at the station, Boeing officials declared success. “We accomplished a lot, and really more than expected,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, during a post-docking news conference. “We just had an outstanding day.” Over the subsequent weeks of the
Baby chickens appear to react similarly to humans when tested for something called the “bouba-kiki effect,” which links certain sounds to certain shapes. Elena Goncharova/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Elena Goncharova/Getty Images When people are shown a spiky shape next to a rounded one and asked which shape is called “kiki” and which one
NASA Warns: Thousands of City-Killing Asteroids Untracked, Earth Vulnerable In a stark and widely reported warning, NASA’s planetary defence chief has revealed that Earth currently has no reliable way to stop thousands of “city-killing” asteroids that could one day strike our planet, raising emergency concerns in the scientific community and beyond. These insights come from
Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward about why that would be the case, and most of them have turned out to be wrong.
NASA experts are raising alarms about the growing threat posed by near-Earth asteroids, with some of these objects having the potential to cause devastating damage to cities. While some large asteroids are monitored and their movements tracked, there’s a significant concern over the undetected mid-sized asteroids that could strike without warning. These “city killers,” as
Summary: For over a century, the cornerstone of psychology has been the Pavlovian idea that we learn through repetition—the more a bell rings before food, the stronger the association. However, a groundbreaking study is upending this 100-year-old assumption. Researchers discovered that the brain actually learns more efficiently when rewards are rare and spaced far apart.
At a news conference on Thursday, NASA released a report of findings from the Program Investigation Team examining the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. “The Boeing Starliner spacecraft has faced challenges throughout its uncrewed and most recent crewed missions. While Boeing built Starliner, NASA accepted it and launched two astronauts to space.
It is the most distant and primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft from Earth: now researchers say they have fresh insights into how the ultra-red, 4bn-year-old body known as Arrokoth came to have its distinctive snowman-like shape. Arrokoth sits in the Kuiper belt, a vast, thick ring of icy objects that lies beyond the
Inverse design strategies Inverse design used an AGA to determine 2D microlattice patterns, defined by spatially varying triangular voids, for targeted 3D geometries (Extended Data Fig. 1). The optimization process used the Python framework DEAP, a common package for the deployment of AGAs. Discretization of the surface of the target geometry into a finite number