A planetary scientist is working on a pulverizing system to destroy asteroids before they hit Earth. Learn more about his technology through this article.
With the war in Ukraine raging and gas and energy prices climbing across world markets, there is one piece of good news for European energy markets.
Economists from Poland’s state Pekao bank are reporting a large reduction on the price of CO2 emission certificates. The prices have fallen dramatically from €95 to €62 per ton. This is especially good for countries like Poland, which are forced to pay a premium for energy derived from “dirty” sources like coal. The fall in the price of this “tax” is expected to make the cost of energy especially more bearable for many of Europe’s poorer nations.
The CEO of Poland’s Development Fund, Paweł Borys, also commented on the issue on Twitter. “It is significant how CO2 prices have collapsed, falling by 30 percent since they peaked in February. This is good news, as it means that electricity prices may fall, thereby reducing inflationary pressure that have been exacerbated by hikes in oil and food prices.”
In a vacuum like space, the speed of light is just over 186,280 miles per second. Scientists have now shown it’s possible to slow it down to zero miles per second without sacrificing its brightness, regardless of its frequency or bandwidth.
A team of researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology and the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil discovered a method of theoretically bringing the speed of light to a halt by capitalizing on “exceptional points”—coordinates at which two separate light emissions reach each other and merge into a single one, according to Phys.org. A paper describing the research was published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
Continue reading “Physics: Speed of Light Could Be Dropped to Zero Using Crystals” »
Townscaper is a clever little town-building experience that gained notoriety back when it first launched on Steam Early Access in 2020. Now developer Oskar Stålberg has taken interest in VR design, showing a prototype of the pint-sized town creator running in VR.
Stålberg took to Twitter today to ask some design advice from the VR developer community, offering a glimpse at Townscaper’s quaint little models being plopped down and manipulated in VR.
Looking at basic VR design. Current idea is to use a point on a stick for interaction (rather than a raycast) so that you can build in the air. Those points also serve as grabbig points for grab-navigation. Feels tactile. pic.twitter.com/QvqoJzkn9y
The weight from the additional battery cells required to match the range of gas cars would slow the car down and make it less efficient, Musk said.
Blockchain Commons’ 2022 internship will focus around Bitcoin and blockchain technology, human-rights privacy, and decentralized identity.
Blockchain Commons, a not-for-profit benefit corporation focused on Bitcoin and decentralized architectures, announced this year’s edition of its annual internship program to be held remotely during the summer months. The program’s focuses include Bitcoin and blockchain technology, human-rights privacy and advocacy, and decentralized identity.
“We are looking for interns with a wide range of expertise including not just software engineers and hardware developers, but also pre-law students, library science students, and technical writers,” said Blockchain Commons founder Christopher Allen in a GitHub post announcing the internship.
Continue reading “Blockchain Commons Announces Bitcoin Internship Program” »
Tesla’s Fremont Factory could have its production capacity increased, according to CEO Elon Musk. Tesla is “considering expanding [Fremont] significantly,” Musk said in a Tweet last night.
Following Musk’s heavily publicized jab at President Joe Biden on Tuesday night for not mentioning Tesla in the State of the Union Speech with the likes of Ford and GM, who received Biden’s praise for electric vehicle projects resulting in employment opportunities. While Biden commended Ford for $11 billion invested and 11,000 new jobs and GM for $7 billion and 4,000 new employment opportunities in Michigan, Musk hit back with a valid point.
“Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles & is investing more than double GM + Ford combined,” he said, alerting “the person running this account” to give Tesla more credit.
A huge amount of mysterious dark energy is necessary to explain cosmological phenomena, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, using Einstein’s theory. But what if dark energy was just an illusion and general relativity itself had to be modified? A new SISSA study, published in Physical Review Letters, offers a new approach to answer this question. Thanks to huge computational and mathematical effort, scientists produced the first simulation ever of merging binary neutron stars in theories beyond general relativity that reproduce a dark-energy like behavior on cosmological scales. This allows the comparison of Einstein’s theory and modified versions of it, and, with sufficiently accurate data, may solve the dark energy mystery.
For about 100 years now, general relativity has been very successful at describing gravity on a variety of regimes, passing all experimental tests on Earth and the solar system. However, to explain cosmological observations such as the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe, we need to introduce dark components, such as dark matter and dark energy, which still remain a mystery.
Enrico Barausse, astrophysicist at SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) and principal investigator of the ERC grant GRAMS (GRavity from Astrophysical to Microscopic Scales) questions whether dark energy is real or, instead, it may be interpreted as a breakdown of our understanding of gravity. “The existence of dark energy could be just an illusion,” he says, “the accelerated expansion of the Universe might be caused by some yet unknown modifications of general relativity, a sort of ‘dark gravity’.”
“We were really surprised by this result because our motivation was to find an indirect route to improve performance, and we thought trust would be that—with real faces eliciting that more trustworthy feeling,” Nightingale says.
Farid noted that in order to create more controlled experiments, he and Nightingale had worked to make provenance the only substantial difference between the real and fake faces. For every synthetic image, they used a mathematical model to find a similar one, in terms of expression and ethnicity, from databases of real faces. For every synthetic photo of a young Black woman, for example, there was a real counterpart.
