One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA's $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control.

It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft's cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.

The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up in the atmosphere.

Read full article

Comments

A fruit fly hunting a piece of rotting fruit or a mate navigates by smell, following plumes of odor. Out in the wild, turbulent air swirls these plumes into a chaotic, broken landscape—dense chemical filaments laced through long stretches of clean air. A fly trying to find the source gets the smell in stutters, from constantly shifting directions, with no guarantee that a next whiff is coming at all.

Scientist had little idea of how fruit flies manage this chaotic signal with a brain the size of a pinhead. For a long time, biologists stood by the “surge and cast” model, which posited that insects solved this with hardwired reflexes. The idea was that, when a fly registers the plume with olfactory neurons in its antennae, it simply flies upwind until it’s gone and then flies side to side attempting to catch it again. But now a team led by Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University, has shown that fruit flies do something far more advanced.

A treadmill for flies

The trouble with the traditional surge and cast model is that it struggles to explain how an insect tracks a meandering plume across long distances. Chemical cues floating in the air in the natural environment are often sparse and unreliable. But those same features make the mechanism behind olfactory navigation notoriously difficult to test. "Odors are invisible," Ruta says, "and often they're carried along by turbulent airflow." We’ve got no way of knowing what the animal is smelling from one moment to the next.

Read full article

Comments

When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we've interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.

But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.

But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there has been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a "ghost lineage."

Read full article

Comments

Human eyes don’t register the infrared portion of the light spectrum because infrared photons don't carry enough energy to trigger the signaling pathway inside our light-sensing cells. But we’ve been able to make devices that give us a visual representation of what’s happening in the infrared.

A team at the Beijing Institute of Technology, led by Xin Tang and Ge Mu, has now built a device that lets people see infrared in a new way. Instead of just translating it to visible shades of green as it’s done in standard night-vision goggles, it translates different infrared wavelengths into distinct parts of the visual spectrum, giving the eye something closer to natural vision.

Researchers achieved that by combining mercury telluride colloidal quantum dots, which absorb infrared light, and a dual-layer OLED, which converts that absorbed energy into visible color. Stacked together with the right internal wiring, they make incoming infrared radiation come out the other side as an ordinary-looking, full-color image.

Read full article

Comments

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. Fast-moving technologies like electric vehicles throw in an added complication: By the time a car is scrapped, the industry may have moved on to a different battery chemistry. That reduces the value of recycling the car’s battery back into the production chain.

Still, a study led by Xin Xiong at Nanjing University finds that in China, recycling could become the dominant source of many key materials needed to manufacture EV components over the coming decades.

Modeling manufacturing needs

The researchers set out to model how the supply of recycled materials compares to manufacturing demand in China between 2010 and 2050. It covers materials relevant to batteries across hybrid, battery-electric, and even fuel-cell vehicles (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, phosphorus, sodium, sulfur, and graphite), as well as several critical elements used in electric motors (copper, neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and cerium).

Read full article

Comments

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 True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game with another spacecraft named Puma, based on Rocket Lab's Pioneer satellite platform.

"This is what we've really been building towards for the past four years," said Even Rogers, True Anomaly's co-founder and CEO.

Read full article

Comments

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 can't run those algorithms or can only run simplified versions that classical computers can also handle. This has left the field facing a challenging question: Can we demonstrate the promise of quantum computers on today's noisy, limited hardware?

That's a more difficult question than it may first appear. If you generate a result that's out of reach of today's regular computers, it may not be possible to verify that you got the right result. And given that today's quantum computers are somewhat error-prone, getting the wrong result is a distinct possibility. Further, in the absence of a mathematical proof of the capabilities of quantum hardware, it's possible that a better classical algorithm could outperform the quantum hardware.

These issues inspired IBM to launch a quantum advantage tracker. On Thursday, the company announced three new entries that it says clearly show a quantum advantage, each using a different approach to overcoming errors and validating quantum results. "Trusted computing when you can do classical simulations is irrelevant," IBM's Jay Gambetta told Ars. "Trusted computing when you can't do classical simulations is a big deal."

Read full article

Comments

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, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech's ability to scale. We'll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any complex computations, and the ability of any technology to get us there is the subject of debate.

So even as some technologies can now support thousands of qubits, some competitors are still working on a small handful of qubits—the companies behind them are convinced that they have the potential to scale more effectively.

One of those technologies involves quantum dots that hold a single electron. Their advantage is that we can manufacture them using the same tech we use to build traditional processors, an approach that has proven to be scalable. This week saw two new papers describing different ways of using quantum dots, one of which was appealing enough that IBM bought the company that developed it. Separately, another company has released a processor showing 100 individual electrons being held in diamond defects, technology that wasn't obvious could scale.

Read full article

Comments

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 Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.

Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.

Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.

Read full article

Comments

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 by Katalyst Space Technologies "experienced issues with attitude control" over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.

"Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link's three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system," NASA said.

Read full article

Comments

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 those extinctions has been the subject of fierce debate. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the “Alvarez hypothesis,” after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary(the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. It has been estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Read full article

Comments

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.

Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended with conflagrations, an outcome SpaceX officials have come to expect with each water landing of Starship.

The buoyant Starship looked to be in fine shape after reaching the Indian Ocean. SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship's stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hourlong flight from Starbase, Texas.

Read full article

Comments