An initiative called Breakthrough Starshot wants to explore another star system using ultra-powerful laser beams and wafer-thin spaceships.

It’s a goal that sounds so fantastic, you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as science fiction. But it’s no joke, and the project’s chief engineer says millions of dollars’ worth of work is moving along without any major snags.

Starshot’s founders and collaborators include the late Stephen Hawking, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, and Russian-American billionaire Yuri Milner. The concept is based on more than 80 scientific studies about interstellar travel.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Creating a Laser So Powerful It Could Get a Probe to Mars in Days” »

Space agencies are working hard to get humans back to the surface of the Moon. But it’s not exactly the most inviting place.

Astronauts during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 may not have had any health incidents while they were gleefully bouncing around on the lunar surface, as a NASA mission report from the time points out. But they knew that lunar dust wasn’t their friend — it could irritate their lungs, cause their Moon buggies to overheat — it even started degrading their spacesuits.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rare, medium-size “hot Neptune” planet in a solar system far beyond our own. Why are there so few exoplanets of this size? Some clues: the planet orbits very close to a young star, and its atmosphere is evaporating rapidly from the blistering radiation. https://go.nasa.gov/2rBCwW4

Solving the RSS’s fiendishly tricky festive quiz will require general knowledge, logic and lateral thinking.

“We’re sorry this happened,” Tomer Bar, engineering director at Facebook, wrote in a blog post about the flaw.

The flaw allowed apps that users accessed through the social network’s “Facebook Login” system to see photos that had been uploaded but not published on Facebook, as well as photos published to Facebook’s “Marketplace” and to its Stories feature.

“The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post,” Bar wrote.

Continue reading “Facebook apologizes after security flaw exposes unpublished photos” »

Science fiction has promised us a whole lot of technology that it’s rudely failed to deliver—jetpacks, flying cars, teleportation. The most useful one might be the robot companion, à la Rosie from The Jetsons, a machine that watches over the home.

It seemed like 2018 was going to be the year when robots made a big leap in that direction. Two machines in particular surfaced to much fanfare: Kuri, an adorable R2D2 analog that can follow you around and take pictures of your dinner parties, and Jibo, a desktop robot with a screen for a face that works a bit like Alexa, only it can dance.

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Continue reading “Sci-Fi Promised Us Home Robots. So Where Are They?” »

Nano-sized particles already make bicycles and tennis rackets lighter and stronger, protect eyeglasses from scratches, and help direct chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. But their usefulness depends on being able to precisely sculpt them into the right configurations—no easy task when they’re so tiny that thousands of them could fit into the thickness of a sheet of paper.

https://www.bustle.com/p/7-creepy-things-a-dead-body-can-do-…e-13550864

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