Lifeboat Foundation

In October, NASA announced the first selection of a scientist to conduct research aboard a commercial spaceflight mission. I am that scientist, and I will be flying aboard Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship 2.

On that flight, which will reach altitudes over 300, 000 feet, I’ll be conducting experiments to further both astronomy and space life sciences.

This is a game-changing move by NASA. Why? Because it represents a normalizing of research in space to be more like other research disciplines, such as field geology, oceanography and volcanology, where researchers do their work themselves in the field, rather than designing, building and testing robots to go in their stead. The end result of this important evolution will be beneficial in many ways.

The SN9 prototype was almost aborted in a storage accident.

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality is working on an artificial intelligence (AI) project to ease the city’s notorious traffic jams, daily Milliyet has reported.

“By analyzing images from junctions, the system will activate traffic lamps and turn them green in a short time to ease traffic flow,” said Esat Temimhan, the director of Istanbul IT and Smart City Technologies (İSBAK), an sub unit of the municipality.

The AI system has started in two pilot regions, he said.

Scientists in Australia have developed a process for calculating the perfect size and density of quantum dots needed to achieve record efficiency in solar panels.

Quantum dots, man-made nanocrystals 100, 000 times thinner than a sheet of paper, can be used as light sensitisers, absorbing infrared and visible light and transferring it to other molecules.

This could enable new types of solar panels to capture more of the light spectrum and generate more electrical current, through a process of ‘light fusion’ known as photochemical upconversion.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, with collaborators at Technische Universität Berlin, have demonstrated the shortest wavelength ever reported of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). This can pave the way for future use in, for example, disinfection and medical treatment. The results were recently published in the scientific journal ACS Photonics.

“Although there is still much work to be done, especially to enable electrically driven devices, this demonstration provides an important building block for the realization of practical VCSELs covering the major part of the UV spectral range,” says Filip Hjort, Ph.D. student at the Photonics Laboratory at mc² and first author of the article.

A vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) is a compact semiconductor laser and has seen widespread application in, for example, facial recognition in smartphones and for optical communication in data centers. So far, these lasers are only available commercially with red and infrared wavelengths, but also other visible-emitting VCSELs, that could find applications in adaptive headlamps for cars or projection displays, will soon be commercialized.

Nuro’s autonomous vehicles will take to the streets as early as 2021.

Scientists in China claim to have built a hypersonic jet engine—called “sodramjet”—that can fly at 16 times the speed of sound. This means that an aircraft kitted out with such engines could fly anywhere in the world in two hours, according to the scientists. The test flight of a prototype was carried out in a wind tunnel in Beijing, China, and displayed excellent thrust, fuel efficiency, and operational stability. Led by Professor Zonglin Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Mechanics, the team’s findings were published in Chinese Journal of Aeronautics on Saturday.

Scientists in China have tested a prototype sodramjet engine in a hypersonic wind tunnel at nine times the speed of sound. Check it out here!

Google and its American internet peers are steadily amping up their investment in India, latching onto the only other country with a billion-plus population after getting shut out of China. From Amazon.com Inc. to Facebook Inc., they’re hoping to get in on the ground floor of what they envision as a smartphone and online commerce boom that could eventually create a market to rival the world’s No. 2 economy.

Google investments helped create India’s two youngest technology unicorns: a pair of startups that feed personalized news and entertainment to the world’s fastest-growing smartphone population.