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Category: habitats

Space Habitats: The Megastructures We’ll Call Home

Explore the future of space habitats, from rotating cylinders and torus colonies to orbital cities, asteroid homes, and the megastructures humanity may one day live inside.

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Watch my exclusive video Nearby Supernovae: https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… SFIA Merchandise: https://isaac-arthur-shop.fourthwall… 🌐 Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net ❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur ⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… 👥 Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 📣 Reddit Community: / isaacarthur 🐦 Follow on Twitter / X: / isaac_a_arthur 💬 SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: Space Habitats: The Megastructures We’ll Call Home Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Editors: Briana Brownell, Ludwig Luska Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images, Anthrofuturism, Apogii.uk, Bryan Versteeg, Fishy Tree, Katie Byrne, Jarred Eagley, Jeremy Jozwik, Justin Dixon, Ken York YD Visual, Neil Blevins, Sergio Botero, Steve Bowers, and Udo Schroeter Music by Epidemic Sound: http://nebula.tv/epidemic and Markus Junnikkala, Phase Shift, Kai Engel, Chris Zabriskie, Taras Harkavyi, and Stellardrone 0:00 Intro 4:37 The Sunflower 14:07 The O’Neill Cylinder 49:00 Lewis One 57:40 Stanford Torus 1:22:19 Kalpana One 1:28:14 Nebula 1:29:27 Bernal Sphere 1:54:13 Bishop Ring 2:03:23 Topopolis 2:27:36 McKendree Cylinder 2:33:57 Hammer Habs 2:59:01 Rungworlds 3:04:35 Conglomerations 3:38:45 Epilogue.

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🌐 Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur.
⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a…
👥 Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264
📣 Reddit Community: / isaacarthur.
🐦 Follow on Twitter / X: / isaac_a_arthur.
💬 SFIA Discord Server: / discord.
Credits:
Space Habitats: The Megastructures We’ll Call Home.
Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Editors: Briana Brownell, Ludwig Luska.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images, Anthrofuturism, Apogii.uk, Bryan Versteeg, Fishy Tree, Katie Byrne, Jarred Eagley, Jeremy Jozwik, Justin Dixon, Ken York YD Visual, Neil Blevins, Sergio Botero, Steve Bowers, and Udo Schroeter.
Music by Epidemic Sound: http://nebula.tv/epidemic and Markus Junnikkala, Phase Shift, Kai Engel, Chris Zabriskie, Taras Harkavyi, and Stellardrone.

0:00 Intro.
4:37 The Sunflower.
14:07 The O’Neill Cylinder.
49:00 Lewis One.
57:40 Stanford Torus.
1:22:19 Kalpana One.
1:28:14 Nebula.
1:29:27 Bernal Sphere.
1:54:13 Bishop Ring.
2:03:23 Topopolis.
2:27:36 McKendree Cylinder.
2:33:57 Hammer Habs.
2:59:01 Rungworlds.
3:04:35 Conglomerations.
3:38:45 Epilogue

Peering into the Milky Way’s far side, Roman could unveil 100,000 worlds

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds—a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,300 found so far thanks to NASA missions working in tandem with other observatories. And Roman will primarily find them in underexplored regions of the Milky Way.

“Our galaxy is home to a variety of different environments, but when it comes to hunting for exoplanets, we’ve really only explored one: our own neighborhood,” said Elisa Quintana, an exoplanet researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Quintana leads a team focused on building software and simulations to help prepare for Roman’s exoplanet transit observations. “Roman will extend the search far enough to encompass other galactic habitats, which could help us learn how planet formation varies across different regions of the Milky Way.”

Most known exoplanets are located within a couple thousand light-years of Earth. But one of Roman’s core surveys will peer all the way through the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, the central hub where stars are packed more densely than anywhere else, to the fringes of the far side of the galaxy.

New art test could help museums spot fake Van Goghs without touching paintings

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Surface Topography: Metrology and Properties introduces a pioneering, noninvasive technique that can distinguish authentic artworks from forgeries, offering museums, collectors, and auction houses a major advantage in tackling art fraud.

The study, developed at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, introduces a method that analyzes the microscopic “texture” of a painting by converting high-resolution images into 3D-like maps, allowing researchers to measure how rough or detailed the surface is using fractal dimensions. This measurement captures subtle patterns created by an artist’s brushwork—patterns so consistent that they act like a morphological signature unique to that artist.

Using works attributed to Vincent van Gogh, the researchers showed that the method can reliably distinguish between authentic paintings and known forgeries. In tests, the well-documented fake “The Plowmen” was identified as a strong outlier, while the recently authenticated “Sunset at Montmajour” aligned closely with Van Gogh’s known works.

Fbi Probes Space Scientists Dead, Missing

Missing and dead US scientists spark federal probe. Nancy Grace has the latest.

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Researchers develop a biodegradable wash that can remove pesticides and keep fruit fresh longer

Many grocery shoppers know the routine: bring fruit and vegetables home, rinse them, dry them and hope they stay fresh long enough to be eaten. But fresh produce is delicate. Grapes shrivel, apple slices brown and berries can spoil quickly.

At the same time, many people worry about what may remain on the surface of fruit they buy, including pesticide residues.

Cleaning and freshness are usually treated as separate problems that require different treatments. Washing feels like a simple act of control. But it’s not quite that simple.

Wealthy Individuals Funding Science is Good for Everyone

Excellent article on the importance of private funding for cutting-edge science.

“The skepticism toward private science funding is part of a broader anti-capitalist sentiment, likely fueled by real affordability problems in housing, healthcare, and education. These concerns are understandable. But directing private capital toward fundamental science benefits everyone, and treating this the same as other uses of wealth only ensures that money flows into megayachts rather than research.”

Private wealth funded most of history’s scientific breakthroughs. Stigmatizing it now is holding us all back.

Learning while Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies

Even the best-trained robots struggle when they leave the lab. They face “distribution shifts”—situations they didn’t see in training, like a brand of cereal with a new box design or a human suddenly walking into their personal space. Static datasets (fixed instructions) simply can’t prepare a robot for every “what if” scenario.

To make sense of all this messy real-world data, the researchers introduced two key technical innovations to the robot’s “Vision-Language-Action” (VLA) brain.

Imagine bringing home a single robot to be your all-in-one kitchen assistant—you want it to brew your morning Gongfu tea, make fresh juice in the afternoon, and mix the perfect cocktail at night. While it might have been trained extensively in a lab, in your house, the counter is slightly higher, the fruit is shaped differently, and your cocktail shaker is transparent. Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide an incredible starting point, yet real-world deployment is never a fixed test distribution. This leaves a critical, unsolved challenge: how do we take the heterogeneous experience generated across a fleet of robots and use it to post-train a single, generalist model across a wide range of tasks simultaneously?

We present Learning While Deploying (LWD), a fleet-scale offline-to-online RL framework for continual post-training of generalist VLA policies. Instead of treating deployment as the finish line where a policy is merely evaluated, LWD turns it into a training loop through which the policy improves. A pre-trained policy is deployed across a robot fleet, and both autonomous rollouts and human interventions are aggregated into a shared replay buffer for offline and online updates. The updated policy is then redeployed, enabling continuous improvement by leveraging interaction data from the entire fleet.

A Generalist Learns Beyond Demonstrations

Some robot learning systems have explored data flywheels: deploying a policy, collecting new robot data, extracting high-quality behaviors, and training the next policy to imitate them. While this supports scalable improvement, it still treats deployment mainly as a source of expert demonstrations. Prior post-training systems mainly focus on specialist policies, leaving fleet-scale post-training of a single generalist policy across diverse tasks unresolved.

Continue reading “Learning while Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policies” | >

Home security giant ADT data breach affects 5.5 million people

The ShinyHunters extortion group stole the personal information of 5.5 million individuals after breaching the systems of home security giant ADT earlier this month, according to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

Founded in 1874 as American District Telegraph, ADT is the oldest and largest home security company in the United States, currently providing monitored security and smart home solutions to over 6 million residential and small-business customers.

ADT has previously disclosed two other data breaches in August 2024 and October 2024 that exposed employee and customer information.

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