Lifeboat Foundation

In the evolving landscape of space warfare, conflict is shifting into what experts commonly call the “gray zone.”

Unlike traditional conflicts defined by clear boundaries, rules of engagement and identifiable actors, space battles in the gray zone are ambiguous, with military and civilian activities that can be difficult to discern.

“It’s crucial for U.S. policymakers and military leaders to understand the nuances of future competition in space, and how it will likely play out,” said John Klein, military strategist and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.

The only AI Hardware startup to realize revenue exceeding $100M has finished the first phase of Condor Galaxy 1 AI Supercomputer with partner G42 of the UAE. Other Cerebras customers are sharing their CS-2 results at Supercomputing ‘23, building momentum for the inventor of wafer-scale computing. This company is on a tear.

Four short months ago, Cerebras announced the most significant deal any AI startup has been able to assemble with partner G42 (Group42), an artificial intelligence and cloud computing company. The eventual 256 CS-2 wafer-scale nodes with 36 Exaflops of AI performance will be one of the world’s largest AI supercomputers, if not the largest.

Cerebras has now finished the first data center implementation and started on the second. These two companies are moving fast to capitalize on the $70B (2028) gold rush to stand up Large Language Model services to researchers and enterprises, especially while the supply of NVIDIA H100 remains difficult to obtain, creating an opportunity for Cerebras. In addition, Cerebras has recently announced it has released the largest Arabic Language Model, the Jais30B with Core42 using the CS-2, a platform designed to make the development of massive AI models accessible by eliminating the need to decompose and distribute the problem.

The European Space Agency, Airbus, and Voyager Space have signed an agreement for the Starlab commercial space station launching in 2027.

The system calculated more than 3.7 million molecules it could make from six different metallic elements in the rocks.

Using meteorites from Mars, an AI-powered robot chemist synthesized compounds that could be used to generate oxygen from water, scientists announced on Monday (Nov.

The galaxy’s stars keep a record of its history. By reading those stories, astronomers are learning more about how the Milky Way came to be—and about the galaxy we live in today.

The impact of the research goes well beyond astronomy and can help increase accuracy of climate models as well.

Joecicak/iStock.

It is common knowledge that the Earth’s rotational axis is not entirely symmetric due to the shape of our planet. However, even the speeds at which the Earth spins are not constant. This is because out world is not completely solid and consists of solid and liquid components.

Continue reading “Researchers make the most accurate measurements of Earth’s rotation yet” »

In 1972 and 1973, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes. They were the first missions to Jupiter and Saturn, before heading to the asteroid belt and becoming the first two of five probes to reach the edge of our Solar System.

With such missions, NASA was of course expecting to hit some unknowns. Even more recent probes like Voyager 1 have had their own share of glitches, and sending back data that doesn’t make any sense. But what NASA got from Pioneer 10 and 11 was a weird and intriguing mystery. At around 20 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun, both spacecraft began accelerating towards the Sun.

“The anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft is a discrepancy between modeled and observed radio-metric Doppler data received from the two vehicles,” a paper on the topic explains. “The discrepancy can be eliminated by incorporating a constant sunward acceleration of unknown origin.”

A system of seven sweltering planets has been revealed by continued study of data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope: Each one is bathed in more radiant heat from their host star per area than any planet in our solar system. Also unlike any of our immediate neighbors, all seven planets in this system, named Kepler-385, are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

It is one of only a few planetary systems known to contain more than six verified planets or planet candidates. The Kepler-385 system is among the highlights of a new Kepler catalog that contains almost 4,400 planet candidates, including more than 700 multi-planet systems.

“We’ve assembled the most accurate list of Kepler planet candidates and their properties to date,” said Jack Lissauer, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and lead author on the paper presenting the new catalog. “NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, and this new catalog will enable astronomers to learn more about their characteristics.”

A team of George Mason University scientists has received a federal grant of more than $13 million to work with the Department of the Navy to study and better understand increased solar activity that could potentially cause an “internet apocalypse” disrupting all electronic communications on Earth, including satellite communications.

Research from the grant, which will total $13.6 million in expenditures over five years, will be done in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and will include state-of-the-art data mining, analysis, and scientific modeling, among other endeavors, led by Mason faculty, students and staff. Under the terms of the contract, Mason provides scientific support for a broad range of astronomy-related activities that are of interest to the U.S. Navy and the nation at large.

“The main focus is on solar activity and the way it can impact systems on Earth,” said principal investigator Peter A. Becker, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within the College of Science. “This is especially important to the Navy—and more broadly the Department of Defense—because high-energy outbursts from the sun can have a strong negative impact on earthly radio and internet communications. And they can also have a detrimental effect on navigation systems and energy grids on Earth.”