I suspect the tracks being LN2-cooled is a mistranslation or miscommunication. The typical setup is for the train to have superconducting electromagnets, and for the track to have either permanent magnets or induced-current electromagnets. There’s other stuff that makes me think there was a lot of information messed…

Generally, no. Most cubesats and other nanosatellites are launched into extremely low orbits that decay in a few years, or in some cases months. There’s usually little point in putting them in a higher orbit - most of them are camera sats, with a camera that small you want to be as close to the target as possible.

It’s always nice to see new launch providers, but Virgin’s coming in late to the game. They’re going to have to move quickly to keep up.

The rover isn’t built to get from point A to point B, it was built to do a lot of science. It’ll go a few hundred feet and ooh look at this interesting rock, let me take some pictures and zap it with x-rays and hit it with a hammer so we can see what kind of cleavage patterns it has and woah don’t you think this whole…

Very well, if you’re going to dismiss my criticism for use of a casual register, I will reply in a scholarly register to forestall any further tone-policing.

A server chip seems more likely than a tablet chip (though the former could lead to the latter). Azure is currently x86-only but that could very well change, and would have fewer issues with back-compat - nobody buying Azure instances is going to be confused when their legacy x86 code doesn’t run natively on an ARM…

Bruh are you seriously arguing that something is going to come along and replace electricity for charging electric vehicles? Are you expecting some sort of on-site generation, like one of those mini nuclear reactors at every charging site, or are you expecting BEVs to be swiftly replaced by something like hydrogen…

Much of the cost of an EV fast-charge station, AIUI, is the actual grid hookup and maybe the AC->DC converter. Eight DC fast chargers (~120kW apiece) are going to pull a megawatt of power when all in use, no matter what the actual charging standard used is or what fancy battery tech is involved, and that’s not a…

Nope, it’s still waiting to go. “Liftoff Time TBD” is all we know. Could be a ground support issue, they’ve had some trouble with prop loading before... or it could be an idiot in the range problem, they have a very wide exclusion zone for safety, if someone drove a boat or plane into it, they have to wait to escort…

Significant precautions are taken to avoid diseases spreading to the ISS. Crew have always quarantined prior to liftoff, and shipments are sanitized. COVID does not appear to spread readily through surface contact, so with the quarantine period doubled they should be among the safest people.

One good piece of advice: feel free to give up on even playing some games, and make a distinction between “yeah I guess I’ll play that if there’s nothing else left” and “oh shit I gotta play this one” games. I’ve sorted my Steam library into six categories:

Unfortunately, Puerto Rico is probably the best location in the US. The telescope needs to be as close as possible to the equator to maximize viewing area, ruling out most of the contiguous US and Alaska. It needs to be in a mountainous region to help block external radio interference and to support the massive size,…

There are two things that makes me hopeful a new dish will be built:

Software is just not good at fixing hardware problems. Code like you suggest would be more likely to malfunction than to correctly solve a problem - for every instance where the sensors were actually installed wrong, there will be a dozen instances where the code incorrectly decides something is wrong and crashes the…

I meant mid/low in terms of raw performance. It’s obviously going into at least “premium mid-grade” laptops. I’m not sure whether this chip itself will be cheaper or more expensive than Intel. I think Apple’s primary motivation is simplifying their hardware, they’ve been doing some bodges to get things like the AI…

It is not unreasonable to expect the M1 to be competitive with current laptop-grade x86 offerings. Anandtech’s done some good reverse-engineering work, and come up with some interesting numbers.

The typical season for hurricanes ends November 30, but that’s just the norm. Highly active seasons can and do keep going beyond an arbitrary calendar date, and storms that form in December will still be counted as part of the 2020 storm season. 2005, for instance, saw a storm form on December 28, which actually…

I’m kind of surprised they’re using solar power for this, instead of an RTG. It seems risky to explore permanently-shadowed craters on battery power, unable to recharge if it gets stuck. I know solar power is cheaper and lighter, and that RTG fuel is pretty limited, but it still seems like a strange decision. I guess…

Were strict gender roles in pre-agricultural societies actually the expert consensus? I know it’s fairly popular with laypeople and maybe evolutionary psychologists, but from the (admittedly not too many) archeological papers I’ve read, I got the impression most scientists had already moved on past that. Early…

Wait, even the dedicated desktop version?