Jeff Bezos Brings Amazon Work Culture To Blue Origin

Source: See here

Headlines:

Financial Times

Kuwait has stripped nationality from 42,000 people after suspending the region's only parliament last year

Long hooked on American defence exports, allies feel buyers' remorse over hardware dependent on Washington support

Nick Harkaway on his father John le Carré's legacy — and the debate over creative control as OO7 moves to Amazon

Reduction comes despite surge in spending on search for metals crucial to energy transition since 2020

New administration wants Washington-based multilateral lender to help the west compete with China and Russia

Overexpansion has damaged service and value for money at rival airlines, according to Badr Mohammed Al-Meer

Source: Found here

#news

Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world's third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The space company's founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the ecommerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.

Half a dozen current and former senior Blue Origin employees told the Financial Times that the billionaire had taken a prominent role in helping reset a company that has reached orbit only once, compared with SpaceX achieving the feat more than 450 times.

"The euphemism among Blue Origin alumni is that Blue Origin's track record speaks for itself," said one former executive.

Key to Bezos's effort is chief executive Dave Limp. The former Amazon devices chief was appointed in late 2023 and has been followed in quick succession by several veterans from the $2.2tn tech giant, including supply chain chief Tim Collins, chief information officer Josh Koppelman, and chief financial officer Allen Parker.

The move came only a month after Blue Origin launched its 30-story-high New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, the result of 12 years of work and a significant juncture for the business as it extends into the satellite launch market.

"We grew and hired incredibly fast in the past few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed," Limp told employees in an email seen by the FT.

NASA Launch Of SPHEREx And PUNCH Space Missions Delayed

More details: Found here

Headlines:

The agency had planned to launch both missions at the same time on Saturday (March 8) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; SpaceX is continuing to complete vehicle checkouts, delaying the liftoff.

A new launch date will be announced once confirmed, according to an update posted to SpaceX's website.

The liftoff had been scheduled to occur from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. local time, and 0309 GMT on March 9). This carpool situation came about because of NASA's Launch Services Program , which aims to match various science missions with commercial vehicles in order strike a balance between the taxpayer money and private funding that go into space exploration.

SPHEREx ⁘ which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer ⁘ is a conical white spacecraft constructed to work as a sort of wide-angle version of the James Webb Space Telescope . It'll be working with information-rich infrared light wavelengths emanating from the distant universe just like the JWST does, but it will do so on a much wider scale.

The JWST can peer into the crevices of a faraway galaxy with remarkable resolution, for instance, while SPHEREx will be able to detect the other galaxies around the JWST's single target with its own stellar imaging capabilities.

Meanwhile, PUNCH ⁘ which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere ⁘ will be searching for secrets of solar dynamics. Made up of four satellites that'll be stationed around our planet, this mission is meant to help scientists understand how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona , turns into the solar wind . This is important because the solar wind ricochets around the bubble our solar system sits within, known as the heliosphere; the edges of that bubble represent the barrier between our cosmic neighborhood and the rest of the universe.

Decoding how our sun operates in general can offer many benefits to humanity, but the most obvious probably has to do with space weather. Sometimes, for instance, bursts of plasma rip off the sun and turn into what are known as coronal mass ejections , or CMEs, that can barrel toward our planet. This happens relatively often, meaning a CME headed our direction doesn't mean we're in for doomsday, to be clear ⁘ but space weather resulting from such events can indeed affect things like our power grid and the health of astronauts in space.

#news

SpaceX's Latest Starship Explosion Marks Two Consecutive Failures

Source: See here

Headlines:

SpaceX's Starship launcher spun out of control minutes after liftoff Thursday, showering fiery debris over the Bahamas and dealing another setback to Elon Musk's rocket program after a failure under similar circumstances less than two months ago.

Starship and its Super Heavy booster, loaded with millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants, lumbered off their launchpad in Texas at 5:30 pm Central time to begin the eighth full-scale test flight of SpaceX's new-generation rocket. Thirty-three Raptor engines propelled the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket through a clear afternoon sky with more than twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket, the workhorse of the Apollo lunar program.

Repeating a feat SpaceX accomplished with Starship twice before, the rocket's Super Heavy booster separated from the Starship upper stage roughly two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, then guided itself back to the Texas coastline for a catch by mechanical arms on the launchpad's tower. SpaceX is now 3-for-3 with attempts to catch a Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, a sign that engineers are well on their way to mastering how to recover and reuse boosters in a similar way as they do with the smaller workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Musk sees Starship as the interplanetary backbone for transporting cargo and people to Mars, one of his most consistent long-term goals. This, too, requires orbital refueling. Musk recently suggested SpaceX could be ready to demonstrate ship-to-ship orbital refueling in 2026, a year later than the 2025 goal NASA officials discussed in December.

#news

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Not A Threat To Earth. Moon Impact Uncertain.

Source: See here

Headlines:

NASA officials this week said recent calculations show a significantly smaller risk than previously believed that Earth could be annihilated in 2032 as a result of being hit by Asteroid 2024 YR4. The moon, however, may not be in the clear. 

When first discovered in December, Asteroid 2024 YR4 had a small but notable chance of impacting Earth in 2032, according to information from NASA's Planetary Defense Department. That chance rose above 1% and then 3% before recent NASA calculations now estimate the likelihood of it impacting Earth at 0.004%.

Here's why this asteroid made headlines, how it could impact the moon and how a big addition in 2027 could change how scientists study space objects. 

MARCH BLOOD MOON: Total lunar eclipse will result in a blood moon in March. Here's when to see it.

The asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered Dec. 27, 2024 in Chile through the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).

The size is estimated to be 130 to 300 feet across according to NASA, but Johnson said there is still some uncertainty to the size due to the amount of light it reflects. 

#news

White House May Seek To Slash NASA's Science Budget By 50 Percent

More details: Found here

Headlines:

This includes NASA. As expected, the president's plan for the space agency includes some significant shakeups, including a desire to move elements of NASA headquarters to field centers around the country. However, in perhaps the most drastic change, the White House seeks to massively cut funding for science programs at the space agency.

Multiple people familiar with the White House proposal said cuts to NASA's "Science Mission Directorate" could be as high as 50 percent. These sources emphasized that no decisions are final, and there are some scenarios in which the cuts to NASA's science programs would be less. But the intent is to slash science.

The associate administrator who runs NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Nicola Fox, appeared in Houston on Thursday for a news conference about a lunar landing . Afterward, Ars asked her about the implications of cutting science funding in half.

However, as word of these potential cuts spread through the scientific community this week, they have set off alarm bells and generated a response that indicated otherwise.

"If this is implemented, it would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States," said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society. "Losing this much money, this fast, has no precedence in NASA's history. It would force terrible decisions, including turning off scores of active, productive, irreplaceable missions, halting nearly all new mission development, and decimating the country's space science workforce."

In many ways, NASA's science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini's discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA's science directorate.

#news

NASA Artemis II Astronauts Discuss Returning To Moon

Read more: Visit website

Headlines:

NASA is set to return humans to the moon, and Artemis program astronauts visited the South by Southwest Conference and Festival to discuss how the U.S. plans to use the moon as a steppingstone for future missions to Mars.

Taking the SXSW stage Friday morning, Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen spoke about the 10-day flight test mission that will orbit Earth and the moon.

"We want to get to Mars. We don't want to stop there," Wiseman said. "We want to get humans working off of our planet. And Artemis II ... is the first step in the Artemis campaign for humans on Mars. The moon is right next door, so let's go try out some of these systems around the moon. We've been working on the International Space Station for the last 25 years. We know how to live and work off of our planet. And now let's go extrapolate that out to the moon and then let's push on to Mars."

"As humans, we are naturally inspired to explore," Hansen said. "Not everybody wants to get in a rocket. ... But we truly want to go. And what we see is other people truly want to be involved, and they want to solve those problems."

#news

Self-aware AI Robots Can Now Learn The Same Way Humans Do

More details: See here

Headlines:

For years, robots have relied on pre-programmed instructions and complex simulations to function. But now, scientists have developed self-aware robots that can learn and adapt in real time, just like humans.

Instead of relying on engineers to program every movement, these robots watch themselves move, understand their structure, and adjust their actions accordingly. It⁘s a move that could lead to robots that function more independently, reducing the need for constant human intervention in homes, factories, and even disaster zones.

At the center of this development is a new AI-powered method enabling robots to observe their movements through a simple camera. Much like how humans watch themselves in a mirror to refine a skill⁘whether it⁘s dancing, lifting weights, or adjusting posture⁘these self-aware robots use visual feedback to build an internal model of their bodies.

The method was created by researchers at Columbia University and is detailed in a new study . It uses deep neural networks, which allow the robots to analyze how they move in 3D space and detect any changes or misalignments in their structure. This allows them to self-correct errors without human intervention or complex sensor arrays.

Until now, robots have required constant monitoring and reprogramming whenever they encounter issues. More self-aware robots change that by becoming more autonomous, efficient, and adaptable. Of course, it also has some very interesting and scary implications, like if China⁘s rifle-toting robots were to become self-aware.

Josh Hawkins has been writing for over a decade, covering science, gaming, and tech culture. He also is a top-rated product reviewer with experience in extensively researched product comparisons, headphones, and gaming devices.

#news

⁘Age Of Disclosure⁘ Director Breaks Silence On UFO Revelations

Read more: Visit website

Headlines:

The highly anticipated UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure has its world premiere at South by Southwest Film Festival on Sunday, and filmmaker Dan Farah is finally ready to talk about his years-long secretive effort to make the most credible nonfiction movie ever about the buzzy topic.

From there, Disclosure spins a deft narrative that details an alleged 80-year cover-up of UFOs while attempting to answer several burning questions (such as how do the crafts work, why have they crashed, who is covering this up, and what do U.S. presidents know?). The film will doubtlessly convert many skeptics, while also generating some skepticism of its own.

⁘I hope I made a film that makes the public aware of a very serious situation that impacts us all,⁘ Farah says. ⁘I had multiple senators tell me that they thought my documentary would be one of the most effective tools for helping make the public aware of the truth in a way that could get the rest of the government to take this topic more seriously.⁘

Below, Farah took our questions. The director is passionate about this subject and also exceedingly careful in selecting his words, which is understandable. Having your debut film premiere at a major film festival is cause for anxiety enough. To also have it also be a project that claims to answer one of mankind's biggest existential questions while tackling sensitive national security issues is quite another. As a first-time director, Farah has jumped straight into the deep end of the pool ⁘ which might also contain aliens.

How were you able to convince so many of credentialed voices to go on camera to talk about this for your first film?

#news

Promoting Innovations And Patents For Exploring Our Final Frontier

Source: Visit website

Headlines:

Whether you're NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman, Virgin Galactic Founder Richard Branson, Artemis mission specialist Christina Koch, or even fictional astronaut and self-proclaimed "space pirate" Mark Watney, setting out on our final frontier and exploring space requires the right technology. The technology associated with space exploration has come a long way from the once-cutting-edge systems that put Sputnik into orbit and allowed the Apollo 11 crew to land on the lunar surface. A nearly exponential surge in patent activity related to space exploration, particularly over the past decade and a half, has captured a snapshot of these developments. Along with these technological advances, ambitions are growing too. There is a desire to go bigger, faster and further in space exploration.

But as the ambitions have grown, more and more obstacles have emerged. Space exploration poses unique research challenges: the need for more efficient rockets to travel farther into inhabitable areas of space, food production for space settlements and preventive and responsive medical research on the potential detrimental impact of long-term exposure to the conditions of space travel. In response to these research challenges, inventors from across the space exploration sector have created new and exciting innovations — innovations protected by patents. Hundreds of thousands of patents are issued each year in the United States across a range of industries and disciplines. Hidden in this haystack of patents, however, could very well be the needles needed to solve each of these challenges and allow us to, in the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, "push the boundaries of our existence."

There is some tension, however, between the space industry and patent law, with the value of the latter not always being recognized. Patents, however, contribute directly to the development of space exploration innovations by providing a way for innovators to receive compensation for their contributions, even when the path to market for a new innovation may be long or prohibitively expensive for small inventors whose innovations compete with the likes of NASA, Space X and Blue Origin. Even those small inventors can generate revenue from their creations through licensing.

#news

Bong Joon-ho Misses The Moment

Read more: Visit website

Headlines:

Bong Joon-ho was delighted by a congratulatory letter he received from Martin Scorsese after his 2019 Korean-language film Parasite triumphed at the Oscars. At a press conference, Bong revealed that Scorsese had said he and other directors were keenly awaiting his next movie. "You've done well. Now rest. But don't rest for too long."

Here at last, six years later, is Bong's next film, financed on a different scale. Parasite was made on a budget of $11.4m and took $258m at the box office worldwide. Mickey 17 is ten times the punt, with a $118m budget, lavished by Warner Bros.

Pattinson is endearing as passive, dopey Mickey 17, before transforming into aggressive, macho Mickey 18, modelled on Robert De Niro's nastiest roles, with only snarly teeth to show as a physical difference. As Nasha, the British actress Naomi Ackie is convincingly excited by the prospect of getting both of them in bed together. The far future is surprisingly English, perhaps because Mickey 17 was made at the Warner studio in Leavesden.

Where the movie goes wrong is its satirising of the vile leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his grotesque, manipulative wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). It's more than heavy handed: Marshall announces that he is creating "a pure white planet full of superior people", while Nasha speaks up for "the native inhabitants of our planet", the Creepers (caterpillars-cum-walruses, given to bounding around like spring lambs).

#news

NASA Uses GPS On The Moon For The First Time

More details: See here

Headlines:

On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost made history, becoming the first commercial lunar lander to successfully touchdown on the moon's surface. The groundbreaking lander is wasting no time in getting to work. According to NASA , the joint public-private mission has already successfully demonstrated the ability to use Earth-based GPS signals on the lunar surface, marking a major step ahead of future Artemis missions.

Accurate and reliable navigation will be vital for future astronauts as they travel across the moon, but traditional GPS tools aren't much good when you're around 225,000 miles from Earth. One solution could be transmitting data from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to the lunar surface in order to autonomously measure time, velocity, and position. That's what mission engineers from NASA and the Italian Space Agency hoped to demonstrate through the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), one of the 10 projects packed aboard Blue Ghost.

However, LuGRE's achievements didn't only begin after touchdown on the moon. On January 21, the instrument broke NASA's record for highest altitude GNSS signal acquisition at 209,900 miles from Earth while traveling to the moon. That record continued to rise during Blue Ghost's journey over the ensuing days, peaking at 243,000 miles from Earth after reaching lunar orbit on February 20.

#news

What Are The Chances An Asteroid Will Impact Earth In 2032?

Read more: See here

Headlines:

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

For a few days in mid-February, headlines around the world buzzed about the potential for an asteroid to hit the Earth in 2023—specifically, asteroid 2024 YR4 . The chance of this impact rose to a high of 3.1 percent on Feb. 18.

As a planetary geologist, my research focuses on meteorite impact craters , the scars of large asteroid and cometary impacts in Earth's past.

There are countless numbers of asteroids and an unknown number of comets throughout our solar system. Most of these objects date back to the very beginnings of our solar system, around 4.5 billion years ago.

Research has identified approximately 200 locations where these asteroids or comets have struck the Earth in the past to form meteorite impact craters. It's very rare that planetary geologists can tell whether it was an asteroid or comet that hit.

One of the most famous of these 200 or so impact craters is the 200 km-diameter Chicxulub impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This impact wiped out 65 percent of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago .

#news

New JPL Space Mission Seeks To Unravel The Mystery Of Cosmic 'Inflation'

More details: Visit website

Headlines:

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

It expanded so fast that in about a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second, a chunk of space the size of an atom would have exploded into a size far larger than our solar system. It brought our slice of the universe—everything we can see in the night sky —from an incomprehensibly small point to a size roughly between that of a human head and a city block.

But while the modern-day universe is riddled with evidence that this strange prolog to the universe that physicists call "inflation" probably happened, scientists still don't know exactly why it happened.

A new spacecraft from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, launching as early as Tuesday evening on a SpaceX rocket out of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, hopes to find out.

The mission—the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer; or SPHEREx—will examine one of the clues inflation left behind. From its data, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the culprit (or culprits) behind the rapid expansion.

Over the course of two years, SPHEREx will create four three-dimensional maps of the spread of galaxies throughout the entire sky, allowing scientists to search for the subatomic quantum ripples created by undiscovered inflation particles 13.8 billion years ago, now etched into the large-scale structure of the universe.

"It's zooming out to map the cosmos and see the largest structures and the biggest picture, unlike large telescopes like [the James Webb Space telescope] that will zoom in and take very detailed, exquisite pictures over specific small areas of the sky," said James Bock, Caltech physics professor, JPL senior research scientist and SPHEREx's principal investigator.

#news

These Humanoid Robots Are Getting Set To Reproduce

More details: See here

Headlines:

Robotics manufacturer Apptronik announced this week that it has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with design and manufacturing giant Jabil to build, test, and deploy Apptronik's Apollo humanoid robots.

It's not exactly a Von Neumann machine , but this is a big deal that will eventually see robots building robots. While Apptronik has significant expertise and just raised a massive $350 million round from investors including Google to make humanoid robots, it only has about 150 employees and a relatively small global footprint. In contrast, Jabil has 140,000 employees at over 100 sites across 25 countries to go with reported revenue of almost $30 billion last year. If this partnership works well, Jabil can significantly accelerate execution of Apptronik's humanoid robot project.

"Humanoid robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we live and work, but for that to become a reality, we need to be able to build them rapidly at scale, at the right price point, and in geographies where our customers are located," Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas said in a statement. "Our partnership with Jabil, along with our unique design for manufacturability and ability to have Apollo humanoid robots handling material movement and assembly tasks in the factory, are critical components needed to create a flywheel effect that could make humanoid robots ubiquitous."

"The robots will be used to complete an array of simple, repetitive intralogistics and manufacturing tasks, including inspection, sorting, kitting, lineside delivery, fixture placement, and sub-assembly before being deployed to Apptronik customer sites," Apptronik says in its press release.

#news

NASA Supercomputer Detects A Disturbing Spiral In The Solar System. What's Going On?

Reference: Found here

Headlines:

The NASA boffins in white coats and thick-rimmed glasses have detected new signals that show the Oort cloud - the spooky shell of icy objects at the very edge of our solar system - might have spiralling arms that resemble a galaxy.

Proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort , the cloud sits between 2,000 and 200,000 AU (Astronomical units) For reference, 1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun: 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres .

It's largely believed that Oort cloud came into being as the unused remnants of the creation of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn , around 4.6 billion years ago.

While studies are always ongoing, recent developments propose a model that says the inner structure of the Oort cloud may look like a spiral disk . The findings were published on February 16 on the preprint server arXiv , meaning the work it yet to be peer-reviewed - a crucial step in any scientific experiment.

In their experiment, researchers tried to look at the gravitational effects of objects on either side of the Oort cloud in order to build up a model of what the cloud itself could look like. However, when they ran the numbers through the NASA's Pleiades supercomputer , it came back with a mysterious structure for the inner part of the cloud that looked incredibly similar to the spiral disk of the Milky Way .

In order to confirm this structure, observations are needed, as researchers will have to track the objects directly themselves or locate the light reflected from them - both incredibly difficult tasks with little resources.

Being so far away from the Sun makes them incredibly faint ; they are (we think) merely rocks and planet-sized chunks of ice, nothing in them gives off light which would make them more photo-friendly.

#news