On December 15, the United States Air Force successfully flew an AI copilot on a U-2 spy plane in California, marking the first time AI has controlled a U.S. military system. Dr. Will Roper, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, reveals how he and his team made history: With call sign ARTUu, we trained uZero…
Tag: Fiction
Hibernating lemurs may be the key to cryogenic sleep for human space travel
Science fiction is shifting into reality. With humanity’s plans to return to the moon this decade and further ambitions to travel to Mars in the next, we need to figure out how to keep astronauts healthy for these years-long missions. One solution long championed by science fiction is suspended animation, or putting humans in a hibernation-like sleep for the duration of…
SpaceX launches Starship on highest test flight, crash-lands
SpaceX launched its shiny, bullet-shaped, straight-out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the 6 1/2-minute test flight ended in an explosive fireball at touchdown. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-12-spacex-starship-highest-flight-crash-lands.html…
Legendary Science Fiction Author Ben Bova Has Passed At the Age of 88
Ben Bova “was the author of more than 120 works of science fact and fiction,” according to Wikipedia, and was also a six-time winner of the Hugo Award. “He was also president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.” Tor.com reports Bova has passed “due to complications from COVID-19 and a stroke…” Born in 1932,…
Mystery ‘2001’ monolith found in Utah desert
A real-life version of the monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ has shown up in the middle of nowhere. In the classic science fiction novel by Arthur… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/341134/mystery-2001-monolith-found-in-utah-desert…
Elon Musk outlines plans for living on Mars
The SpaceX CEO has made no secret of his ambition to see humans living on the Red Planet in his lifetime. It might seem like science fiction at the mo… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/341103/elon-musk-outlines-plans-for-living-on-mars…
USAF to fit its fighter jets with laser weapons
A number of older fighter jets will be fitted out with defensive laser weapons by the mid 2020s. It might sound like something out a science fiction m… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/340883/usaf-to-fit-its-fighter-jets-with-laser-weapons…
HP Replaces ‘Free Ink for Life’ Plan With ’99 Cents a Month Or Your Printer Stops Working’
In a new essay at EFF.org, Cory Doctorow re-visits HP’s anti-consumer “security updates” that disabled third-party ink cartridges (while missing real vulnerabilities that could actually bypass network firewalls). Doctorow writes that it was just the beginning: HP’s latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their…
New NASA posters feature cosmic frights for Halloween
Check out these 3 new posters from NASA’s Galaxy of Horrors, featuring cosmic frights for Halloween. They’re free to download, and available in English and Spanish. Source: https://earthsky.org/todays-image/nasa-halloween-2020-free-posters…
Time crystals lead researchers to future computational work
Time crystals sound like something out of science fiction, but they may be the next major leap in quantum network research. A team based in Japan has proposed a method to use time crystals to simulate massive networks with very little computing power. …