Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station.

The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Another quantum computing record has been broken. A team has built a quantum computer with the largest ever number of so-called logical qubits (quantum bits). Unlike standard qubits, logical qubits are better able to carry out computations unmarred by errors, making the new device a potentially important step towards practical quantum computing. How complicated of a calculation a quantum computer can complete depends on the number of qubits it contains. Recently, IBM and California-based Atom Computing unveiled devices with more than 1000 qubits, nearly tripling the size of previously largest quantum computers. But the existence of these devices has not led to an immediate and dramatic increase in computing capability, because larger quantum computers often also make more errors.

To make a quantum computer that can correct its errors, researchers from the quantum computing start-up QuEra in Boston and several academics focused instead on increasing its number of logical qubits, which are groups of qubits that are connected to each other through quantum entanglement. In conventional computers, error-correction relies on keeping multiple redundant copies of information, but quantum information is fundamentally different and cannot be copied -- so researchers use entanglement to spread it across several qubits, which achieves a similar redundancy, says Dolev Bluvstein at Harvard University in Massachusetts who was part of the team. To make their quantum computer, the researchers started with several thousand rubidium atoms in an airless container. They then used forces from lasers and magnets to cool the atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero where their quantum properties are most prominent. Under these conditions, they could control the atoms' quantum states very precisely by again hitting them with lasers. Accordingly, they first created 280 qubits from the atoms and then went a step further by using another laser pulse to entangle groups of those – for instance 7 qubits at a time -- to make a logical qubit. By doing this, the researchers were able to make as many as 48 logical qubits at one time. This is more than 10 times the number of logical qubits that have ever been created before.

"It's a big deal to have that many logical qubits. A very remarkable result for any quantum computing platform" says Mark Saffman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says that the new quantum computer greatly benefits from being made of atoms that are controlled by light because this kind of control is very efficient. QuEra's computer makes its qubits interact and exchange information by moving them closer to each other inside the computer with optical "tweezers" made of laser beams. In contrast, chip-based quantum computers, like those made by IBM and Google, must use multiple wires to control each qubit. Bluvstein and his colleagues implemented several computer operations, codes and algorithms on the new computer to test the logical qubits' performance. He says that though these tests were more preliminary than the calculations that quantum computers will eventually perform, the team already found that using logical qubits led to fewer errors than seen in quantum computers using physical qubits. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: One of the world's most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It's a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an "interrogator." This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It's a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Because DAS can track seismicity, other scientists are increasingly using it to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity. (A buried system is so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect people walking and driving above.) But the scientists in Princeton just stumbled upon a rather noisier use of the technology.

In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar -- a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed -- noticed a strange signal in the DAS data. "We realized there were some weird things happening," says Ozharar. "Something that shouldn't be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere." The team suspected the "something" wasn't a rumbling volcano -- not inNew Jersey -- but the cacophony of the giant swarm of cicadas that had just emerged from underground, a population known as Brood X. A colleague suggested reaching out to Jessica Ware, an entomologist and cicada expert at the American Museum of Natural History, to confirm it. "I had been observing the cicadas and had gone around Princeton because we were collecting them for biological samples," says Ware. "So when Sarper and the team showed that you could actually hear the volume of the cicadas, and it kind of matched their patterns, I was really excited."

Add insects to the quickly growing list of things DAS can spy on. Thanks to some specialized anatomy, cicadas are the loudest insects on the planet, but all sorts of other six-legged species make a lot of noise, like crickets and grasshoppers. With fiber optic cables, entomologists might have stumbled upon a powerful new way to cheaply and constantly listen in on species -- from afar. "Part of the challenge that we face in a time when there's insect decline is that we still need to collect data about what population sizes are, and what insects are where," says Ware. "Once we are able to familiarize ourselves with what's possible with this type of remote sensing, I think we can be really creative."

Rahul Rao reports via Space.com: On Nov. 14, NASA picked up a laser signal fired from an instrument that launched with the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from Earth and heading toward a mysterious metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is at more than 40 times the average distance of Earth's moon, and still voyaging afar.) The moment marked the first successful test of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, a next-generation comms link that sends information not by radio waves but instead by laser light. It's part of a series of tests NASA is doing to speed up communications in deep space, on different missions. "Achieving first light is a tremendous achievement. The ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC," Abi Biswas, the system's project technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in an agency statement.

"And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space," Biswas added.

Humane, the startup founded by former Apple design and engineering team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has officially launched its long-awaited Ai Pin -- making a splashy foray into the nascent field of artificial intelligence hardware. From a report: The device can magnetically clip onto clothing and will cost $699 with a $24-a-month subscription -- which will come with unlimited data and phone calls. The company also said it would partner with T-Mobile for phone service and Microsoft and OpenAI for AI technology. The device will be available to order starting Nov. 16.

Tech and AI enthusiasts have watched Humane closely after Chaudhri and Bongiorno, husband-and-wife co-founders, started the company in 2018. It has kept most of its work under wraps, with some notable exceptions. In April, Chaudhri gave a demo of the device at a TED Talk. In September, the pin adorned models including Naomi Campbell at Paris Fashion Week. The Humane Ai Pin is meant to eventually be a smartphone replacement. The subscription plan comes with its own phone number, and it doesn't need to be paired with a phone. The device is screenless, and people will interact with it via voice, touchpad, gesture or by holding up objects. It also features a laser projector that can emit text onto the user's hand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Attendees at a conference for Bored Ape NFT owners are reporting waking up in the middle of the night following laser and blacklight-heavy performances with extreme eye pain and vision loss. Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, hosted ApeFest in Hong Kong from November 3-5. The event was open to holders of Bored Ape NFTs, a crypto project that peaked in 2021 and recently crashed to a two-year low, costing many investors thousands of dollars.

"I woke up at 04:00 and couldn't see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital," one attendee posted on the last day of the event. "The doctor told me the uv of the lightning of the stage did it. It has the same effect as sunlight. Still can not see normally.." "Same here for me and +1. I had eyeglasses, so was a bit spared, but skin is burned and +1 had the same degree of issues with eyes," someone replied. "The toilets may have been great, but what happened to our eyeballs last night at #ApeFest?" another attendee wrote, as a follow-up to a photo of him sitting on a toilet with his pants around his ankles in a room bathed in intense blacklights. "Been to lots of concerts, festivals, Burning Man, and never have I ever experienced fucked eyes like this."

Even as they woke up in the middle of the night with blinding eye pain, some attendees still praised the organizers for the event. "Thanks for great apefest logistiscs guys @yugalabs & @BoredApeYC. Incredible event and met plenty of amazing people," one wrote. "Still, as dozens of others, I've almost lost sight this night." They suggested others get their eyes checked like they did, and said their eyes were burned by UV. "To the organisers: For the communication & awareness reasons, it would be fair to put together an official statement with recommendations what to do, as dozens of people you care about were exposed to serious health hazards and lots of suffering," they continued. "You're good guys so it should be easy for you to recognise the seriousness of it." Photos and videos from the event show crowds of young men doing some of the worst moshing I've ever seen to performances and conference rooms soaked in blacklight and lasers. Where in the venue the damage was done is still unclear. Bored Ape Yacht Club acknowledged the issue in a post early Monday morning: "Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest and have been proactively reaching out to individuals since yesterday to try and find the potential root causes," the official account tweeted. "Based on our estimates, we believe that much less than 1% of those attending and working the event had these symptoms. While nearly everyone has indicated their symptoms have improved, we encourage anybody who feels them to seek medical attention just in case."

Wikipedia defines LIGO as "a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves." (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.)

Now Science Alert reports: A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO's interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier.

For LIGO, it's a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so... "Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy," says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech...

LIGO's sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can't feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales — the quantum realm — LIGO's abilities are hobbled. That's because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that's louder than any signal.

Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be 'louder' than the quantum noise... If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately... [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for... "We've known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction," says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech...

This means we're likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.

"Scientists recently fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator for the first time," reports Space.com.

"The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients." The new machine, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual "pillars." Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main acceleration tube is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeter) long, which is 54 million times shorter than the 16.8-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring that makes up CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland — the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator... The inside of the tiny tunnel is only around 225 nanometers wide. For context, human hairs are 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Institute.

In a new study, published Oct. 18 in the journal Nature, researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany used the tiny contraption to accelerate electrons from an energy value of 28.4âkiloelectron volts to 40.7âkeV, which is an increase of around 43%. It is the first time that a nanophotonic electron accelerator, which was first proposed in 2015, has been successfully fired, the researchers wrote in a statement...

"For the first time, we really can speak about a particle accelerator on a [micro]chip," study co-author Roy Shiloh, a physicist at FAU, said in the statement.
What they accomplished "was demonstrated almost simultaneously by colleagues at Stanford University," according to the researchers' statement. "Their results are currently under review, but can be viewed on a repository. The two teams are working together on the realization of the 'Accelerator on a chip' in a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation" in 2015.

NASA is demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions -- showcasing the benefits infrared light can have for science and exploration missions transmitting terabytes of important data. NASA: The International Space Station is getting a "flashy" technology demonstration this November. The ILLUMA-T (Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload is launching to the International Space Station to demonstrate how missions in low Earth orbit can benefit from laser communications. Laser communications uses invisible infrared light to send and receive information at higher data rates, providing spacecraft with the capability to send more data back to Earth in a single transmission and expediting discoveries for researchers.

Managed by NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, ILLUMA-T is completing NASA's first bi-directional, end-to-end laser communications relay by working with the agency's LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration). LCRD launched in December 2021 and is currently demonstrating the benefits of laser communications from geosynchronous orbit by transmitting data between two ground stations on Earth in a series of experiments. Some of LCRD's experiments include studying atmospheric impact on laser signals, confirming LCRD's ability to work with multiple users, testing network capabilities like delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) over laser links, and investigating improved navigation capabilities.

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Next time you try to wipe a smudge off your iPhone screen, take a closer look. See if you can spot one of the two tiny QR codes etched into its glass. Chances are you won't be able to find them. Both codes are tiny -- one is the size of a grain of sand and can only be seen with special equipment, while the other, roughly the size of the tip of a crayon, is laser-printed on the reverse side of the glass somewhere along its black border or bezel. The codes are placed on the glass at different stages of manufacturing to help Apple track and reduce defects. They represent the company's obsessive attention to detail in manufacturing devices such as the iPhone, which has helped it squeeze costs in a traditionally low-margin business.

"Apple has been granularly and singularly tracking many components in the iPhone for some time, but expanding that to the glass and doing it with a microscopic bar code is another level of obsessive attention to detail that few companies would do," said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a popular Apple gadget repair site. "I've never heard of serial numbers on the glass level, but if you're throwing infinite money at improving your manufacturing knowledge, then why not?" Apple added the smaller of the two QR codes -- 0.2 mm in width -- to iPhone screens in 2020 so it can track precisely how many usable cover glass units its two Chinese suppliers, Lens Technology and Biel Crystal, are making and how many defective cover glass units they are throwing away during manufacturing. Lens and Biel have previously stymied Apple's efforts to learn the true rate of defects, which can raise its production costs. Apple has paid millions of dollars to install laser and scanning equipment at Lens and Biel factories to both add the microscopic QR code and scan the cover glass at the end of the production process.

Chipmaker Intel said on Friday it had begun high-volume production using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines at its $18.5 billion plant in Ireland, calling it a "landmark" moment as it seeks to regain ground on its rivals. From a report: The EUV tools, which are theoretically precise enough to hit a person's thumb with a laser pointer from the moon, will play a key role in meeting Intel's goal of delivering five generations of technology in four years, the U.S. company said. The effort in Ireland is Intel's first attempt at high-volume manufacturing using EUV technology. Once the world's leading chip manufacturer, Intel has lost the lead but says it is on track to regain it with manufacturing technology it says will rival the best from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

"This is a landmark for Intel and the semiconductor industry as a whole," Ann Kelleher, Intel's general manager of technology development, said in a statement. "The transfer of Intel 4 process technology into high-volume production in Ireland is a giant step toward enabling leading-edge manufacturing in Europe." The plant, located in the town of Leixlip outside Dublin, is the first high-volume location for its manufacturing process called Intel 4 that uses EUV. The advanced manufacturing technique will produce its forthcoming "Meteor Lake" chip for laptops, which will pave the way for AI PCs.

Many readers shared this report: Antimatter just lost a little more pizazz. Physicists know that for every fundamental particle in nature there is an antiparticle -- an evil twin of identical mass but endowed with equal and opposite characteristics like charge and spin. When these twins meet, they obliterate each other, releasing a flash of energy on contact. In science fiction, antiparticles provide the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward in time.

A new experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out, antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. "The bottom line is that there's no free lunch, and we're not going to be able to levitate using antimatter," said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Fajans was part of an international team known as ALPHA, the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus collaboration, which is based at CERN and led by Jeffrey Hangst, a particle physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Dr. Fajans and his colleagues assembled about 100 hundred anti-atoms of hydrogen and suspended them in a magnetic field. When the field was slowly ramped down, the anti-hydrogen atoms drifted down like maple leaves in October and at the same rate of downward acceleration, or g force, as regular atoms: about 32 feet per second per second. They published their result on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Few physicists were surprised by the result. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.

According to Universe Today, China may utilize lunar caves as potential habitats for astronauts on the Moon, offering defense against hazards like radiation, meteorites, and temperature variations. From the report: Different teams of scientists from different countries and agencies have studied the idea of using lava tubes as shelter. At a recent conference in China, Zhang Chongfeng from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology presented a study into the underground world of lava tubes. Chinese researchers did fieldwork in Chinese lava tubes to understand how to use them on the Moon. According to Zhang, there's enough similarity between lunar and Earthly lava tubes for one to be an analogue of the other. It starts with their two types of entrances, vertical and sloped. Both worlds have both types.

Most of what we've found on the Moon are vertical-opening tubes, but that may be because of our overhead view. The openings are called skylights, where the ceiling has collapsed and left a debris accumulation on the floor of the tube directly below it. Entering through these requires either flight or some type of vertical lift equipment. Sloped entrances make entry and exit much easier. It's possible that rovers could simply drive into them, though some debris would probably need to be cleared. According to Zhang, this is the preferred entrance that makes exploration easier. China is prioritizing lunar lava tubes at Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) and Mare Fecunditatis (Sea of Fecundity) for exploration.

China is planning a robotic system that can explore caves like the one in Mare Tranquillitatis. The primary probe will have either wheels or feet and will be built to adapt to challenging terrain and to overcome obstacles. It'll also have a scientific payload. Auxiliary vehicles can separate from the main probe to perform more reconnaissance and help with communications and "energy support." They could be diversified so the mission can meet different challenges. They might include multi-legged crawling probes, rolling probes, and even bouncing probes. These auxiliary vehicles would also have science instruments to study the lunar dust, radiation, and the presence of water ice in the tubes. China is also planning a flight-capable robot that could find its way through lava tubes autonomously using microwave and laser radars. "China's future plan, after successful exploration, is a crewed base," the report adds. "It would be a long-term underground research base in one of the lunar lava tubes, with a support center for energy and communication at the tube's entrance. The terrain would be landscaped, and the base would include both residential and research facilities inside the tube."

"[R]egardless of when they start, China seems committed to the idea. Ding Lieyun, a top scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told the China Science Daily that 'Eventually, building habitation beyond the Earth is essential not only for all humanity's quest for space exploration but also for China's strategic needs as a space power.'"

Cerabyte, a technology startup pioneering ceramic nanolayer-based storage, claims it will usher in the "Yottabyte Era" and disrupt the $500 billion storage market in the process. Tom's Hardware reports: More specifically, its roadmaps sketch out CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) storing between 10 PB and 100 PB, and its CeraTape (2030-35) with up to 1 EB capacity per tape. According to the startup, these new formats are poised to address density, performance, and access paradigms, as well as the cost and sustainability demands of datacenters. Cerabyte, a German storage startup, has published an abstract from its upcoming presentation at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, California (h/t Blocks and Files). Here, for the first time, it will detail how it will introduce CeraMemory with inorganic nanolayers, using 50-100 atoms thick ceramics to store information. Scaling ceramic data storage technology from 100nm to 3nm bit sizes will scale the corresponding data density from GB/cm2 to units measured in TB/cm2, reckons Cerabyte.

To record data to CeraMemory, Cerabyte says that a laser beam or particle beam structures data matrices similar to QR codes. Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy. Initially, there will be no need for particle beams/electron microscopy, as those technologies will only be required later in the roadmaps at the highest densities. In its abstract from the 'Ceramic Nano Memory -- Data Storage for the Yottabyte Era' presentation, Cerabyte says its technology can read and write data at GB/s class speeds. These read/write technologies are "low power," according to the storage startup. Another seemingly excellent inherent property of ceramic storage is the touted media durability and longevity. On its website, Cerabyte says that its media can last "5,000+ years" and that the data stored can ensure through "a wide temperature range of -273C (-460F) to 300C (570F)." We have used quotes here, as those are extraordinary figures. Additionally, it is boasted that CeraMemory is resistant to corrosive, acidic, radioactive environments and EMP disruption.

SonicSpike shares a report from NASA: In 2023, NASA is sending a technology demonstration known as the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) to the space station. Together, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in December 2021, will complete NASA's first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. With ILLUMA-T, NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program office will demonstrate the power of laser communications from the space station. Using invisible infrared light, laser communications systems send and receive information at higher data rates. With higher data rates, missions can send more images and videos back to Earth in a single transmission. Once installed on the space station, ILLUMA-T will showcase the benefits higher data rates could have for missions in low Earth orbit.

"Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space," said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN program. "We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space." In addition to higher data rates, laser systems are lighter and use less power -- a key benefit when designing spacecraft. ILLUMA-T is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator and will be secured to an external module on the space station to conduct its demonstration with LCRD. Currently, LCRD is showcasing the benefits of a laser relay in geosynchronous orbit -- 22,000 miles from Earth -- by beaming data between two ground stations and conducting experiments to further refine NASA's laser capabilities. "Once ILLUMA-T is on the space station, the terminal will send high-resolution data, including pictures and videos to LCRD at a rate of 1.2 gigabits-per-second," said Matt Magsamen, deputy project manager for ILLUMA-T. "Then, the data will be sent from LCRD to ground stations in Hawaii and California. This demonstration will show how laser communications can benefit missions in low Earth orbit."

ILLUMA-T is launching as a payload on SpaceX's 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. In the first two weeks after its launch, ILLUMA-T will be removed from the Dragon spacecraft's trunk for installation on the station's Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), also known as "Kibo" -- meaning "hope" in Japanese. NASA's Laser Communications Roadmap. Following the payload's installation, the ILLUMA-T team will perform preliminary testing and in-orbit checkouts. Once completed, the team will make a pass for the payload's first light -- a critical milestone where the mission transmits its first beam of laser light through its optical telescope to LCRD. Once first light is achieved, data transmission and laser communications experiments will begin and continue throughout the duration of the planned mission.

Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises. From a report: When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university.

A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention. Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman's movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry.

"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.

"Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin." Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics....

[G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged...

"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said.

"What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."

By 2035 America needs a 43% increase in its power-transmitting capacity, according to an analysis by the REPEAT project. But NPR reports there's another way to quickly improve capacity without building new transmission lines: That's where the laser sensors come in, says Jon Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, the company that makes them. Sensors can help utilities get real-time data on their power lines, which can allow them to send more renewable electricity through the wires. This tech is part of a suite of innovations that could help the U.S. increase its grid capacity faster and cheaper than building new transmission lines...

At any given moment, utilities typically know how much power is going through their lines. But they aren't required to know the real time conditions of those lines, like the wind speed or how hot the line is. Without that data, utilities have to use conservative standards for how much power can safely flow, says Jake Gentle, senior program manager for infrastructure security at Idaho National Laboratory. But when sensors gather information from the wires — about wind, temperature, and wire sag — that data allows utilities to go beyond their conservative standards and safely put more electricity through the wires... With this tech, called "dynamic line rating", utilities are able to increase the efficiency of their lines — sometimes as much as 40%, says Gentle.
One Pittsburgh company using similar technology told NPR that "we found an average of 25% additional available capacity on transmission lines that were equipped with the sensors."

The Perseverance rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, designed to analyze organic chemicals on Mars, has provided valuable insights into the presence and distribution of potential organic materials on the surface of Mars. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: SHERLOC comes with a deep-UV laser to excite molecules into fluorescing, and the wavelengths they fluoresce at can tell us something about the molecules present. It's also got the hardware to do Raman spectroscopy simultaneously. Collectively, these two capabilities indicate what kinds of molecules are present, though they can't typically identify specific chemicals. And, critically, SHERLOC provides spatial information, telling us where sample-specific signals come from. This allows the instrument to determine which chemicals are located in the same spot in a rock and thus were likely formed or deposited together.

SHERLOC can sample rocks simply by being held near them. The new results are based on a set of samples from two rock formations found on the floor of the Jezero crater. In some cases, the imaging was done by pointing it directly at a rock; in others, the rock surface, and any dust and contaminants it contained, was abraded away by Perseverance before the imaging was done. SHERLOC identified a variety of signatures of potential organic material in these samples. There were a few cases where it was technically possible that the signatures were produced by a very specific chemical that lacked carbon (primarily cerium salts). But, given the choice between a huge range of organic molecules or a very specific salt, the researchers favor organic materials as the source. One thing that was clear was that the level of organic material present changed over time. The deeper, older layer called Seitah only had a tenth of the material found in the Maaz rocks that formed above them. The reason for this difference isn't clear, but it indicates that either the production or deposition of organic material on Mars has changed over time.

Between the different samples and the ability to resolve different regions of the samples, the researchers were able to identify distinct signals that each occurred in many samples. While it wasn't possible to identify the specific molecule responsible, they were able to say a fair bit about them. One signal came from samples that contained a ringed organic compound, along with sulfates. The most common signal came from a two-ringed organic molecule, and was associated with various salts: phosphate, sulfate, silicates, and potentially a perchlorate. Another likely contained a benzene ring associated with iron oxides. A different ringed compound was found in two of the samples. Overall, the researchers conclude that these differences are significant. The fact that distinct organic chemicals are consistently associated with different salts suggests that there were either several distinct ways of synthesizing the organics or that they were deposited and preserved under distinct conditions. Many of the salts seen here are also associated with either water-based deposition or water-driven chemical alteration of the rock -- again, consistent with the processes involved changing over time. Collectively, the researchers say this argues against the organic chemicals simply having been delivered to Mars on a meteorite.