176924989
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
Russian scientists and designers have developed a rocket engine based on a magnetoplasma gas pedal and created a laboratory prototype of the unit. The engine will run on hydrogen. It will be able to accelerate particles — charged electrons and protons — to a speed of 100 km/s. Ships equipped with such propulsion systems will be able to reach the far corners of the solar system and go beyond it in a reasonable time, and flights to Mars will take one or two months.
The plasma engine, developed by scientists at Rosatom’s Troitsk Institute, differs fundamentally from traditional chemical rockets. Instead of relying on combustion to generate thrust, the engine uses electromagnetic fields to accelerate charged hydrogen ions to speeds of 100 km/s (360,000 km/h).
172115443
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term.
Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk.
Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles.
But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024
171525208
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
You've probably heard about SpaceX's plans to use its giant new Starship vehicle to land people on the Moon and Mars, send numerous Starlink satellites or large telescopes into space, or perhaps even serve as a high-speed point-to-point terrestrial transport for equipment or people.
There's another application for SpaceX's Starship architecture that the company is studying, and NASA is on board to lend expertise. Though still in a nascent phase of tech development, the effort could result in repurposing Starship into a commercial space station, something NASA has a keen interest in because there are no plans for a government-owned research lab in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned after 2030.
171383161
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do.
AlmaLinux announced a few minutes ago:
"After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.
We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community’s needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux."
AlmaLinux will be evaluating what other options they may have now that they aren't sticking to 1:1 rebuild of RHEL. AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.
171342487
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
SpaceX will test the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening when it launches a booster on a record-breaking 16th flight.
The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA ‘worm’ logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea’s Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.
Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.
“We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15,” Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.
168550488
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from Syngenta Jealott's Hill International Research Centre in the U.K., has developed a way to synthesize cocaine using a tobacco plant. The group describes how they synthesized the notorious drug and possible uses for their process in their paper published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.
37665693
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
Christopher Stringer is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists. He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or "Out of Africa". He now calls the theory into question: "I'm thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the "Out of Africa" model, and also looking back into Africa itself. I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I've come around to thinking that it wasn't a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa. There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species. Now I don’t think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa."
