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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 7 declined, 4 accepted (11 total, 36.36% accepted)

Submission + - China builds Thorium reactor based on abandoned US design (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by xanthos
xanthos writes: China has built an experimental 2 MW working thorium reactor in the Gobi desert using declassified US documents from the early 60's.

Thorium Salt reactors are safer (think lava vs explosive steam), less radioactive, and the scientists involved were able to refuel the reactor without having to shut it down. A 10 MW unit is expected to be online by 2030.

Submission + - Boeing delays Starliner launch ... again (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by xanthos
xanthos writes:

A Boeing official said Thursday that the company was "standing down" from an attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft on July 21 to focus on recently discovered issues with the vehicle. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Starliner, said two spacecraft problems were discovered before Memorial Day weekend and that the company spent the holiday investigating them. After internal discussions that included Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun, the company decided to delay the test flight that would carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station.

TLDR; the parachute cords might not be strong enough and the tape that holds down all the wiring harnesses might go up in flames. Manned flight score: SpaceX 9 — Boeing 0

Submission + - Zero Day found in Universal Turing Machine (CVE-2021-32471) (theregister.com)

Submitted by xanthos
xanthos writes: Our friends over at The Register are reporting a zero day vulnerability for one of the earliest modern computer architectures.
Pontus Johnson, a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, has published what amounts to a sql injection attack on the 1967 implementation of the simulated Universal Turing Machine (UTM) designed by the late Marvin Minsky. The exploit allow an arbitrary program to be run in place of the intended one. It has been dutifully documented as CVE-2021-32471. At this time there is no patch or workaround.

Submission + - The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by xanthos
xanthos writes: A fascinating article in Quanta magazine introduces us to Cohl Furey and the eight dimensional mathematics called octonions that she is using to model the interactions of strong and electromagnetic forces.

"... reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these “division algebras” would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe?"

"In her most recent published paper she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model symmetry group for a single generation of particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units — essentially, because whole numbers are"
Space

Submission + - Space vehicle unveiled at EAA (jsonline.com) 1

Submitted by
xanthos
xanthos writes: "Sir Richard Branson was at the annual Experimental Aircraft Assoc Fly-in to show off EVE (previously known as White Knight Two), the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic's commercial space operation. Test flights for SpaceShipTwo are slated for next year with the first paying passenger's going up in 2011.

What surprised me was the following from the article:

"So many people have signed up already, Whitehorn said, that the company has collected $40 million in deposits with orders to build five spaceships to meet the demand."

Will this mean that the $200k price tag may be dropping?"

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