Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 584
June 26, 2021
Rasgo, a GitHub-like repository which helps data scientists explore, clean, join, and transform data sets for machine learning models, raises $20M Series A (AlleyWatch)
The post Rasgo, a GitHub-like repository which helps data scientists explore, clean, join, and transform data sets for machine learning models, raises $20M Series A (AlleyWatch) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
FCC filing shows Verizon has built a smart display powered by Amazon’s Alexa,
According to a Friday filing with the Federal Communications Commission (first discovered by Protocol), Verizon is preparing to launch a smart display device based on the Alexa voice assistant. The FCC filing shows a basic-looking device that resembles an Amazon Echo, with an 8-inch display and front-facing camera, and the specs show it has 4GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, Bluetooth, wi-fi and 4G connectivity.
It’s not clear from the filing what the user interface will look like on its screen but the device, referred to as LVD1, will “wake” when users speak the phrase “Hi Verizon” to it. That would seem to confirm, as Protocol notes, that the device is part of Amazon’s Alexa Custom Assistant program, which allows companies to build their own versions of Alexa for their branded devices. building Alexa skills specific to certain devices.
A user manual included in the FCC filing indicates the device supports the BlueJeans videoconferencing platform that Verizon acquired last April, which would be a logical use for it. At the time of the acquisition, Verizon said in a statement that “BlueJeans will be deeply integrated into Verizon’s 5G product roadmap, providing secure and real-time engagement solutions for high growth areas such as telemedicine, distance learning and field service work.”
Verizon didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment Saturday.
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On This Day in Space! June 26, 1954: NACA research station moves to new base, ,
On June 26, 1954, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – basically pre-1958 NASA– moved their headquarters to a brand new facility at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Edwards Air Force Base: History & Missions
More than 200 employees moved to what they called the High-Speed Flight Station. Before the big move, they were cramped inside a small hangar in Edwards’ South Base.
But the new location provided a fully functional research facility where a lot of early rocket tests went down. And it housed the X-1 program that created the first supersonic jets.
Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.
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Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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Watch Day 3 of National Space Society’s ISDC 2021 conference live today, ,
Editor’s note: Day 3 of the International Space Development Conference 2021 begins at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) and runs through 6 p.m. EDT (200 GMT).
The National Space Society (NSS) will hold its flagship annual event virtually this year, starting on Thursday (June 24) — and you can watch most of it live, for free.
The International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will include four days of speakers focusing on space exploration, development and settlement. The first three days (Thursday, June 24 to Saturday, June 26) will air for free starting at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) each day here at Space.com, at e360tv.com, on the NSS Facebook page, and on the NSS YouTube channel.
This year marks a pivot for the ISDC to a virtual format, since last year’s in-person conference was canceled due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the NSS predicts there may be as many as 50,000 attendees across the four days. Representatives say the conference will be more of a multimedia experience than the usual talking heads you see on video conference calls.
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
“What’s really cool about ISDC in general, even when we do it live, is we make sure that there’s things there for all the students and for people who have a strong interest in space,” Aggie Koberin, founder and director of CEC Global Events and one of the organizers for ISDC 2021, told Space.com.
She added that the event is designed to be accessible for beginners to the space field, as well as experts. “You don’t have to be in a space community to really appreciate it,” she said, “but there’s enough in there for people who really are in the industry as well.”
You can see the full schedule, and also register and pay for the fourth day of presentations, at the conference website. The theme of ISDC 2021 will be the ongoing efforts by NASA, other space agencies and private companies to bring humans back to the moon, with the hopes of continuing to Mars in the coming decades. But the event will also feature discussions focused on matters such as space education, space solar power, international space participation and other solar system destinations like Jupiter.
Some of the more than 100 conference speakers include:
Peggy Whitson , a retired NASA long-duration astronaut who was recently named to command a private orbital mission from Axiom Space; Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX; Janet Ivey, president of Explore Mars; Jim Green, chief scientist at NASA; Jeffrey Manber, CEO of NanoRacks that hosts science experiments on the International Space Station; and Michelle Hanlon, president of the National Space Society.“After the [pandemic] year we’ve had, what struck me as being the most remarkable was the fact that the speakers would make time for us,” Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of the “Ad Astra” magazine published by NSS, told Space.com.
The NSS also plans to rebroadcast the conference in about two weeks for time zones on the other side of the world, particularly tailored to Indian and eastern European representatives. The conference rebroadcast will start daily at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) and more schedule details will be released on the ISDC website and social media.
Next year’s ISDC in May 2022 is expected to occur in person in Arlington, Virginia, pending the progress of international vaccination campaigns.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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China is readying Shenzhou 13 spacecraft in case of space station emergency, ,
China may have successfully sent its first astronauts to its new space station module this month, but back on the ground authorities are still readying a new rocket in case of emergency.
Three Chinese astronauts launched to Tianhe, the country’s first space station module, on the Shenzhou 12 mission on June 17. They rode to space on a Long March 2F and docked with Tianhe just over 6 hours after liftoff. The crew, consisting of astronauts Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, entered the module shortly after.
Now, engineers back at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert are preparing another Long March 2F rocket and the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft for the China National Space Administration. The pair are to be ready on the pad for a rapid launch in the event of an emergency.
Video: Watch China’s 1st space station crew enter Tianhe module
“Shenzhou 12 is docked on the space station. Because of space debris or various reasons, the Shenzhou 12 spacecraft may be at risk when it returns. Then we could launch Shenzhou 13 in the shortest time,” Shao Limin, deputy technological manager of the Shenzhou 12 spacecraft, told China’s CCTV media.
“The astronauts would be able to return to the ground on Shenzhou 13. In that case, it can be used as the emergency rescue ship for Shenzhou 12.”
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The crew of China’s Shenzhou 12 mission salute for a photo inside the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station after successfully docking at the module on June 17, 2021. (Image credit: CMSE)The emergency planning is reminiscent of the NASA “Launch On Need” missions planned to rescue space shuttle crews if their vehicles had suffered damage in orbit.
Tianhe provides living quarters for the crew and propulsion for the space station. It has a rear docking port and a forward docking hub that will allow two more modules to connect and other spacecraft to visit.
That means, unlike China’s two earlier Tiangong space labs, a second Shenzhou spacecraft can dock with Tianhe to perform a rescue mission.
Related: The latest news about China’s space program
Engineers have also upgraded the Shenzhou spacecraft, which had a first test flight in 1999, to have a longer service life. This allows the spacecraft to be docked at the space station for longer to facilitate regular, six-month-long crewed missions.
The Shenhou 12 mission is planned to last three months, during which the astronauts will conduct two extravehicular activities, or space walks, begin using a 33-foot-long (10 meters) robotic arm and test new regenerative life support systems.
If there are no emergencies, Shenzhou 13 will launch as planned around October. Tianzhou 3, a supply mission, is expected to fly in September in preparation for the arrival of the new crew. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) says Shenzhou 13 will be a six-month mission. Shenzhou 14 will likewise be readied as an emergency rescue for Shenzhou 13.
China is planning 6 launches in 2022 to complete the three-module Chinese space station. Two experiment modules, Wentian and Mengtian, will launch next year along with two more crewed spacecraft, Shenzhou 14 and 15, and the Tianzhou 4 and 5 cargo missions.
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Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
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Mysterious flashes of radio light come in two ‘flavors,’ new survey finds, ,
Every two minutes, a mysterious flash of radio light explodes somewhere in the sky and fades back into darkness within a matter of milliseconds. Astronomers first noticed the bursts in data archived from 2007 and have spent the decade or so since carefully stockpiling examples of the fast radio bursts, or FRBs, looking for patterns that might reveal their origins. Now, they have a whopping 500 new bursts to study.
On June 9, an international research collaboration released the first FRB catalog from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in British Columbia, more than tripling the number of known FRBs in a single day. The new dataset lends strong support to the notion that two distinct types of FRBs dot the radio sky, and it foreshadows a future where astronomers leverage FRBs to illuminate the most distant reaches of the universe.
“This represents a new phase in FRB science,” Kiyoshi Masui, an Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist and representative of the CHIME collaboration, said at a news briefing.
Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe
An FRB-finding machineCHIME was not initially designed to become the world’s leading FRB hunter. Astronomers originally planned the machine to use the jitters of dim hydrogen atoms to chart the cosmos’s matter out to unprecedented distances. But after the Canadian government funded the $9 million machine, researchers realized it was perfectly suited to solving the emerging mystery of FRBs.
The sky flashes with FRBs all the time — about 880 times a day, according to the CHIME collaboration’s new results. But unless astronomers happen to have a large radio dish trained on exactly the right random point in the sky at exactly the right moment, a burst will go unseen.
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CHIME, however, has a cosmic perspective. The telescope’s broad receivers (more half-pipes than dishes) pick up radio waves from much of the sky overhead at once, and Earth’s rotation points it in different directions. A $4.5 million supercomputing cluster dedicated to FRB hunting, added part-way through the design process, digitally focuses the telescope on thousands of points at once.
Previously, researchers tended to analyze FRBs on a case-by-case basis. The catalog now opens the door to studying bunches of FRBs at once, “transforming this whole field into big data science,” Mohit Bhardwaj, a CHIME collaboration member from McGill University in Montreal, said at the news briefing.
Patterns in the randomnessMost astrophysicists think FRBs emanate from magnetars, which are one of the weirdest things a star can become when it dies. Magnetars are highly magnetized versions of the stellar corpses known as neutron stars, making them some of the densest and most magnetic objects in the universe. Only a body packing so much mass and magnetic intensity into such a small package could be powerful and nimble enough to beam out the brief bursts, theorists have reasoned. Then in 2020, CHIME caught a magnetar mid-burst in our own galaxy. Still, exactly how magnetars are churning out radio waves is anyone’s guess.
Related: The 15 weirdest galaxies in our universe
“There are a plethora of theories, but nothing that tells us which ones could be right and which could be wrong,” Masui said.
The CHIME catalog all but confirms a long-held suspicion: Not all FRBs are alike. Astronomers have identified a small minority of FRBs that occur repeatedly from the same spot in the sky, dubbed “repeaters.” Of the 535 newly revealed bursts, 61 flashes came from 18 repeat offenders.
The astronomers also found that repeaters look intrinsically different from one-off bursts. One-time FRBs are brief and tend to shine with a rainbow of radio waves, while repeat bursts linger and tend to show up as a single radio hue. The distinction hints that magnetars could have at least two different ways of spitting out radio waves.
Across the universeRegardless of what’s causing FRBs or how, researchers are already thinking about how to put the flashes in the dark to work. The hundreds of bursts seem to be coming from all directions, as opposed to, say, aligning with the Milky Way, That’s a sign that the cosmic lighthouses emitting them are scattered across the cosmos, with many coming from hundreds of millions to billions of light-years away.
CHIME also picks up a quality of FRBs called dispersion, a measure of how the radio frequencies of a burst have spread out as its photons travel between galaxies. This separation grows as FRB photons plow through the thin plasma that fills space (like white light separates into a rainbow as it passes through a prism). In this dispersion, each FRB records how much matter it encountered on its journey, much as a car’s tires carry a history of the roads they have traveled.
As CHIME’s FRB catalog grows, astronomers hope they will be able to use it to create a map of the cosmos’s matter on the largest scales.
“We think that [FRBs] are going to be the ultimate tool for studying the universe,” Masui said.
Originally published on Live Science.
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Barbarella will launch on wild space adventures in new Dynamite comic series, ,
The 1968 psychedelic space opera, “Barbarella,” was best known for a scantily-clad Jane Fonda in the starring role. It’s the perfect example of excessive, Euro-style sci-fi flicks of the decade, produced by the legendary Dino De Laurentiis and directed by Fonda’s husband, Roger Vadim.
“Barbarella” was adapted from a popular French comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest, with this sexy cult movie chronicling the exploits of a sultry 41st-century space agent and her mission to rescue a villainous scientist named Dr. Durand Durand.
Now the sensual siren of space is returning to comic book form this summer with Dynamite Entertainment’s “Barbarella” reboot as she embarks on all new cosmic adventures.
Related: The space race takes a bizarre twist in new sci-fi series ‘Primordial’
Written by award-winning sci-fi and fantasy novelist Sarah Hoyt (“Darkship Thieves“) in her first venture into comics, the title’s creative team includes rising star artist Madibek Musabekov (“Vampirella vs Purgatori”), colorist Ivan Nunes, and letterer Carlos Mangual.
“Barbarella #1” arrives in July and embarks on a mission fraught with danger, duplicity, and a solid dose of romance as she blasts through a constellation of exotic locales.
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Barbarella #1 e-book from ComiXology: (pre-order) $3.99 at Amazon
Dynamite Entertainment reboots the 1960s space heroine in a new comics series launching July 21.View Deal
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“Barbarella” is back in space for sci-fi action in Dynamite Entertainment’s new series launching July 21, 2021. (Image credit: Dynamite Entertainment)Image 2 of 5[image error]
“Barbarella” is back in space for sci-fi action in Dynamite Entertainment’s new series launching July 21, 2021. (Image credit: Dynamite Entertainment)Image 3 of 5[image error]
“Barbarella” is back in space for sci-fi action in Dynamite Entertainment’s new series launching July 21, 2021. (Image credit: Dynamite Entertainment)Image 4 of 5[image error]
“Barbarella” is back in space for sci-fi action in Dynamite Entertainment’s new series launching July 21, 2021. (Image credit: Dynamite Entertainment)Image 5 of 5[image error]
“Barbarella” is back in space for sci-fi action in Dynamite Entertainment’s new series launching July 21, 2021. (Image credit: Dynamite Entertainment)The storyline tale begins in Camelot, home to the elite class seeking refuge from a crowded and decaying galactic empire. Intercepting a series of dire transmissions from the poor underclass, Barbarella zooms off in her shiny new AI-equipped spaceship to investigate and starts to unravel a string of dark secrets. Along the way she’ll make stops at the underwater world of Encantado and the carnival-like playground of Rio.
“Writing the Barbarella stories was more fun than is probably legal in most states,” writer Sarah Hoyt said in a statement. “The work of learning a new format was overshadowed by the fun of being able to think big and play with someone else’s no-holds-barred character. I’ve also loved the art I’ve seen so far from Madibek!”
Legendary artist Brian Bolland (“Batman: The Killing Joke“) joins Musabekov, Lucio Parrillo, Derrick Chew, Dani, and cosplayer Rachel Hollon in offering an evocative set of variant covers.
Dynamite Entertainment’s “Barbarella #1” lands in comic shops on July 21.
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Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
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Analysis finds thousands of videos of Uyghurs denying abuses against their community on Twitter and YouTube as part of an elaborate Chinese influence campaign (ProPublica)
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June 25, 2021
New research: estimates of Internet’s energy consumption are exaggerated and throttling data consumption like lowering Netflix resolution does not yield much (Steve Lohr/New York Times)
The post New research: estimates of Internet’s energy consumption are exaggerated and throttling data consumption like lowering Netflix resolution does not yield much (Steve Lohr/New York Times) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
AlayaCare, which develops software for scheduling, clinical documentation, and billing for home and community healthcare providers, raises $225M CAD Series D (Josh Scott/BetaKit)
The post AlayaCare, which develops software for scheduling, clinical documentation, and billing for home and community healthcare providers, raises $225M CAD Series D (Josh Scott/BetaKit) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
