Amtrak trains traveling the Northeast Corridor, servicing major cities like New York, Boston, and Washington DC, are getting a $2.45 billion federal upgrade. But it won’t get you anywhere any faster. Read more…
Read this article:
America’s Railroads Are Too Busted for High Speed Trains
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Mars vehicle — the spaceship his company plans to build to transport the first colonists to Mars. It will have a diameter of 17 meters. The plan is to send about 100 people per trip, though Musk wants to ultimately take 200 or more per flight to make the cost cheaper per person. The trip can take as little as 80 days or as many as 150 depending on the year. The hope is that the transport time will be only 30 days “in the more distant future.” The rocket booster will have a diameter of 12 meters and the stack height will be 122 meters. The spaceship should hold a cargo of up to 450 tons depending on how many refills can be done with the tanker. As rumored, the Mars vehicle will be reusable and the spaceship will refuel in orbit. The trip will work like this: First, the spaceship will launch out of Pad 39A, which is under development right now at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At liftoff, the booster will have 127, 800 kilonewtons of thrust, or 28, 730, 000 pounds of thrust. Then, the spaceship and booster separate. The spaceship heads to orbit, while the booster heads back to Earth, coming back within about 20 minutes. Back on Earth, the booster lands on a launch mount and a propellant tanker is loaded onto the booster. The entire unit — now filled with fuel — lifts off again. It joins with the spaceship, which is then refueled in orbit. The propellant tankers will go up anywhere from three to five times to fill the tanks of the spaceship. The spaceship finally departs for Mars. To make the trip more attractive for its crew members, Musk promises that it’ll be “really fun” with zero-G games, movies, cabins, games, a restaurant. Once it reaches Mars, the vehicle will land on the surface, using its rocket engines to lower itself gently down to the ground. The spaceship’s passengers will use the vehicle, as well as cargo and hardware that’s already been shipped over to Mars, to set up a long-term colony. At the rate of 20 to 50 total Mars trips, it will take anywhere from 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization with one million people on Mars, says Musk. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
Elon Musk Proposes Spaceship That Can Send 100 People To Mars In 80 Days
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Quantum teleportation just moved out of the lab and into the real world, with two independent teams of scientists successfully sending quantum information across several kilometers of optical fiber networks in Calgary, Canada, and Hefei, China. Quantum teleportation relies on a strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Basically, quantum entanglement means that two particles are inextricably linked, so that measuring the state of one immediately affects the state of the other, no matter how far apart the two are — which led Einstein to call entanglement “spooky action at a distance.” In the latest experiments, both published in Nature Photonics (here and here), the teams had slightly different set-ups and results. But what they both had in common is the fact that they teleported their information across existing optical fiber networks — which is important if we ever want to build useable quantum communication systems. To understand the experiments, Anil Ananthaswamy over at New Scientist nicely breaks it down like this: picture three people involved — Alice, Bob, and Charlie. Alice and Bob want to share cryptographic keys, and to do that, they need Charlie’s help. Alice sends a particle to Charlie, while Bob entangles two particles and sends just one of them to Charlie. Charlie then measures the two particles he’s received from each of them, so that they can no longer be differentiated — and that results in the quantum state of Alice’s particle being transferred to Bob’s entangled particle. So basically, the quantum state of Alice’s particle eventually ends up in Bob’s particle, via a way station in the form of Charlie. The Canadian experiment followed this same process, and was able to send quantum information over 6.2 km of Calgary’s fiber optic network that’s not regularly in use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over 7km of Cable
Image: Daniel Mears via AP Images The Obama administration is trying to check as many policy boxes as it can on the way out of the door, and today it finally announced a flexible framework for companies and governments involved in developing self-driving cars. Read more…
Link:
The U.S. Government Finally Got Around To Publishing Self-Driving Car Guidelines
Reader Mysticalfruit writes: NPR is reporting that a Falcon9 carrying the AMOS-6 satellite that was supposed to launch on Sat exploded during it’s scheduled static fire. No injuries are reported. They’re reporting that this was going to be the first reflown first stage. The Verge adds:SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, meant to launch a satellite this weekend, exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida this morning. The explosion occurred during the preparation for the static fire test of the rocket’s engines, NASA told the Associated Press. The blast reportedly shook buildings “several miles away.” The company confirmed to The Verge the loss of the Falcon 9 an hour later: “SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today’s static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
Falcon 9 Explodes On Pad
After anticipating extra long airport security lines this year , the Transportation Security Administration has taken steps to fix the problem. Their latest solution involves adding new screening technology to Chicago (O’Hare), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and Miami. They’ll also include a pilot program in Phoenix. Read more…
Read the original:
Five Airports Are Set to Get Automated TSA Security Screening Lanes
Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland . But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting the neighboring nations of Sweden and Finland. Read more…
Read the article:
Hyperloop Connecting Helsinki and Stockholm Turns 300-Mile Trip Into 28 Minute Ride
Solar Roadways’ dreams of sunlight-gathering paths are one step closer to taking shape. Missouri’s Department of Transportation is aiming to install a test version of the startup’s solar road tiles in a sidewalk at the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center in Conway. Okay, it won’t be on Route 66 just yet, but that’s not the point — the goal is to see whether or not the technology is viable enough that it could safely be used on regular streets. You should see it in action toward the end of the year. The tiles will be familiar if you’ve followed Solar Roadways before. Each one combines a solar cell with LED lighting, a heating element and tempered glass that’s strong enough to support the weight of a semi-trailer truck. If successful, the panels will feed the electrical grid (ideally paying for themselves) and make the roads safer by both lighting the way as well as keeping the roads free of rain and snow. They should be easier to repair than asphalt, too, since you don’t need to take out whole patches of road to fix small cracks. Of course, “if successful” is the operative term here. The real litmus test comes if and when Solar Roadways subjects the tiles to the legions of cars traveling on Route 66 and beyond. Missouri has a strong incentive to make that happen, though. As the Transportation Department’s Tom Blair observes , it would be odd to push self-driving cars in the state’s Road to Tomorrow initiative when the streets aren’t as smart as the vehicles using them. Via: Inhabitat , CleanTechnica , The Verge Source: Kansas City Star , News Tribune
Continued here:
Solar road technology comes to Route 66
Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9, 000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160, 000 of 250, 000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. “I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society, ” said Browder. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.” Browder, who’s 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the original:
DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets — and Counting
An anonymous reader writes from a report via ScienceAlert: Physicists have confirmed the existence of pear-shaped nuclei, which challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. “We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, providing there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present, ” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News. Until recently, it was generally accepted that nuclei of atoms could only be one of three shapes: spherical, discus, or rugby ball. The first discovery of a pear-shaped nucleus was back in 2013, when physicists at CERN discovered isotope Radium-224. Now, that find has been confirmed by a second study, which shows that the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144 is also asymmetrical and pear-shaped. In regard to time travel, Scheck says that this uneven distribution of mass and charge caused Barium-144’s nucleus to “point” in a certain direction in spacetime, and this bias could explain why time seems to only want to go from past to present, and not backwards, even if the laws of physics don’t care which way it goes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View article:
Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever