If somebody doesn’t find that rhino birth scene funny, we can’t be friends. I still shake violently watching that.

Similar, yeah. More modern construction and side-by-side seating instead of tandem. But otherwise, similar size and weight.

Good to know; first time I’ve come across this website.

Ha, why was this downvoted? Sketchy website “reports” proprietary Chinese research firm’s accomplishment by rehashing the firm’s press release about an unbelievable claim with no other evidence. This got more red flags than the beach before a hurricane.

At best, this is something they actually did approximate in some kind of lab setting that might be years and years away from being some kind of marketable product.

The (translated) press release even has a stench all on its own:

It is expected to fundamentally solve the battery life and safety anxiety of traditional lithium-ion batteries.

If it can give hugs too, you basically got a whole gramma there.

Excellent. Didn’t know about this one. I’ve been diving into conservas a lot lately with some diet changes, so this is super.

It improves the waste issue, doesn’t really solve it. A dirty, little-discussed secret about fusion power.

If we had a bunch of fusion plants go live, we’d soon have tons and tons of radioactive containment wall material to bury/store somewhere. Including all the special handling requirements that you need with fuel rod waste. I think fusion plants would actually create more waste than a comparable fission plant, at least as far as tons of radioactive material.

The benefit is that waste would be lighter isotopes and degrade faster. So you have more physical material to worry about but only need to worry about it for ~100 years, not thousands.

AI is the new crypto. Idiots will be fleeced. Schemes will be hatched. Vaporware will vape.

In 2-5 years there will likely be some Intel- or Google-like companies with big controlling stakes in AI. Investing in the them then will likely be a good idea. Trying to figure out now which of the 61,000 AI startups will become them, and hoping to win the lottery in the process, is a fool’s game.

Also a non-zero chance that AI itself is all vaporware and the “industry” fizzles out completely.

In 2016, aerospace giant Northrop Grumman invited me and 14 other professors and NASA scientists—all experts on exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life—to Los Angeles to answer one question: What will exoplanet space telescopes look like in 50 years?

In our discussions, we realized that a major bottleneck preventing the construction of more powerful telescopes is the challenge of making larger mirrors and getting them into orbit. To bypass this bottleneck, a few of us came up with the idea of revisiting an old technology called diffractive lenses.

Color me skeptical of this story. The author no doubt believes it.

But the fact that this was organized and sponsored by NG makes me skeptical of this take. Maybe it’s less scientists innovating and inventing and more an NSA/NRO-approved, NG-led, soft disclosure of technology that already exists. The scientists are likely reinventing the wheel after getting a nugget of an idea seeded by NG.

Civilian optical space telescopes lag far behind spy ones. Literally decades.

KH-11 is much, much older than Hubble.

Some improved KH-11s were deemed unnecessary or out-of-date and gifted to NASA. Never flown, still in a warehouse somewhere.

I have strong suspicions that Webb’s folding mirror system wasn’t exactly new and novel either. Probably just a refinment of something NRO and Ball Aerospace worked out many years prior. No hard evidence for that, however.

Anyway, long-winded way of saying there’s a decent chance these guys are trying to figure out something that’s already floating around up there and maybe already 5-10 years old or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches#Launch_history?wprov=sfla1