Ahmed estimates that eliminating all the turbopump machinery could reduce a rocket’s weight by around 30%. It’d also make the engine far less complicated and more fuel-efficient than a conventional one.
Month: May 2020
Microsporidia kills Malaria
Researchers are investigating 2 main strategies for increasing the number of infected mosquitoes. Microsporidia form spores which could be released en masse to infect mosquitoes Male mosquitoes (which don’t bite) could be infected in the lab and released into the wild to infect the females when they have sex
GPU price per FLOPS
in recent years, GPU prices have fallen at rates that would yield an order of magnitude over roughly:
17 years for single-precision FLOPS
10 years for half-precision FLOPS
5 years for half-precision fused multiply-add FLOPS
Jukebox
We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.
Dead drop drugs
Most Russian drug dealers don’t hand off drugs anymore—they stash them in geotagged hiding spots ready for pickup by online buyers.
Solar System Black Hole
A possible alternative is to probe the gravitational field of this object using small, laser-launched spacecraft, like the ones envisioned in the Breakthrough Starshot project. With a velocity of 0.001c, such spacecraft can reach Planet 9 10 years after launch and can discover it if they can report timing measurements accurate to 10^-5 seconds back to Earth.
Lunar
Motion Designer Christian worked with his brother and Composer Wolfgang for 18 months on this
Eel video chat
Concerned that the garden eels – so named because their grass-like appearance when, en masse, they poke their heads out of the seabed – could come to see visitors as a threat, the aquarium is asking people to get in touch in the form of a calming video calls.
Social distancing hats
The hats were all designed and made by the students themselves upon their return to school this week. Made of cardboard, balloons, and other materials, they create a 1-meter buffer zone around each of the first to third graders.
77% Common Sense
77.5% of the novel responses generated by COMET were deemed “plausible” by human evaluators. That’s less than 10% shy of human-level performance.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 