Like Han Solo, spaceship pilot Alex Kamal (played by Cas Anvar) has a complicated past in “The Expanse,” which has its TV premiere on Syfy tonight. (Photo by: Rafy/Syfy)
While you’re waiting for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” to invade theaters this week, you can tune in a couple of other star wars on TV – with settings and themes that hit much closer to home than the goings-on in a galaxy far, far away.
Starting tonight, the Syfy channel is bringing two classic science-fiction sagas to the small screen: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End,” a novel about space aliens that was written before dawn of the Space Age; and “The Expanse,” a series of future-looking novels and short stories by James S.A. Corey (the pen name for collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
The Parrot Bebop drone, weighing in at 14.6 ounces, would have to be registered under the FAA’s newly issued rules. (Credit: Parrot)
The Federal Aviation Administration has laid out the rules for registering recreational drones, starting Dec. 21, plus the penalties for those who don’t.
It’s not likely that drone police will be watching the skies, but if your unregistered drone gets into trouble, you could get into trouble as well: You’ll be required to have a registration certificate when you fly your drone outdoors, and the drone will have to be marked with a registration number.
Failure to do so could leave you open to civil penalties of up to $27,500, or criminal penalties including fines of up to $250,000 and three years in prison.
“Make no mistake: Unmanned aircraft enthusiasts are aviators, and with that title comes a great deal of responsibility,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a news release. “Registration gives us an opportunity to work with these users to operate their unmanned aircraft safely. I’m excited to welcome these new aviators into the culture of safety and responsibility that defines American innovation.”
A Geminid meteor makes an impression in an all-sky photo captured in 2011. (Credit: NASA)
The most reliable meteor shower of the year reaches its peak tonight – but to catch the Geminids, you’ll have to find a patch of clear, dark sky.
That’s difficult to do in the Seattle area. There’s a glimmer of hope, however: Theweather outlook improves as Sunday night turns into Monday morning, and it gets a lot better by Monday night. With any luck, there’ll still be some Geminids to see. So let’s assume you do find clear skies sometime in the next couple of days.
The Geminids appear every year from Dec. 4 to 17. They peak on Dec. 13-14, when Earth passes right through the trail of cosmic grit and pebbles left behind by an asteroid or burned-out comet called 3200 Phaeton. When those bits of debris pass through the upper atmosphere, they leave bright meteoric trails behind.
This year is a good one because the crescent moon makes an early exit, leaving a nice glare-less sky to look up into. Under peak conditions, you could see as many as 100 meteors per hour, including showy fireballs.
General Fusion’s Brendan Cassidy shows off a test reactor in Burnaby, B.C. (Photo by Alan Boyle)
It’s not clear when fusion power will pay off, but there’s a way to earn a cool $20,000 in fusion research. And you don’t even have to be a plasma physicist or an energy entrepreneur.
All you have to do is make perfect sense out of the data generated by the plasma experiments being conducted by General Fusion in Burnaby, B.C.
“The challenge is basically to come up with a metric for predicting the performance of a plasma shot,” Brendan Cassidy, the company’s crowdsourcing project leader, told GeekWire.
General Fusion is a private venture that’s attracted tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, including investments from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Over the past five years or so, the company has conducted about 100,000 experiments. Those experiments, or shots, involve injecting blobs of super-heated hydrogen gas into plasma chambers and studying how they behave. A single shot lasts somewhere around a thousandth of a second.
“Our shot data includes signals from nearly 100 probes measuring things like magnetic field strength, plasma density and the spectral composition of plasma light,” Cassidy explained in a blog post outlining the challenge. “There are also configuration settings for each shot, and calculated single point, or scalar, metrics.”
The quality of the plasma varies from shot to shot, and General Fusion’s researchers don’t fully understand why. It’d be nice to distill the shot data into algorithms that predict which settings will produce the best shots.
Toward that end, hundreds of gigabytes of data from previous shots are being made available for a challenge titled “Data-Driven Prediction of Plasma Performance.” After signing up, competitors can download the data, look for correlations and patterns, devise their algorithms and send them in for evaluation by March 9.
This enhanced color mosaic combines image data from two cameras on NASA’s New Horizons probe. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
The Pluto pictures from NASA’s New Horizons probe just keep getting better and better: Feast your eyes on this colorized view of the border between the towering al-Idrisi mountains made of water ice, and the rippled nitrogen-rich plains of Sputnik Planum.
The view combines high-resolution black-and-white imagery from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI; and lower-resolution color data from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera, or MVIC.
The two sets of images were taken about 25 minutes apart on July 14, while the piano-sized probe zoomed within 10,000 miles of the dwarf planet’s surface. Check out the full-size mosaic.
DJI says the thermal-imaging Zenmuse XT camera can go on its Inspire 1 and Matrice M100 drones.
One of the world’s best-known drone manufacturers, DJI, has partnered with one of the world’s best-known infrared imaging companies, FLIR Systems, to create thermal-imaging cameras for aerial vehicles.
But don’t expect to take your DJI Phantom out for night-vision flights anytime soon: These cameras are designed for higher-end drones and specialized applications. And besides, the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t cleared drones for routine nighttime flying.
he cameras coming out of the collaboration between China-based DJI and Oregon-based FLIR are more likely to be used during the day – for example, to help firefighters see through smoke, to help farmers monitor crop health from above, or to assist in search-and-rescue operations. Infrared imaging is particularly well-suited for those applications, day or night.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren makes his first call home after descending to Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft today. (Credit: NASA TV)
It took some doing, but three crew members from the International Space Station returned to Earth today and are on their way home in time for Christmas.
NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Russia’s Oleg Kononenko and Japan’s Kimiya Yui touched down on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule at 7:12 p.m. local time (5:12 a.m. PT), marking the first time since 2012 that a space station crew came down after dark. It’s the sixth night landing for the Soyuz in the 15 years since astronauts started living on the station.
The shift to an after-dark landing was made to accommodate the Dec. 21 launch of an upgraded Progress supply ship.
The winter weather in Kazakhstan brought further complications.
An artist’s conception shows the dwarf planet Eris. Astronomers say an even larger world may exist on the solar system’s edge. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Caltech)
An array of radio telescopes in Chile has picked up weird readings that appear to be coming from far-out objects – and that’s sparked a debate over whether they’re previously undetected worlds on the edge of our solar system, brown dwarfs, or just random glitches.
Readings from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, have led to the posting of at least two research papers on the arXiv pre-print server. Historically, some of the studies that scientists post to arXiv go on to make a splash, while others fizzle out.
Could it be yet another star associated with Alpha Centauri? The researchers rule out that scenario on the grounds that it hasn’t been seen before in other wavelengths.
This illustration gives a sense of how characters from alphabets around the world were replicated through human vs. machine learning. (Credit: Danqing Wang)
Researchers say they’ve developed an algorithm that can teach a new concept to a computer using just one example, rather than the thousands of examples that are traditionally required for machine learning.
The algorithm takes advantage of a probabilistic approach the researchers call “Bayesian Program Learning,” or BPL. Essentially, the computer generates its own additional examples, and then determines which ones fit the pattern best.
The researchers behind BPL say they’re trying to reproduce the way humans catch on to a new task after seeing it done once – whether it’s a child recognizing a horse, or a mechanic replacing a head gasket.
“The gap between machine learning and human learning capacities remains vast,” said MIT’s Joshua Tenenbaum, one of the authors of a research paper published today in the journal Science. “We want to close that gap, and that’s the long-term goal.”
Employees at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., cheer as they watch the landing of the company’s New Shepard test spaceship on Nov. 23. “How do we steal that video?” Lt. Gov. Brad Owen joked after watching a clip showing the celebration. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Washington state legislators got an introduction to the state’s space industry today at Seattle’s Museum of Flight – and voiced amazement at how much is going on.
“I feel so illiterate in this field, it’s unbelievable,” state Sen. Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, remarked at one point during today’s meeting of the Legislative Committee on Economic Development and International Relations. Afterward, Hewitt said he knew “100 percent” more about the field than he did at the start of the hearing.
State Sen. Maralyn Chase, D-Shoreline, marveled when she heard Aerojet Rocketdyne executive Roger Myers list all the missions his company in which his company has played a part, ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon, to the space shuttle program, to robotic missions that have visited every planet (yes, including Pluto).
“I would wager that most of the people in this state do not know what you’re doing in Redmond,” Chase told Myers.
That was the point of today’s hearing, presided over by Lt. Gov. Brad Owen: to let legislators know that there’s much more than Boeing to the state’s profile in the aerospace industry.
