The Quest to Build a Telescope on the Moon
“He led me to a provisional-looking conference room—the company hadn’t had a chance to renovate yet—and uncapped a dry-erase marker. Then, on a whiteboard, he drew a large circle, to represent the moon. Inside the circle, he drew a small square, which represented about two hundred square kilometres of the lunar surface. This was the potential site of the FarView radio-telescope array. Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, Carol drew a big square filled with dots. Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.” (The New Yorker)
A weekly dispatch featuring exclusive interviews with deep tech founders & a roundup of the most important deep tech news.
- AI revives ‘zombie’ nuclear plants
- The quantum computing arms race is accelerating
- NASA confirms space station cracking a “highest” risk and consequence problem
- IBM opens its quantum-computing stack to third parties
- CERN to expel hundreds of Russian scientists
- Milan startup opens world-first production facility for glass-based quantum photonic chips
- An ultrathin graphene brain implant was just tested in a person
- Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes – a world first
- Satellite images suggest test of Russian “super weapon” failed spectacularly
- ‘World’s first’ fully autonomous underwater robot is piloted by AI
- Deep Blue Aerospace hop test suffers anomaly moments before landing.
- Geoengineering wins reluctant interest from scientists as Earth’s climate unravels.
- Radian Aerospace completes ground tests of prototype space plane
For the first time, Blue Origin has ignited an orbital rocket stage. Twenty days after it rolled out to Blue Origin’s launch site in Florida, the second stage of the massive New Glenn rocket underwent a successful hot-fire test on Monday. The second stage—known as GS2 for Glenn stage 2—ignited for 15 seconds as part of the “risk reduction” hot-fire test, the company said. The two BE-3U engines, fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen and each producing 173,000 pounds of thrust, burned with a nearly transparent flame that approached a temperature of 6,000° Fahrenheit. This marked the first time that Blue Origin, a space company founded by Jeff Bezos more than two decades ago, has integrated and fired an orbital rocket stage. After the test, Blue Origin said it is still tracking toward a November launch of the New Glenn rocket. (via Ars Technica)
- Manganese cathodes could boost lithium-ion batteries
- Quantum entanglement in quarks observed for the first time
- Balloon mission tests quantum sensor technology
- An edible toothpaste-based transistor
- Scientists nuke an asteroid in a lab mock-up
- New evidence shows heat destroys quantum entanglement
- AI models let robots carry out tasks in unfamiliar environments
- AI for drug discovery: DrugSynthMC to make finding new medication more efficient
- Human urine could be used as eco-friendly crop fertilizer
- Advanced civilizations will overheat their planets within 1,000 years, researchers suggest
- Research explores organic semiconductor materials for sustainable temperature sensors
- Longshot Space closes over $5M in new funding to build space gun in the desert
- Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery technology company, faces $1B valuation drop in latest funding round
- US finalizes first binding chips award with Polar Semiconductor
- Vicebio raises $100M for next-gen vaccines for respiratory viruses
- VC investment in European defence tech to hit record $1B in 2024, report finds
- Lightspeed leads $65M round for Qure.AI, an AI diagnostics firm
- The 25 battery tech startups that just got a piece of $3B in federal funds
- Black Forest Labs, the company that powers Grok’s image generation, is raising another $100M on a $1B valuation
- Pyka, a startup building electric autonomous planes, raised a $40M Series B
- Cyclic Materials, a recycling startup for rare earth elements, raised a $53M Series B
- Marvel Fusion, a startup building laser-powered fusion reactors, raised a $70M Series B
VCs and founders air their concerns about defence tech’s future / ‘We are embarrassed’: Scientific rigor proponents retract paper on benefits of scientific rigor / New shark species named for late Microsoft co-founder / Mathematicians define new class of shape seen throughout nature / Mental-1, a Brainfuck CPU / Several people detained in Switzerland over death in a ‘suicide capsule’ / Bruce Schneier: Israel’s Pager Attacks Have Changed the World / Tetris shows promise in reducing PTSD symptoms / Deep space radio signal reaches Earth after 8B years / Patients Are Turning to Vibrators to Relieve Their Migraines / Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won’t Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030 / Why the U.S. can’t build icebreaking ships / Libgen must pay publishers $30M, but no one knows who runs it / Jockey Can’t Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery in $100k Exoskeleton / Pilots Are Dying of Tiredness. Tech Can’t Save Them / Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe / Google Paid $2.7 Billion To Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration / Electronic Warfare Spooks Airlines, Pilots and Air-Safety Officials / Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect / A Mysterious School for the Network State Crowd Is Now in Session / US moves to block all Chinese auto imports through software crackdown / Could We Turn the Sun Into an Extremely Powerful Telescope? / Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX, alleges “invasion” of land on US/Mexico border / Could Artificial Intelligence Help Us Talk to Animals? / Tennessee Bans Geoengineering, & Other Tales From The Far Right / Climate Migrants Stand to Overwhelm World’s Megacities / The genetic secrets of the United States’s privately owned tigers / First polar bear spotted in Iceland since 2016 is shot dead by police / Graphene at 20: Still no sign of the promised space elevator, but the material is quietly changing the world / Could monkeys predict the U.S. election? / India’s Oyo acquires Motel 6 for $525M / ‘Harvest now, decrypt later’: Why hackers are waiting for quantum computing / How Big Tech embraced nuclear power