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The Australian Border Force won’t stop searching me and my personal devices when I visit Australia. Despite being an Australian citizen, under Australian law, I have zero recourse to this continued flagrant invasion of my privacy. After two years of harassment I am publicizing this as a considered next step in an effort to make it stop. This is somewhat different from my usual articles about space, energy, and technology – we will return to that theme shortly. As far as possible, I will relate only facts and keep editorializing to a minimum. I will update this post as the …
[Originally posted on the Terraform blog April 3, 2025.] Three years ago we set out to make cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that we had kicked off the process of recompiling the foundation layer of our entire industrial stack. Last year, we made cheap pipeline grade natural gas from sunlight and air and expanded our hydrocarbon fuel road map to include methanol, a versatile liquid fuel and chemical precursor for practically every other kind of oil-derived chemical on the market. Unlimited synthetic methane and methanol underpinning global energy supply is a good start, but …
Some ideas on preventing cryogenic propellant boiloff in Starship during long duration cruise or while operating orbital fuel depots. The usual caveats apply! One of the major concerns with using Starship for the Human Landing System is that propellant (cryogenically liquid methane and oxygen) need to a) be transferred in orbit and b) maintained for the duration of the mission, which could be weeks, months, or years. In particular, no astronaut wants to board their Starship after a successful 6 week sortie on the Moon only to find the fuel’s boiled off and they’re stuck. The trick lies in using energy …
As of today, it is 601 days until October 17, 2026, when the mass-optimal launch window to Mars opens next. While I don’t have any privileged information, it’s fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. (Spoiler alert: Rods from the gods…) Over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate; orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. It’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. I’m optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October next year, to be followed by …
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Naturally, the early history of space exploration is filled with firsts. Just six decades ago at this time, the world watched as NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft […]
The US House and Senate appropriations subcommittees have now completed their markups on the bills relevant to the FY26 appropriations for NSF, NASA, and NIST. The AAAS has an interactive dashboard with current information here if you want to click and look at all the science-related agencies. Other agencies still need to go through the Senate subcommittees. Just a reminder of how this is supposed to work. The House and Senate mark up their own versions of the detailed appropriations bills. In principle these are passed by each chamber (with the Senate versions for practical purposes requiring 60/100 votes of support because of the filibuster). Then a conference committee hashes out the differences between the bills, and the conference version of the bills is then voted on by each chamber (again, needing 60/100 votes to pass in the Senate). Finally, the president signs the spending bills. In the fantasy land of Schoolhouse Rock, which largely described events until the 1990s, these annual spending bills are supposed to be passed in time for the start of the new fiscal year on October 1. In practice, Congress has been deeply dysfunctional for years, and there have been a lot of continuing resolutions, late budgets, and mammoth omnibus spending bills. To summarize: NSF - House recommendation = $6.997B (a 20.7% cut from FY25), Senate = $9B (a 2% increase from FY25). These are in sharp contrast to the presidential budget request (PBR) of a 55.8% cut. NASA - House = flat from FY25, Senate = $24.9B (0.2% increase). NIST - House = $1.28B (10.6% increase from FY25), Senate = $1.6B (38.3% increase from FY25) NOAA - House = $5.7B (28.3% increase from FY25), Senate = $6.1B (36.3% increase from FY25) DOE has gone through the House, where the Office of Science is recommending a 1.9% increase, in contrast to a 13.9% cut in the PBR. If you are eligible and able to do so, please keep pushing. As I wrote a few days ago, this is a long-term project, since appropriations happen every year. As long as you're making your opinions known, it's good to push on representatives and senators that they need to hold the agency leadership accountable to actually spend what congress appropriates. A science post soon....
Fundamental technique lets researchers use a big, expensive “teacher” model to train a “student” model for less. The post How Distillation Makes AI Models Smaller and Cheaper first appeared on Quanta Magazine
When Europeans arrived to the Pacific Northwest, they spread smallpox that devastated the Indigenous people, plundered stocks of salmon and herring, hunted down deer and other game, and built sprawling cities and ports. New research tallies the profound impact on wildlife. Read more on E360 →
A team of mathematicians based in Vienna is developing tools to extend the scope of general relativity. The post A New Geometry for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity first appeared on Quanta Magazine
