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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 …
California is by far the richest and most powerful polity led by Progressive ideals, and it has taken a beating of late. In this post, I discuss a practical roadmap by which California must reclaim its mantle as the shining city on the hill, an embodiment of the positive attributes of Progressive ideals and material optimism, and once again become a target of aspirational upward mobility. This will not be an easy road. Decades of complacency have squandered enviable resources and potential. But I believe a strength of America is syncretism, with the marketplace of ideas providing robust competition for …
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 …
This post is a follow on from Powering the Mars Base. It’s an extended riff on the following thought experiment: What is the most electrical power you could extract from an integrated Starship-delivered nuclear reactor on Mars? The usual caveats apply. I have taught nuclear physics but I am not a reactor designer – which will shortly become obvious to those of you who Know. No liability is accepted for attempts to install open Brayton cycle nuclear turbines in Starships, with or without SpaceX permission. At the outset, let’s rehearse the underlying assumptions. A Starship has a 9 m diameter, …
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We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way. The post To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Last week I wrote about the de-extinction of the dire wolf by a company, Colossal Biosciences. What they did was pretty amazing – sequence ancient dire wolf DNA and use that as a template to make 20 changes to 14 genes in the gray wolf genome via CRISPR. They focused on the genetic changes they […] The post OK – But Are They Dire Wolves first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Massive changes in IQ scores over time are much less meaningful than people think
Many things have been happening in and around US science. This is a non-exhaustive list of recent developments and links: There have been very large scale personnel cuts across HHS, FDA, CDC, NIH - see here. This includes groups like the people who monitor lead in drinking water. There is reporting about the upcoming presidential budget requests about NASA and NOAA. The requested cuts are very deep. To quote Eric Berger's article linked above, for the science part of NASA, "Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion." The proposed cuts to NOAA are similarly deep, seeking to end climate study in the agency, as Science puts it. The full presidential budget request, including NSF, DOE, NIST, etc. is still to come. Remember, Congress in the past has often essentially ignored presidential budget requests. It is unclear if the will exists to do so now. Speaking of NSF, the graduate research fellowship program award announcements for this year came out this past week. The agency awarded slightly under half as many of these prestigious 3-year fellowships as in each of the last 15 years. I can only presume that this is because the agency is deeply concerned about its budgets for the next couple of fiscal years. Grants are being frozen at several top private universities - these include Columbia (new cancellations), the University of Pennsylvania (here), Harvard (here), Northwestern and Cornell (here), and Princeton (here). There are various law suits filed about all of these. Princeton and Harvard have been borrowing money (issuing bonds) to partly deal with the disruption as litigation continues. The president of Princeton has been more vocal than many about this. There has been a surge in visa revocations and unannounced student status changes in SEVIS for international students in the US. To say that this is unsettling is an enormous understatement. See here for a limited discussion. There seems to be deep reluctance for universities to speak out about this, presumably from the worry that saying the wrong thing will end up placing their international students and scholars at greater exposure. On Friday evening, the US Department of Energy put out a "policy flash", stating that indirect cost rates on its grants would be cut immediately to 15%. This sounds familiar. Legal challenges are undoubtedly beginning. Added bonus: According to the Washington Post, DOGE (whatever they say they are this week) is now in control of grants.gov, the website that posts funding opportunities. As the article says, "Now the responsibility of posting these grant opportunities is poised to rest with DOGE — and if its employees delay those postings or stop them altogether, 'it could effectively shut down federal-grant making,' said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations." None of this is good news for the future of science and engineering research in the US. If you are a US voter and you think that university-based research is important, I encourage you to contact your legislators and make your opinions heard. (As I have put in my profile, what I write here are my personal opinions; I am not in any way speaking for my employer. That should be obvious, but it never hurts to state it explicitly.)
