Using Nuclear Rockets to get to MARS

Scientists have long proposed nuclear fission-fueled rockets to get to Mars fast — but one is warning that making it happen will be an uphill battle.

In an explainer for The Conversation, nuclear engineering expert Dan Kotlyar noted that fueling rockets with nuclear fission, which results from the energy emanated from splitting atoms, will indeed cut the years-long journey to and from Mars by a wide margin.

One of the chemical compounds that goes into the production of nuclear fuel, however, makes those dreams difficult to achieve.

Kotlyar, a nuclear and radiological engineering assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, pointed out that the United States government and major companies like General Electric funded development into nuclear thermal propulsion technology.   READ MORE...

Material Moving Faster Than Light

New research suggests that the universe is filled with particles capable of traveling faster than light, LiveScience reports — and that this scenario holds up as a potentially "viable alternative" to our current cosmological model.

The idea is a little far-fetched, sure, but it's worth hearing out. These hypothetical particles, known as tachyons, aren't likely to be real — but they're not some hokey bit of sci-fi, either. The potential for their existence is something physicists have been giving serious thought for decades, raising fundamental questions about the nature of causality.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, the researchers posit that tachyons are what make up dark matter, an unobservable — and despite being widely considered to exist by scientists, technically hypothetical — substance that is thought to account for around 85 percent of all matter in the universe.  READ MORE...

An AI Simulated Child

A Chinese scholar has unveiled what he's calling the world's first AI child — and saying the creation could bring the technology into a new age.

As the South China Morning Post reports, visitors at the Frontiers of General Artificial Intelligence Technology Exhibition held in Beijing at the end of January were able to interact with the avatar representing Tong Tong, a virtual toddler whose name translates to "Little Girl" in English.


Created at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) — which, yes, are dedicated to building artificial general intelligence, or human-level AI — Tong Tong is the brainchild of Zhu Songchun, the institute's computer scientist founder who specializes in "cognitive artificial intelligence," or AI designed to mimic human cognition.

While AI avatars can have all kinds of simulated appearances and personalities, they say Tong Tong is designed to break new technical ground by not only executing tasks given to her in a virtual environment, but independently giving herself new tasks as well.     READ MORE...

China Doubles Size of its Space Station

In a matter of less than two years, China assembled three modules of its space station dubbed Tiangong, an orbital habitat that can accommodate a crew of three astronauts.

And while it's still significantly smaller than the International Space Station — which took well over a decade to complete — that could soon change.


China is now planning to expand the station with an additional three modules, Reuters reports, offering the country and its international partners an important alternative to the ISS, which is set to be retired by the end of the decade.


Even with the additional three modules, Tiangong will still be only about 40 percent of the mass of the ISS, per the report — but a growing space for research in orbit is still arguably a lot better than not having one at all.

Heavenly Palace
Space contractor the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) announced this week that the station's lifespan will also be 15 — not the previously announced ten — years, according to Reuters, meaning that it'll outlive the ISS by several years if things go according to plan.  READ MORE...