The James Webb space telescope was successfully launched over the weekend. The $10B honeycomb array, which will serve as the spiritual successor to Hubble, is now on its way to Lagrange point two. There, it’ll sit in orbit a million miles away from the planet it was built on. ✅ Milestone achieved. @NASAWebb is safely in space, powered on, and communicating with ground controllers. The space telescope is now on its way to #UnfoldTheUniverse at its final destination one million miles (1.5 million
It was my first time pitching a VC investor. I had settled on the couch of my living room, ready for a video call with someone I had never met in person. I had a business idea and a team to pull it off. He had the money and interest in early-stage startups. Fingers crossed it’s a match! The call was short and to the point. We spoke about my idea, the team behind it, and why we needed the money. Half an hour later, a $100k investment landed in our bank account. How did that happen? First of all,&
The universe started with a Big Bang. Everything that was ever going to be anything was compacted into a tiny ball of whatever-ness and then it exploded outward and the universe begin expanding. At least, that’s one way of looking at it. But emergent new theories and ages-old philosophical assertions are beginning to find a foothold in cutting-edge quantum physics research. And it’s beginning to look more and more like we might actually be the center of the universe after all. That’s not to say
A team of theoretical physicists working with Microsoft today published an amazing pre-print research paper describing the universe as a self-learning system of evolutionary laws. In other words: We live inside a computer that learns. The big idea: Bostrom’s Simulation Argument has been a hot topic in science circles lately. We published “What if you’re living in a simulation, but there’s no computer” recently to posit a different theory, but Microsoft’s pulled a cosmic “hold my beer” with this
If you ask a physicist like me to explain how the world works, my lazy answer might be: “It follows the Standard Model.” The Standard Model explains the fundamental physics of how the universe works. It has endured over 50 trips around the Sun despite experimental physicists constantly probing for cracks in the model’s foundations. With few exceptions, it has stood up to this scrutiny, passing experimental test after experimental test with flying colors. But this wildly successful model has conc
Amidst the booming influx of electric vehicles worldwide, automakers and tech companies have been focusing on optimizing the most vital and expensive part of EVs: the batteries. They aren’t all alike, and manufacturers use a range of different kinds of batteries. So we’ve decided to select and rank the three most prominent (or promising) battery types: lithium, solid-state, and sodium-ion batteries. We’ll compare the batteries using four criteria: safety, energy density and charging time, sustai
This article was originally published here. I’ve been seeing more and more job postings for analytics engineers in recent months. Every company wants someone that has both data analytics and software engineering skills. It’s the best bang for their buck in hiring one person. I first became an analytics engineer 6 months ago, after working for 2 years as a data engineer. And I’ve never looked back. I’m glad I decided to apply for a position I had never heard of. It ended up being the perfect pos
For more than 100 years, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been our best description of how the force of gravity acts throughout the Universe. General relativity is not only very accurate but ask any astrophysicist about the theory and they’ll probably also describe it as “beautiful”. But it has a dark side too: a fundamental conflict with our other great physical theory, quantum mechanics. General relativity works extremely well at large scales in the Universe, but quantum mech
If there’s one segment in the mobility sector that did spectacularly well in 2021, it had to be ebikes. This year we saw investments in ebikes explode. Many companies used the funding for R&D and market expansion. We also saw legal and infrastructural amendments in the US, UK, and EU to promote ebike ownership, and a series of new business models. Let’s take a look: Notable ebike investments in 2021 Rad Power ebikes had a bumper year for funding. 2021 was a fantastic year for ebike investments: