Technology

Here we bring you all the latest technological news both here on Earth and in space.

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The Laser That Once Filled a Lab Now Fits on a Tiny Chip

EPFL / SciTechDaily

Scientists have finally packed a laboratory-class ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip.

Ultrafast lasers generate bursts of light that last only a few hundred femtoseconds, each one just a quadrillionth of a second long. These extremely short pulses are used in a wide range of technologies, including precision manufacturing, eye surgery, and optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning innovation that powers the world’s most accurate optical atomic clocks.

Despite their importance, ultrafast lasers have generally remained large, costly systems that occupy entire optical tables in research laboratories. After more than two decades of work by scientists around the world, shrinking these devices onto a photonic chip has remained an elusive goal.

Now researchers led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg at EPFL have achieved that milestone. Writing in Nature, the team reports the first integrated ultrafast laser capable of matching the performance of traditional tabletop femtosecond lasers, producing pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds with energies reaching 1.05 nanojoules. Read more here.

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NASA’s X-59 Sonic Boom Killer Is Ready for Its Biggest Test Yet

By NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center – SciTechDaily

NASA’s strange-looking X-59 jet is about to reach the milestone it was built for: flying faster than the speed of sound.

NASA’s X-59 experimental aircraft is preparing for one of the most important phases of its flight testing program. The next series of flights will include the aircraft’s first journey beyond the speed of sound, along with several key tests needed for the mission’s future goals.

“What comes next is the first time this one-of-a-kind aircraft will fly supersonic,” said Cathy Bahm, project manager for NASA’s Low Boom Flight Demonstrator. “We are starting toward the mission conditions test point that X-59 was designed for.”

Following months of flight testing, the X-59 team completed a review of recent progress in late May and is now moving on to a new set of tests involving greater speeds and higher altitudes. These flights will help engineers evaluate how the aircraft performs under the operating conditions required for NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to collect data on quiet supersonic flight….Read more here.

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Scientists Create “Living Plastic” That Self-Destructs in Just Six Days

By American Chemical Society – SciTechDaily

Scientists have developed “living plastics” that can be programmed to break themselves down when triggered.

Many plastic items are made for one-time use, but the materials can remain in the environment for years. Researchers are exploring a different approach: living plastics, materials built with microbes that can be activated to break down the polymer when needed.

In a study published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, a team used two cooperating bacterial strains to fully degrade the plastic in only six days without producing microplastics.

Plastics could self-destruct: Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, explains that “the realization that traditional plastics persist for centuries, while many applications, like packaging, are short-lived, led us to ask: Could we build degradation directly into the material’s…Read more here.

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Nvidia chases $200B CPU market with AI agent PCs from Microsoft, Dell, and HP

Julie Bort / TC TechCrunch

Nvidia opened Taipei’s enormous Computex trade show on Sunday with a spark, literally. The chipmaker unveiled a new PC CPU called the RTX Spark, which it dubbed a “superchip,” and named a who’s who list of PC makers that will soon deliver AI PCs powered by it.

The super-fast, 1-petaflop chip is designed to run AI agents like OpenClaw or Hermes Agent securely, according to Nvidia. Such RTX Spark Windows PCs will be available this fall from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, and MSI, with models from Acer and Gigabyte to follow.

In addition to being equipped with secure sandboxes (jointly developed with Microsoft) to run agents securely, the PCs will also have enough CPU, GPU, RAM, and underlying Nvidia CUDA software to run local versions of large language models.

Nvidia said that its RTX technology will deliver faster performance for AI, better image quality, and support for AI features in more than 1,000 games and applications..Read more here.

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