Amazon acquires Facebook’s Satellite Internet team!
Project Kuiper going strong to compete SpaceX’s StarLink, OneWeb and Telesat.
The deal bolsters Amazon’s $10 billion effort to develop low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites capable of delivering high-speed broadband internet around the globe, while marking the end of Facebook’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to do the same.
Facebook’s team, which joined Amazon’s existing 500-person operation in April, included physicists as well as hardware and software engineers who have experience working on aeronautical and wireless systems, according to The Information.
The talent acquisition deal included some intellectual property developed by the team, as well as equipment and facilities, Facebook told Insider. Other terms were not disclosed.
Olympic stadiums can be costly and wasteful. Some have argued for a single, more sustainable, location that can be used year after year.
The summer Olympics have been a quadrennial tradition ever since the late 1800s—when modern sports and rivalries freshened up the ancient tradition. Since COVID-19 crashed the schedule for last years’ events, now the world is gearing up again for another round of competition in Tokyo.
Transporting athletes and fans from all over the world and to cities hosting the Olympic games comes with a gigantic carbon footprint, for example, the 2021 London Olympics had an estimated footprint of over 400 thousand tons of CO2 emissions. Constantly building brand-new stadiums every few years that often go unused after the games, with very few exceptions, is also extremely wasteful. The 2016 Rio Olympics whipped up a whopping 3.6 million tonnes of carbon when including all that went into infrastructure. Eerie listicles of decaying stadiums, including Rio’s, litter the internet with costly examples of the wasted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of labor and materials that go into just one site.
For as long as the games have existed, there have been proponents of having just one Olympic location. King George of Greece gave a speech offering to permanently host the games in the spirit of its origins in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympic games. Some countries, like the United States, agreed, while others, including Pierre de Coubertin who revived the modern Olympics, worried that it would make the games too Hellenistic and that it would hurt the international spirit behind the worldwide event. John Rennie Short, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, has spoken in the past about the environmental and financial benefits of having the games in a singular location.
The 2021 Space Renaissance Congress Acta is now online, and the voting session for the new President and Board of Directors is now open.
Dear SRI friends and supporters.
Two key milestones of our 3rd World Congress are now accomplished.
**1) The complete acta of the presented papers and speeches** is now online, for all of us to be viewed and reviewed. https://2021.spacerenaissance.space/index.php/2021-space-renaissance-congress-acta/
On this page you can find: * The presented papers, for download * The pointer to each live presentation, in the recorded videos on YouTube (hyperlink-pointer to the hour: minutes: seconds)
When watching to any video on the YouTube Space Renaissance channel, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel! (the channel is relatively recent, and increasing the number of subscribers is key to our web reputation).
Soon we will also begin the work to assemble the Acta Book, to be published on Amazon, let’s say, within September 2021.
**2) The new President and Board of Directors** are now waiting the completion of the voting process, to begin their work for the next 5 years, towards the SRI 4th World Congress.
As you likely know, Prof. Bernard Foing — for 30 years ESA officer and tireless space activist — is the candidate President of Space Renaissance International.
A large endorsement by our members and supporters is key, for the new leadership, to know they will be supported during the next 5 years.
Leading an organization mainly working on the web is not simple, it is a hard task, and the leaders never know whether they are “speaking in the desert” or the community is alive, reactive and proactive…
Now it’s up to all of us to assure that Bernard and the new Board get a warm and broad consensus, to support them in their task for the next 5 years!
Btw, as you can see in the list of Directors, i am not escaping! (😁), I am one of the vice presidents, and will take care of the Academy, and other key programmes.
The votes by non SRI members, though non binding for the election, are very important since they testify the consensus to our leadership.
Please vote for the President and the new Board of Directors:
**3) Taking the maximum cultural profit from our Congress**. What is the main outcome of our Congress? It is constituted by the concepts that emerged during the presentations and discussions. The things we understood or better clarified thanks to the great collective work we made, since October 2020 to July 2021, through the webinar series and the five days of the Congress. During the next weeks and months we will produce several newsletters and articles, “mining” the conceptual contents. A few non exhaustive examples: * the social inclusivity, as a 4th parameter to assess the level of a civilization (with reference to the Kardashev-Zubrin-Sagan scale) * the solution of the energy issue, by moving the industries outside the planet, in the cislunar space * the key and indispensable role of the new space industry to save and lead the global economy growth, overcoming the multiple crisis * a gas strategy to kick-off the civilian space development before 2030.
Just to name 4 of the many key concepts we discussed in this congress.
Keep on following and supporting the Space Renaissance!
An elegant new algorithm developed by Danish researchers can significantly reduce the resource consumption of the world’s computer servers. Computer servers are as taxing on the climate as global air traffic combined, thereby making the green transition in IT an urgent matter. The researchers, from the University of Copenhagen, expect major IT companies to deploy the algorithm immediately.
One of the flipsides of our runaway internet usage is its impact on climate due to the massive amount of electricity consumed by computer servers. Current CO2 emissions from data centers are as high as from global air traffic combined—with emissions expected to double within just a few years.
Only a handful of years have passed since Professor Mikkel Thorup was among a group of researchers behind an algorithm that addressed part of this problem by producing a groundbreaking recipe to streamline computer server workflows. Their work saved energy and resources. Tech giants including Vimeo and Google enthusiastically implemented the algorithm in their systems, with online video platform Vimeo reporting that the algorithm had reduced their bandwidth usage by a factor of eight.
But hey, at least all that money is going to charity.
You know that $5.43M NFT that contained files pertaining to the source code for the world wide web? The one created by Sir WWW Tim Berners-Lee himself? Turns out there’s a scripting error in the video representation of the source code. It has been highlighted by Mikko Hypponen, a researcher at F Secure, on Twitter who pointed out that “the angle brackets are wrong!” If you watch the start of the video visualisation of the code on the Sotheby’s auction page you can see that where there should be ‘’ characters they have been replaced by something else entirely.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently shared that the company is already providing Starlink Beta broadband internet service to over 69420 users globally out of over half-a-million customers who pre-ordered the internet service via Starlink.com. According to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, the Starlink constellation is currently actively beaming its signal to users in 11 countries (now 12), including portions of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France, Austria, Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. More European countries and regions in the United States will have coverage during the second half of 2021 and early 2022.
This week, SpaceX e-mailed potential customers in the European country of Denmark –“Starlink is now available in limited supply in Denmark!” the e-mail reads. “Users can expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s [megabits per second] over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all,” SpaceX wrote in the e-mail. “As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations and improve our networking software, data speed, latency and uptime will improve dramatically.” To date, SpaceX has launched approximately 1740 internet-beaming Starlink satellites out of over 12000 that will be part of the global broadband constellation.
Material scientists have developed a fast method for producing epsilon iron oxide and demonstrated its promise for next-generation communications devices. Its outstanding magnetic properties make it one of the most coveted materials, such as for the upcoming 6G generation of communication devices and for durable magnetic recording. The work was published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Iron oxide (III) is one of the most widespread oxides on Earth. It is mostly found as the mineral hematite (or alpha iron oxide, α-Fe2O3). Another stable and common modification is maghemite (or gamma modification, γ-Fe2O3). The former is widely used in industry as a red pigment, and the latter as a magnetic recording medium. The two modifications differ not only in crystalline structure (alpha-iron oxide has hexagonal syngony and gamma-iron oxide has cubic syngony) but also in magnetic properties.
In addition to these forms of iron oxide (III), there are more exotic modifications such as epsilon-, beta-, zeta-, and even glassy. The most attractive phase is epsilon iron oxide, ε-Fe2O3. This modification has an extremely high coercive force (the ability of the material to resist an external magnetic field). The strength reaches 20 kOe at room temperature, which is comparable to the parameters of magnets based on expensive rare-earth elements. Furthermore, the material absorbs electromagnetic radiation in the sub-terahertz frequency range (100−300 GHz) through the effect of natural ferromagnetic resonance. The frequency of such resonance is one of the criteria for the use of materials in wireless communications devices—the 4G standard uses megahertz and 5G uses tens of gigahertz. There are plans to use the sub-terahertz range as a working range in the sixth generation (6G) wireless technology, which is being prepared for active introduction in our lives from the early 2030s.
The promise of 5G Internet of Things (IoT) networks requires more scalable and robust communication systems—ones that deliver drastically higher data rates and lower power consumption per device.
Backscatter radios—passive sensors that reflect rather than radiate energy—are known for their low-cost, low-complexity, and battery-free operation, making them a potential key enabler of this future although they typically feature low data rates and their performance strongly depends on the surrounding environment.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nokia Bell Labs, and Heriot-Watt University have found a low-cost way for backscatter radios to support high-throughput communication and 5G-speed Gb/sec data transfer using only a single transistor when previously it required expensive and multiple stacked transistors.
