SpaceX says it is developing a “simplified” lunar landing mission architecture while defending the progress it has made on its Starship lander for Artemis.
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Chinese commercial firm StarDetect has raised early funding as it seeks to establish itself as a provider of space domain awareness and satellite computing solutions.
The post China’s StarDetect raises Series A funding to expand on-orbit computing and space domain awareness services appeared first on SpaceNews.
Growing space investor optimism got another lift Oct. 29 after the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter point for the second time this year, making borrowing cheaper for a capital-intensive industry already buoyed by rising defense investment.
The post Interest rate cut further fuels space investor optimism amid talk of returning SPACs appeared first on SpaceNews.
Bulgaria’s EnduroSat announced another $104 million in venture capital funding Oct. 30 to scale up its small satellite manufacturing capacity.
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With the government shutdown dragging on and architectural details still under wraps, defense contractors find themselves in the position of building capabilities for a system that hasn’t been defined
The post Golden Dome hype meets information vacuum as industry awaits Pentagon direction appeared first on SpaceNews.
The move toward so-called GOCO (government-owned, commercially-operated) arrangements has been shaped by developments such as Russia declaring that Western commercial satellites could be legitimate military targets.
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In this episode of Space Minds, host David Ariosto speaks with Doug Hendrix, co-founder and CEO of ExoAnalytic Solutions — a company born from three physicists’ passion for solving the hardest problems in space.
The post Inside the new age of space domain awareness appeared first on SpaceNews.
China’s persistent use of maritime gray zone tactics poses a fundamental challenge to regional stability and the international order. These actions are designed to achieve strategic aims — territorial advancement and sovereignty erosion — without crossing the threshold of conventional armed conflict. Using ambiguity and indirect coercion, China seeks to “advance without attacking” and shape […]
The post Confronting China’s pervasive maritime gray zone campaign appeared first on SpaceNews.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Momentus announced a partnership Oct. 30 with DPhi Space to fly the Swiss startup’s hosted-payload platform early next year. Momentus will host the DPhi Space Clustergate-2 payload, which is designed to turn a host spacecraft into a “high-performance hub” on the Vigoride 7 spacecraft, according to the news release. By working […]
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Female university students do much better in introductory physics exams if they have the option of retaking the tests. That’s according to a new analysis of almost two decades of US exam results for more than 26 000 students. The study’s authors say it shows that female students benefit from lower-stakes assessments – and that the persistent “gender grade gap” in physics exam results does not reflect a gender difference in physics knowledge or ability.
The study has been carried out by David Webb from the University of California, Davis, and Cassandra Paul from San Jose State University. It builds on previous work they did in 2023, which showed that the gender gap disappears in introductory physics classes that offer the chance for all students to retake the exams. That study did not, however, explore why the offer of a retake has such an impact.
In the new study, the duo analysed exam results from 1997 to 2015 for a series of introductory physics classes at a public university in the US. The dataset included 26 783 students, mostly in biosciences, of whom about 60% were female. Some of the classes let students retake exams while others did not, thereby letting the researchers explore why retakes close the gender gap.
When Webb and Paul examined the data for classes that offered retakes, they found that in first-attempt exams female students slightly outperformed their male counterparts. But male students performed better than female students in retakes.
This, the researchers argue, discounts the notion that retakes close the gender gap by allowing female students to improve their grades. Instead, they suggest that the benefit of retakes is that they lower the stakes of the first exam.
The team then compared the classes that offered retakes with those that did not, which they called high-stakes courses. They found that the gender gap in exam results was much larger in the high-stakes classes than the lower-stakes classes that allowed retakes.
“This suggests that high-stakes exams give a benefit to men, on average, [and] lowering the stakes of each exam can remove that bias ” Webb told Physics World. He thinks that as well as allowing students to retake exams, physics might benefit from not having comprehensive high-stakes final exams but instead “use final exam time to let students retake earlier exams”.
The post Lowering exam stakes could cut the gender grade gap in physics, finds study appeared first on Physics World.
Earlier this year I met the Massachusetts-based steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum at the Global Physics Summit of the American Physical Society. He was exhibiting a beautiful sculpture of a “quantum engine” that was created in collaboration with physicists including NIST’s Nicole Yunger Halpern – who pioneered the scientific field of quantum steampunk.
I was so taken by the art and science of quantum steampunk that I promised Rosenbaum that I would chat with him and Yunger Halpern on the podcast – and here is that conversation. We begin by exploring the art of steampunk and how it is influenced by the technology of the 19th century. Then, we look at the physics of quantum steampunk, a field that weds modern concepts of quantum information with thermodynamics – which itself is a scientific triumph of the 19th century.
This podcast is supported by Atlas Technologies, specialists in custom aluminium and titanium vacuum chambers as well as bonded bimetal flanges and fittings used everywhere from physics labs to semiconductor fabs.
The post Quantum steampunk: we explore the art and science appeared first on Physics World.
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