Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how fusion power has also been considered a means of propelling spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). In both cases, these proposals paralleled Cold War developments in rocketry and nuclear armaments, as they did for most space age advancements.
Interstellar travel IV: Solar, magnetic, & directed-energy sails
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When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in 2022, nearly 250,000 public comments flooded in—a record response that led the Biden administration to delay a final decision.This [...]
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UC San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library, in partnership with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, has made public nearly 700 internal documents from a Midwest retailer as part of the state’s lawsuit alleging the company ignored [...]
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A new study finds that one side effect of Trump-era trade wars has been cheaper whiskey in much of the United States. But if you live in whiskey hubs Kentucky or Tennessee, your prices actually [...]
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Climate change is making Australia’s housing crisis more dangerous for older women. Extreme heat, floods, fires and storms are turning insecure housing into a safety issue, not just an affordability issue.This post was originally published [...]
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Companies with strong political connections are more likely to escape scrutiny over greenwashing, according to new research from Durham University Business School. Greenwashing occurs when organizations overstate or misrepresent their environmental performance to appear more [...]
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New research from the University of Kansas has found that the more media-literate people are, the more they trust institutions such as government and nonprofits. In addition, their social media habits can predict civic engagement.This [...]
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Members of Parliament from the UK’s three biggest political parties in the House of Commons significantly overestimate levels of public resistance to major policy proposals for tackling climate change, a University of Cambridge study suggests. [...]
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New research in Economic Inquiry provides evidence of in-group bias operating within the judiciary—a setting where impartiality is expected.This post was originally published on this site
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Researchers at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, examined the ideological stance of large language models—artificial intelligence systems trained to understand and generate human language—and discovered that when [...]
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A new study found that people’s beliefs about the harmfulness of an illegal substance are stronger predictors of support for both punishment and court-mandated treatment than beliefs about who is to blame.This post was originally [...]
