Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You can now own a 1 gold coin celebrating one of America's most revolutionary achievements: the NASA Space Shuttle program. The latest variant in the ongoing American Innovation 1 Coin series is available to order through the United States Mint. Selected to represent the state of Florida, the noncirculating legal tender is the third coin released this year and the 28th coin in the 15-year project first announced in 2018. While the coin's front displays the series' Statue of Liberty image, the back shows the shuttle launching above plumes of exhaust.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was a seminal event in American history, one etched deeply into our nation's collective psyche. The event ushered in an era of unbridled possibilities -- the stars were finally coming into reach -- and its effects were felt across the culture, from art and fashion to politics and culture. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary collection of historians, researchers and academics explore the myriad ways that putting a man on the moon impacted the American Experience. Reprinted with permission of the University of Florida Press. From NASA's very beginnings, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians lent their talent, labor, and technical skills to the space program.

NASA presents its space explorers as instant legends, in any event, when their achievements in space are groundbreaking. Maybe the best case of NASA's public-relations prowess was the participation of John Glenn, the first American to circle Earth, in the 1998 shuttle mission STS-95. Glenn's re-visitation to space at the age of 77 made STS-95 the most ardently followed mission since the Apollo moon arrivals. NASA guaranteed that Glenn went up for science, he filled in as a test subject in different clinical trials, however, unmistakably the primary advantage of Glenn's space shuttle ride was exposure, not a scientific revelation. NASA is as yet leading grade A science in space, but it is being finished by unmanned probes instead of space explorers.

To judge from the hype, artificial intelligence is inches away from ripping through the economy and destroying everyone's jobs--save for the AI scientists who build the technology and the baristas and yoga instructors who minister to them. But one critic of that view comes from within the tent of AI itself: Gary Marcus. From an academic background in psychology and neuroscience--rather than computer science--Mr Marcus has long been an AI gadfly. He relishes poking holes in the popular AI technique of deep-learning because of its inability to perform abstractions even as it does an impressive job at pattern-matching. Yet his unease with the state of the art didn't prevent him from advancing the art with his own AI startup, Geometric Intelligence, which he sold to Uber in 2016.

To judge from the hype, artificial intelligence is inches away from ripping through the economy and destroying everyone's jobs--save for the AI scientists who build the technology and the baristas and yoga instructors who minister to them. But one critic of that view comes from within the tent of AI itself: Gary Marcus. From an academic background in psychology and neuroscience--rather than computer science--Mr Marcus has long been an AI gadfly. He relishes poking holes in the popular AI technique of deep-learning because of its inability to perform abstractions even as it does an impressive job at pattern-matching. Yet his unease with the state of the art didn't prevent him from advancing the art with his own AI startup, Geometric Intelligence, which he sold to Uber in 2016.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Despite sending humans to Earth's orbit and the moon, the idea of humans surviving in outer space must seem like science fiction. Creating an environment that can sustain human life in the almost total absence of gravity, as well as no electrical outlets or oxygen, takes a lot of experimentation. That's been the job of teams of dedicated scientists who have facilitated some of the most unforgettable moments in space exploration. We compiled 30 common items that were invented for use in the race for space.

What would we find, if we could look into the future? Will we be living like the Jetsons.. served by machines? Or will we be trying to battle the machines.. like the Terminator? Today there's a new technology race that pits the US against both China and Russia. It's the race for A.I... artificial intelligence... which many believe will define the century and maybe our survival.

The Californian desert rushes up in front of me. I can see the runway at Edwards Air Force Base emerging clearly from the hills, and I try to keep the nose of my spacecraft pointed straight down the centre. I am flying the Dream Chaser space plane back from a stint at the International Space Station (ISS), and am keenly aware of my delicate cargo – and the craft's past failures. I'm seated in front of three computer monitors, which show my view out of the cockpit, and rear and side views of the spacecraft as it descends. To go easy on me, the Draper crew starts the simulation after the Dream Chaser has already entered Earth's atmosphere and headed down towards the ground, so all I have to do is aim it straight at the runway.

They tuned in by the tens of thousands, crowding around their screens the way residents of the Florida Space Coast once jammed the beaches to witness rocket launches at the dawn of the Space Age. But the audience watching SpaceX's live web broadcast of its launch from Cape Canaveral on Friday was treated to a show that until just a few years ago was widely discounted as impossible -- the vertical landing of the Falcon 9 rocket, which used its engine thrust to slow down and touch softly on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. On Sunday morning, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft caught up to the International Space Station. Flying at 17,500 mph, the spacecraft pulled up alongside the orbiting laboratory, and at 7:23 a.m., European astronaut Tim Peake grabbed it using a robotic arm. While the main mission was to deliver food and cargo to the station, it was the landing at sea that was hailed as a breakthrough. President Obama, whose administration followed through with controversial plans to retire the space shuttle and contract out missions to the space station, tweeted his congratulations.

The Electrical Systems Division at the NASA Kennedy Space Center has developed and deployed an agent-based tool to monitor the space shuttle's ground processing telemetry stream. The agent provides autonomous monitoring of the telemetry stream and automatically alerts system engineers when predefined criteria have been met. Sandia National Labs' Java Expert System Shell is employed as the rule engine. This article discusses the rule-based telemetry agent used for space shuttle ground processing and explains the problem domain, development of the agent software, benefits of AI technology, and deployment and sustaining engineering of the product.