Category: Technology

WASHINGTON: Hours after Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin nailed its first-ever orbital mission, SpaceX seized back the spotlight on Thursday as its latest test of Starship, its gargantuan next-generation megarocket, ended with the upper stage dramatically disintegrating over the Atlantic. In terms of sheer excitement, Elon Musk’s company didn’t disappoint, underscoring its technical prowess by catching the first stage booster in the “chopstick” arms of its launch tower for a second time. But the triumph was short-lived when teams lost contact with the upper stage vehicle. SpaceX later confirmed it had…

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One of the most distant and, thus, earliest star-killing supernovas ever seen has been discovered by astronomers with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). After the Big Bang, around 2 billion years, this blast which rocked the cosmos marked the death of just such a monster star, reported Space.com. This supernova, which was detected as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) programme, could help scientists add more detail to the cosmic picture of stellar life and death they are currently building. Designated AT 2023adsv, the…

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BENGALURU: India docked two satellites in space Thursday, a key milestone for the country’s dreams of a space station and manned Moon mission, the space agency said. The satellites, weighing 220-kilogrammes (485 pounds) each, blasted off in December on a single rocket from India’s Sriharikota launch site. Later they separated. On Thursday, the two satellites were manoeuvered back together in a “precision” process resulting in a “successful spacecraft capture”, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said, calling it a “historic moment”. India became the fourth country to achieve the feat…

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Archaeologists have said in a new study that the intricate details of tattoos on centuries-old mummies in Peru have been revealed by a new laser-based technique. According to Live Science, however, not everyone thinks that the new technique is better than existing methods for analysing historical tattoos. Researchers looked at more than 100 mummified human remains from the Chancay culture, which inhabited Peru from about AD 900 to 1533 in the study, which was published on Monday (January 13) in the journal PNAS. “Only 3 of these individuals were found to…

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BOCA CHICA: Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing up for the seventh orbital flight test of Starship, the colossal prototype rocket the company hopes will help humans colonise Mars. From the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, a launch window opens at 4:00pm (2200GMT) Wednesday and will be carried in a live webcast on Musk’s X platform. Space enthusiasts will be eager to see if SpaceX can replicate the stunning feat of catching the first-stage Super Heavy booster in the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms during descent, approximately seven minutes after liftoff.…

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Social media users in the United States have resorted to Xiaohongshu, another Chinese app, in the days leading up to a planned ban on TikTok by the US government. Last year, a law was enacted in America coercing ByteDance, the owner of the well-known video platform, to sell it or close it down by January 19. With that deadline looming, Xiaohongshu — a lifestyle-focussed Instagram-meets-Pinterest alternative — has been propelled to the top of the US Apple App Store free downloads chart. The hashtag “tiktokrefugee” had more than 290 million…

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WASHINGTON: Scientists have observed flashes of X-rays emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy near our Milky Way, gradually increasing in frequency that seem to be originating from a white dwarf — a highly compact stellar ember on a destructive path. The observations made using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope appear to show a white dwarf nearing the point of no return — called the event horizon — as it orbits the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, according to the researchers. “It is probably the closest object we’ve…

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NEW YORK: China’s officials are exploring a potential sale of US TikTok operations to billionaire Elon Musk as the video-sharing platform faces an American law requiring imminent Chinese divestment, Bloomberg News reported Monday. The report, which is citing anonymous people familiar with the matter, outlined one scenario being discussed in Beijing where Musk’s social media company X would purchase TikTok from Chinese owner ByteDance and combine it into the platform formerly known as Twitter. The report estimated the value of TikTok’s US operations at between $40 and $50 billion. Although Musk is…

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Scientists in Australia have discovered a bigger, more venomous species of the Sydney funnel-web spider, one of the world’s deadliest. The new funnel-web species has gotten the nickname “Big Boy” and was first discovered in the early 2000s near Newcastle, 170km (105 miles) north of Sydney, by Kane Christensen, a spider enthusiast and former head of spiders at the Australian Reptile Park. “This particular spider is a lot larger, its venom glands are a lot larger and its fangs are a lot longer,” he said. In research released on Monday,…

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The Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 has been set for launch this Wednesday, January 15, carrying Nasa science and technology to the Moon as part of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and Artemis campaign. According to Nasa, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the mission will lift off on a SpaceX’s Falcon 8 rocket from Launch Complex 39A. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander will spend approximately 45 days in transit after the launch to the Moon before landing on the lunar surface in early…

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