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FILE PHOTO: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Israeli-owned Amos-17 commercial communications satellite, lifts off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., August 6, 2019. REUTERS/Joe Skipper JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s Space Communications said on Monday its Amos-17 communication satellite, which was launched into space in August, has completed

Intel has disclosed an early overview of plans for the upcoming Aurora supercomputer, which it is building in conjunction with Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory, run by the United Sates Department of Energy. It is due to be delivered in 2021. The key components of the Aurora supercomputer will be ‘Ponte Vecchio’ GPUs based on Intel’s Xe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists on Monday unveiled the first global geological map of Saturn’s moon Titan including vast plains and dunes of frozen organic material and lakes of liquid methane, illuminating an exotic world considered a strong candidate in the search for life beyond Earth. FILE PHOTO: This artist’s concept envisions what hydrocarbon ice forming

Computer graphic handout image shows Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa 2 probe arriving at an asteroid in the image released by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, created March 18, 2019 and obtained by Reuters on November 18, 2019. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/Handout via Reuters TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese space probe is heading home from

After an unsuccessful bid two months ago, India may attempt another soft landing on the Moon by next year-end, probably in November, sources in ISRO said on Thursday. The Indian Space Research Organisation had constituted a high-level committee, headed by S Somanath, Director ofThiruvananthapuram-based Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, the lead centre responsible for all launch

The Elon Musk-led SpaceX has completed a series of static fire engine tests of its new passenger spacecraft, Crew Dragon, paving the way for an in-flight launch escape demonstration. In April, during a similar set of engine tests, the spacecraft experienced an anomaly which led to an explosion and loss of the vehicle. In the

Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal R K S Bhadauria, on Thursday said the screeningprocess for the selection of crew for ISRO’s proposed human space flight programme – Gaganyaan – is being done professionally. “The screening process is well underway and I think it is being done very professionally. And increasingly, the interaction with

FILE PHOTO: The Boeing logo is pictured at the Latin American Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition fair (LABACE) at Congonhas Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil August 14, 2018. Picture taken August 14, 2018. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Boeing’s multibillion dollar contract to build U.S. astronaut capsules received an “unnecessary” extension from NASA, a watchdog

A team of US researchers has redefined the conditions that make a planet habitable by taking the star’s radiation and the planet’s rotation rate into account – a discovery that will help astronomers narrow down the search around life-sustaining planets. The research team is the first to combine 3D climate modelling with atmospheric chemistry to

HUAILAI, China (Reuters) – China on Thursday successfully completed a crucial landing test in northern Hebei province ahead of a historic unmanned exploration mission to Mars next year. A lander for China’s Mars mission is seen after a hovering-and-obstacle avoidance test at a test facility in Huailai, Hebei province, China November 14, 2019. Picture taken

Ultima Thule, the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft, has been renamed Arrokoth, or “sky” in the Native American Powhatan language, following a backlash over the previous name’s Nazi connotations. The icy rock, which orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt about a billion miles beyond Pluto, was surveyed by the NASA

A view of lab-made human skin, made from skin cells and collagen, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore November 11, 2019. REUTERS/Yiming Woo SINGAPORE (Reuters) – A piece of skin about the size of your thumbnail can be printed in less than a minute, scientists in Singapore say, a game-changing step for the future of

After looking at standard ECG tests, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help identify patients most likely to die of any medical cause within a year, claim researchers. To reach this conclusion, researchers from Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania analysed the results of 1.77 million ECGs and other records from almost 400,000 patients. The team used this

NASA has detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space, caused by a massive thermonuclear flash on the surface of a pulsar — the crushed remains of a star that long ago exploded as a supernova. The explosion released as much energy in 20 seconds as the Sun does in nearly 10 days. NASA’s

Boeing on Monday morning declared successful its test of the emergency abort system for the spacecraft it’s developing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, even though only two of the three main parachutes deployed. The test, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, was a long-anticipated milestone for a company that

As NASA plans to return humans to the Moon in 2024, scientists opened an untouched rock and soil sample from the Moon returned to Earth as part of the the US space agency’s final mission of the Apollo programme. The sample, opened on Tuesday, was collected on the Moon by Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan

Walmart and Tesla have settled a lawsuit filed by the retail giant alleging that Tesla installed rooftop solar panels that caught fire. Lawyers for both sides filed documents in New York Supreme Court discontinuing the legal action. The companies say in a joint statement that both sides have resolved issues raised by Walmart in the

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fossils unearthed in southern Germany of a remarkable ape that lived about 11.6 million years ago may dramatically alter the understanding of the evolutionary origins of a fundamental human trait – walking upright on two legs. Twenty-one fossilized bones of the most complete partial skeleton of a male of the extinct ape

IBM weighed in Tuesday on the policy debate over facial recognition technology, arguing against an outright ban but calling for “precision regulation” to protect privacy and civil liberties. In a white paper posted on its website, the US computing giant said policymakers should understand that “not all technology lumped under the umbrella of ‘facial recognition’

US government funding in artificial intelligence has fallen short and the country needs to invest in research, train an AI-ready workforce and apply the technology to national security missions, a government-commissioned panel led by Google’s former CEO said in an interim report on Monday. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), created by Congress last

FILE PHOTO: The Boeing logo is displayed on a screen, at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., August 7, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid SEATTLE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Boeing Co said on Monday that one of three parachutes failed to open during a crucial unmanned test of the CST-100 Starliner, which the company is

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will do everything to demonstrate soft landing of its satellite on Moon, its Chairman K. Sivan said here on Saturday, nearly two months after such an attempt of Chandrayaan-2 failed. Sivan, who had become emotional after the Chandrayaan-2 landing failed on September 7, said that ISRO is working on

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The journey of NASA’s dauntless Voyager 2 spacecraft through our solar system’s farthest reaches has given scientists new insight into a poorly understood distant frontier: the unexpectedly distinct boundary marking where the sun’s energetic influence ends and interstellar space begins. FILE PHOTO: NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in space is shown in this artist’s

The Chandra’s Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2 (CHACE-2) payload aboard the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter has detected Argon-40, said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). According to ISRO, the Orbiter that is orbiting the moon has detected Argon-40 from an altitude of about 100 km. Argon-40 (40Ar), which is one of the isotopes of the noble gas Argon, is an

Scientists check plants inside of an aeroponic growing chamber system as an experiment called Marsonaut at Prague University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic, October 30, 2019. REUTERS/David W Cerny PRAGUE (Reuters) – Czech scientists have opened a lab to experiment growing food for environments with extreme conditions and lack of water, such as

BANDUNG, Indonesia (Reuters) – A watchmaker in Indonesia’s Bandung city thinks the next step in sustainability is a wristwatch with a strap made out of the complex root structure of a mushroom. A worker prepares mycelium leather to be used for wristwatches at a workshop of Pala Nusantara, a watchmaking company, in Bandung, West Java

Multi-billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk recently unveiled the third version of Tesla’s solar roof product – called the Solar Glass Roof. According to Musk, this third iteration of the electricity-generating house-topper will be cheaper, easier, and faster to install than its predecessors. “It’ll grow like kelp on steroids,” he said, speaking about the new Tesla

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musks request to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed by British caver Vernon Unsworth over a “pedo guy” tweet, was denied by a Los Angeles judge. US District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles has ruled that a jury will have to decide whether those tweets count as recklessly negligent, Los

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A large ancient wetlands region spanning northern Botswana – once teeming with life but now dominated by desert and salt flats – may represent the ancestral homeland of all of the 7.7 billion people on Earth today, researchers said on Monday. FILE PHOTO: Vanessa Hayes speaks with Headman ǀkun ǀkunta, from an

Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles were forced to start a crowdfunding campaign after their birds wandered into Iran and foreign text messages from their tracking devices depleted the project’s budget. Scientists rang the alarm earlier this month when several endangered steppe eagles transmitting coordinates via Russian mobile numbers wandered into the roaming zone after spending

The Air Force is using SpaceX’s fledgeling satellite network to test encrypted internet services for a number of military planes, the space company’s president said on Tuesday, detailing results for the first customer of Elon Musk’s planned constellation of thousands of broadband-beaming satellites. “We are delivering high bandwidth into the cockpit of Air Force planes,”

Indian space agency has released fresh set of pictures of impact craters on moon surface taken by its Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday, while releasing a picture on its Twitter handle, said the images were taken by the Dual Frequency-Synthetic Aperture Radar (DF-SAR) on its Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter. According to ISRO,

Founder, Chairman, CEO and President of Amazon Jeff Bezos unveils his space company Blue Origin’s space exploration lunar lander rocket called Blue Moon during an unveiling event in Washington, U.S., May 9, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. billionaire Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday his space company Blue Origin has signed agreements with

FILE PHOTO: A passenger plane is seen with the full moon behind as it begins its final landing approach to Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an

Astronomers dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have announced a new collaboration with scientists working on a NASA telescope. So has alien-hunting finally earned its stripes as a scientific discipline? To find out, AFP spoke to scientist Jill Tarter who has devoted her life to searching for signals emanating from distant galaxies and

Interxion managing director Fabrice Coquio is seen at the construction site of Interxion MRS3 data center installed in an old German submarine base built during the Second World War in Marseille, France, October 22, 2019. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier PARIS (Reuters) – The thick concrete walls of a long-abandoned World War Two German submarine base in Marseille,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs. Fossilized mammal skull fossils and lower jaw retrieved from the Corral Bluffs

Just two months after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told leaders gathered at the United Nations that they had stolen her dreams by not figuring out how to stop climate change within her eight-year deadline. Today, Congress can give Greta her climate dream back. The key is President

BERLIN (Reuters) – Researchers at Google say they have achieved ‘quantum supremacy’, in which a computer harnessing the properties of sub-atomic particles did a far better job of solving a problem than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. FILE PHOTO: A handout picture from October 2019 shows a component of Google’s Quantum Computer in the Santa

NASA has found no evidence of Chandrayaan-2’s Vikram lander in the images captured during a latest flyby of its Moon orbiter of the lunar region where India’s ambitious mission attempted a soft landing, the US space agency said. On September 7, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) attempted a soft landing of Vikram on the uncharted

BERLIN/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Wednesday it had achieved a breakthrough in computing research by using a quantum computer to solve in minutes a complex problem that would take today’s most powerful supercomputer thousands of years to crack. Google researchers expect that quantum computers within a few years will fuel advancements

PIXLEY, Calif. (Reuters) – Joey Airoso has always been proud of his cows, whose milk goes into the butter sold by national dairy company Land O’Lakes. Now he has something new to brag about: the vast amounts of gas produced by his 2,900-head herd is powering truck fleets, homes and factories across the state of

Bye bye to bunny hops: when US astronauts next touch down on the Moon, expect them to walk almost as they do on Earth, thanks to a new generation of spacesuits offering key advantages over those of the Apollo-era. Prototypes of the Orion Crew Survival Suit that will be worn on the journey and the

The date for the world’s first commercial space flight is not even confirmed yet, but future passengers’ Star Trek-like outfits are ready and waiting.   Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson on Wednesday introduced the custom suits that will be worn by the first private astronauts.   US sportswear designer Under Armour “worked day and night

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has taken a fresh set of pictures under better lighting conditions of the area where the Indian moon lander Vikram likely ended up and experts will be making a rigorous search for it, according to LRO Project Scientist Noah Petro. “The lighting conditions on Monday were much more favourable, (with)

Smart Dragon-1 rocket, China’s first rocket designed for commercial use, carrying three satellites lifts off from the launch pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province, China August 17, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer BEIJING (Reuters) – China will launch test flights for the next two space rockets in its Smart Dragon series meant for commercial use in

NASA made history Friday morning when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir stepped outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty battery charger. The all-female spacewalk – the first of its kind “in human history,” the agency said – began at 7:38 a.m. Eastern time as the two American astronauts set their suits to

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – One of the world’s largest freshwater fish is protected by the natural equivalent of a “bullet-proof vest,” helping it thrive in the dangerous waters of the Amazon River basin with flexible armor-like scales able to withstand ferocious piranha attacks. FILE PHOTO: Diver Alex Reeson checks on the Arapaima or Pirarucu fishes in