Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is coming back to Earth on Wednesday after four and a half days docked at the International Space Station. The return, to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, will conclude an uncrewed trial run for the spacecraft, which is designed for NASA to carry astronauts to and from the space…
Category: Tech
‘Quantum Internet’ Inches Closer With Advance in Data Teleportation
From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today’s machines look like toys. Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years. In the fall of 2019, Google unveiled an…
E.P.A. to Block Pebble Mine Project in Alaska
In 2020, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the project that was seen as critical for it to proceed. The company seeking to build the mine, the Pebble Limited Partnership, appealed that decision and is also expected to challenge the legality of the Biden administration’s new plan to protect Bristol Bay. The…
Corporations Pledge to Buy ‘Green’ at Davos Gathering
WASHINGTON — More than 50 corporations have joined a global “buyers’ club” that pledges to purchase aluminum, steel and other commodities made from processes that emit little to no carbon, a move that will be announced on Wednesday by leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. John Kerry, President Biden’s special climate envoy,…
A Proposed Road in Alaska Threatens Anilca Protections
By Alaskan standards, the gravel road that an isolated community near the Aleutian Islands wants to build to connect to an airport is not a huge project. But because it would be cut through a federal wildlife refuge, the road has been a simmering source of contention since it was first proposed decades ago. Now,…
Some Elephants Are Getting Too Much Plastic in Their Diets
Some Asian elephants are a little shy about their eating habits. They sneak into dumps near human settlements at the edges of their forest habitats and quickly gobble up garbage — plastic utensils, packaging and all. But their guilty pleasure for fast food is traveling with them — elephants are transporting plastic and other human…
‘Sharkcano’: NASA captures undersea volcano eruption
NASA’s Earth Observatory has released satellite images of an undersea volcano erupting. The image, taken on May 14 by the Operational Land Imager 2 on the Landsat 9 satellite, shows a plume of discolored water being emitted from the submarine volcano. The satellite is designed to capture high-resolution images of our planet. …
Here’s what happened during Boeing’s ‘nail-biting’ spacecraft docking
Boeing managed to dock a spacecraft at the International Space Station late last week, but it was not without several minor hangups. The mission kicked off Thursday evening with a Florida launch, and the Starliner — which is designed to carry astronauts but is flying without people for this test — docked with…
Hubble identifies unusual wrinkle in expansion rate of the universe
Measuring the expansion rate of the universe was one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s main goals when it was launched in 1990. Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that accelerating rate — as well as uncover a mysterious wrinkle that only brand-new physics may solve….
Mark Zuckerberg sued over Cambridge Analytica privacy breach
WASHINGTON – The District of Columbia on Monday sued Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold him personally liable for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a privacy breach of millions of Facebook users’ personal data that became a major corporate and political scandal. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed the civil lawsuit against Zuckerberg…