Science

He says he had the best. He tried to roll back more than 100 environmental protections while in office. Is that what he’s bragging about in the debate?

The contract granted by NASA — worth up to $843 million — will see SpaceX develop a vehicle to safely deorbit the space station “in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.”

NASA says the station will remain in use until then, and expects both the station and deorbit vehicle to break apart upon re-entry to avoid risk to populated areas.

The GOES-U satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.

It’s one of four National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites equipped with powerful new tools to monitor weather in space and on Earth. They’ll provide advanced imagery to inform forecasts, map lightning activity in real time, and detect solar flares.

Closing a loop that began with this 2016 launch, NASA is about to send the fourth and final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series into space as part of a system for much better real-time weather forecasting.

Until now, patients with Medicare — a government-funded insurance program mostly for older adults — haven’t been eligible to enroll in the RxPass program Amazon debuted last year. The RxPass offers Medicare patients “unlimited access” to 60 different prescription medications for $5 a month and a prime membership. For now, patients with Medicaid — state-funded insurance for lower-income Americans — are still ineligible for the program.

NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.

The agency is targeting a return “no earlier than” June 22nd, and plans to hold a teleconference at 12PM ET on June 18th to talk over details of the delayed departure.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:

For the photography nerds: 1 second exposure, f 1.4, ISO 2000, 24 mm lens.

The NHS has now revealed the scope of the damage following the June 3rd cyberattack. In addition to the operations, over 800 outpatient appointments were canceled, and 18 organ transplants were diverted.

“The cyber-attack has had a significant impact on our services, and this is likely to remain the case for some time yet,” say hospital execs.

It includes images of cloud vortices (white), an aurora (pink), a solar flare (light blue), Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt (brown), Jupiter’s moon Io (yellow), Mars (orange), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (black), a red sprite cluster (red), an algal bloom (green), Neptune (blue), and crab nebula (purple).

Happy Pride!

Data centers already use a lot of water and electricity, and adding AI overviews to Google Search only makes those problems bigger.

AI uses “orders of magnitude more energy” than traditional search engines, Hugging Face researcher Sasha Luccioni tells Scientific American.

Correction: Apple’s AI emoji are generated on device, not in data centers.

Research published in Nature today used machine learning to try to find “a name-like component” in the rumbles of elephants. The AI model identified which elephant was being addressed 27.5 percent of the time, and they could use those calls to get a reaction from that elephant.

“Our finding that elephants are not simply mimicking the sound associated with the individual they are calling was the most intriguing,” Fristrup said. “The capacity to utilize arbitrary sonic labels for other individuals suggests that other kinds of labels or descriptors may exist in elephant calls.” 

With 8 temperature sensors, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer works even if you don’t place it “just right.” Those sensors also track temperature on the food’s surface and in the oven to “predict” when your food will be ready within minutes of starting to cook.

Reviews say the Combustion is very good at its job and makes guessing when the turkey will be done or overcooking a steak a problem of the past.

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Most induction requires a 240V outlet, but this new cooktop from Impulse Labs has a battery inside that stores up juice for when you want to cook.

This means it will still work when the power is out, but the company plans to make more appliances with batteries to eventually form a “fractionalized home battery backup system.”

The Impulse Cooktop costs $6,000 and should ship later this year.

I was just chatting about The Moon, a movie I watched last year about a Korean astronaut getting stranded in space. It was a fun sci-fi flick but to my surprise, Korea actually launched its very first space agency last week.

This comes at a time when China, Japan, and India have heavily invested in space exploration. Korea’s pledged roughly $72 billion to its new agency, with a lunar landing planned for 2032, and a Mars landing for 2045.

SpaceX isn’t the only one busy today, as the finally-launched Starliner is closing in on the International Space Station. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have already performed “about two hours of free-flight demonstrations,” and more are planned, despite additional helium leaks detected by flight controllers overnight.

The autonomous docking procedure is scheduled for 12:15PM ET.