The ESA/JAXA space probe BepiColombo made its first flyby of Mercury over the weekend and beamed back some excellent photos to mark the occasion. It’s a big milestone for the orbiter, which has been working its way toward Mercury since it launched nearly three years ago, on October 20, 2018. …
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Apple has just released the updated iPad Mini, a device that packs most of what makes the larger iPads so popular into a diminutive frame. This tablet has an 8.3-inch 60Hz LCD display with narrow bezels and impressive brightness for a tablet. It also exhibits a phenomenon dubbed “jelly scrolling,” …
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A new analysis of data from Apple’s joint heart study with Stanford has found that the Apple Watch is capable of detecting more rhythm abnormalities than we thought it could. The Apple Heart Study was designed to test the Apple Watch’s ability to detect abnormal heart rhythms. Participants whose Watches …
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AMD has announced a major new efficiency initiative that’s intended to build off its previous 25×20 project. The company will now work to deliver a 30x improvement in energy efficiency in AI and high performance computing overall, relative to today’s CPU and GPU accelerators. AMD’s blog post doesn’t go into …
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If the 21st century has taught us any astronomical lessons, it’s that counting planets is hard. In 2000, there were nine planets, and now there are eight, but that might not last. Astronomers have been on the hunt for a theorized ninth planet in the extreme outer solar system, and …
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One of the perks of being a science journalist is being regularly wowed by the very best images from the world’s various space agencies. This week, Hubble was the darling, and the venerable space telescope has provided us these five absolutely beautiful images of stars, galaxies, and nebulae. We’ll start …
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There is a truly enormous new comet sailing in from the Oort Cloud. It’s always exciting to entertain a new celestial visitor, and this massive Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) is causing a stir among astronomers worldwide. First of all, it’s huge. There have been several big, bright comets in the last …
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A pair of molecular clouds known as Taurus and Perseus are famous among astronomers. These star-forming regions are just 400 and 1,000 light-years from Earth, respectively, offering a glimpse of how stars come to be in the galaxy. Now we know a bit more about the origin of these clouds …
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(Photo: Brian McGowan/Unsplash)NASA has announced it’s reshuffling its human spaceflight directorate to better accommodate low Earth orbit (LEO) operations and deep space exploration. The agency stated its Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate would be broken into two new divisions, one of which will prepare future operations on the moon …
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On the evening of Sept. 13, something hit Jupiter, producing an explosion and a flash of light visible even to amateur astronomers with off-the-shelf telescopes. Now, the hunt is on to figure out what the impactor could have been. The collision was first reported by Brazilian amateur astronomer José Luis …
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