Nasa investigating the habitable potential of Europa🔭

Hubble Space Telescope had captured ‘surprising evidence of activity’ on Europa – which made many think that aliens might have been found

The discovery is more likely to relate to water vapour "plumes" that Hubble spotted high above the moon in 2012, but which have not been seen again.

If the plumes are shown to be linked to the moon's sub-surface ocean, it would make the job of investigating the habitable potential of Europa much easier. Instead of having to drill through the moon's thick, icy shell, scientists could analyse the chemical content of the plumes.

Jupiter's moon Europa may have an internal ocean of liquid water, along with the chemistry and energy that life requires. In the cold reaches of the outer solar system, the uppermost portion of Europa’s icy shell forms a rock-hard skin which fractures and deforms to create cracks, ridges, and bands.

The 1,900-mile-wide moon is thought to hold two to three times as much water as all the Earth's oceans.

Europa's ocean is believed to be salty, and warmed by powerful tidal forces generated by Jupiter's gravity so that it remains unfrozen.

Along with the chemistry and energy that life requires. In the cold reaches of the outer solar system, the uppermost portion of Europa’s icy shell forms a rock-hard skin which fractures and deforms to create cracks, ridges, and bands.

$300,000 hacking prize announced for Nexus 6P and 5X🥇

Google is launching the “Project Zero Security Contest” for hackers where they will have to hack Nexus 6P and 5X. The contest has over US$300,000 in prizes for those who will be able to hack the devices with only the device’s email address and phone number.

Google has announced that all its Nexus devices including Nexus 6P will start running a data-saving feature that has been limited only to its Fi Network. This will be for devices not yet on the Fi Network, Google Wi-Fi Assistant.

The feature will be made available to users of Google Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 and Nexus 5. The feature is similar to Windows 10's Wi-Fi Sense. Google explained via Google+ that Nexus 6P and all other Nexus devices not using Project Fi, would be able to save cellular data by taking advantage of Wi-Fi Assistant.

Users will be able to save on their data expenses yet enjoy the connection with free Wi-Fi spots. As Google Project Fi uses a VPN for the best protection, users need not worry about security and privacy on Project Fi.

Google has stated that it always watches out for any abuse so that it can better its services. The tech giant has also claimed that it neither records nor views content sent over VPN. Only Google Nexus smartphones running on Android 5.1 Lollipop or above have the Wi-Fi Assistant feature.

ESA's Missing Comet Lander Philae Spotted At Last🛰

Only a month left of the Rosetta mission, finally imaged Philae and to see it in such amazing detail.

Philae stuck in a dark crack on the surface of its comet home,the first glimpse since the robot lab crashlanded in 2014.

The European Space Agency (ESA) released a photograph of the washing machine-sized robot lab on the comet's rough surface, one leg thrust into the air.

The image, captured with the Rosetta orbiter's OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on Friday last week, were downloaded two days later,just weeks before the official end of the ground-breaking science mission to unravel the mysteries of life on Earth.

The $1.4-billion mission, saw Rosetta launched into space in March 2004, with Philae riding piggyback.

The pair travelled some 6.5 billion four billion miles to enter comet 67P orbit in August 2014.

Three months later, Rosetta sent the 100-kg. (220-pound) probe down to the comet surface, starting a deep-space saga closely followed around the world via cartoon recreations of the pioneering pair.

Philae bounced several times after its harpoons failed to fire into the comet surface, and ended up in a ditch shadowed from the Sun's battery-replenishing rays.

Until now, nobody knew exactly where.

This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search," said Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin.

"We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible that we have captured this at the final hour."

It managed to send home data from 60 hours of experiments, before its batteries failed and it entered standby mode.

The robot woke up in June 2015, and sent eight messages to Earth before falling permanently silent in July 2015.

Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket EXPLODED on the launch pad 🚀

This is the dramatic moment the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered a catastrophic explosion on the Cape Canaveral launch pad during a routine pre-launch check on Thursday morning.

The blast, which shook buildings and windows miles away, occurred shortly after 9am and destroyed Facebook's $200million Amos-6 satellite that was set to launch on Saturday morning aboard the reusable rocket.

Billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the cause of the massive blast - which caused no injuries - is still unknown as the accident throws into question the future of his program of subcontracting his 'reusable' and 'recycled' rockets to NASA.

The satellite would have opened up free internet to more than 14 countries in Africa to serve the most populated areas more efficiently. 

The test was in advance of Saturday's planned launch from from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which is next to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, of an Israeli-made communications satellite. 

SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today's static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries.

Pearl worth $100million kept decade under bed 🛏

Fisherman, who has not been identified, found the priceless 34kg gem ten years ago in sea off the coast of Palawan Island, Philippines.
He didn't know the potential value and kept it as a good luck charm in his wooden home.

But a fire at the property earlier this year forced him to have a clear out and move house.The fisherman handed it in to the local tourism officer. 

Tourism officer said: The fisherman threw the anchor down and it got stuck on a rock during a storm.He noticed that it was lodged on a shell and swam down to pull up the anchor.

The gem was shown off to the public today.

The current record holder is Pearl  of Lao Tze, which was also found off Palawan, Philippines, in 1934.

The priceless rock measures a staggering 1ft foot wide and 2.2 feet long  dwarfing the current world's biggest Pearl  which weighed 6.4kg and is worth $35million.

Natural pearls are formed inside the shells of molluscs as a defence mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant, such as a parasite. Despite popular belief, pearls rarely grow from a grain of sand.

The animal creates a pearl sac and secretes calcium carbonate to seal off the irritation. This secretion process is repeated many times, producing a pearl.


The jewel increases in size as each new layer of calcium carbonate is deposited. Saltwater pearls usually take two to three years to develop, but larger pearls such as the one held in Puerto Princesca would have taken far longer.

Titan's canyons are flooded 🗻🌊👽

Titan is a strange a frigid moon of Saturn. larger than Mercury, where water is frozen rock solid and lakes of liquid methane permeate the surface. But now there's a new weird fold in the story of Titan: it's got canyons flooded with more liquid hydrocarbons.

The find, announced today by NASA and published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal, details "channels" of hydrocarbons — in other words, streams of methane and other organic compounds that flow like water at low temperatures. While the canyon features were known to NASA previously, radar evidence now reveals that the features are liquid and not solid ices.

The observations come from a Cassini probe encounter with Titan in May 2013. The channels flow from the giant hydrocarbon lakes into the canyons, some of which are up to 1,870 feet (570 meters) deep. However, the streams are typically less than half a mile long and flow into "ponds" at the bottom of the canyons, rather than carving giant river systems as we might find on Earth.

The process is similar to what happens on Earth, but with the chemicals switched up. Canyons on Earth are typically eroded by water to create wide chasms over relatively short geologic periods. But on Titan, water ice is the bedrock, eroded gradually by methane, ethane, and more organic compounds.

Vid Flumina's channels may have formed much like the Grand Canyon, with the erosion forces of the water cutting deeper as the surrounding land thrust upward. But while some of the canyon channels feature sea levels on par with Ligeia Mare, other channels feature much higher sea levels. More research is needed to explain the evolution of Vid Flumina.

In fact, many hypothesize that Titan looks a lot like a smaller, colder version of early Earth and could be an ideal place for life to eventually develop. Others hypothesize that it could exist there already utilizing chemistry based on nitrogen. Even weirder, in addition to the bodies of organic compounds on the surface, there may also be a subterranean ocean as seen on other moons like Europa and Enceladus, both of which are believed to be potentially ripe for life.

As the only moon with a thick atmosphere, and the only place other than Earth known to have liquid bodies on the surface, there's a lot of enthusiasm to explore Titan in the coming decade. 

Quantum computer that can be reprogrammed with laser beams❔

Debnath and colleagues at the University of Maryland reveal their new device can solve three algorithms using quantum effects to perform calculations in a single step, where a normal computer would require several operations.

Debnath's quantum computer works by stringing five qubits in a line, and using lasers to manipulate them. These qubits are basically just tightly-trapped atoms of the element ytterbium. By shining a laser on the atoms with an exact staccato pulse of light, you can throw them into superposition—the state where they're doing two opposite things at the same time such as spinning in two directions with different angular momentum. That's where the quantum principle called entanglement comes in.

In this new quantum computer, Debnath's team can use different pulses of laser light to entangle different pairs of the qubit atoms together,even ones not next to one another in a line,so that if something happens to one, it also effects the other. Basically, the scientists can force different atoms to share a piece of arbitrary information.

This is what allows the computer to tackle different problems and be programmed with new algorithms. Normally you'd have to physically rearrange your quantum computer's parts to adjust it to run different problems. But the laser-based setup of Debnath's quantum computer allows him to fire lasers at any of his five 5 qubits, entangling pairs of qubits together in whatever order he wants.

This flexibility allows Debnath's team to rapidly re-program their computer to solve different problems and run different algorithms. And if they come up with a new algorithm they'd like to run, all they have to do is figure out which atoms need to be entangled and in what order, and then let the lasers do the rest.

Debnath's team "demonstrated several algorithms. [Including two] which both use quantum effects to perform a mathematical calculation in a single step, whereas a conventional computer would require several operations. They also demonstrate a quantum Fourier transform, which is a key component of many of the heftier quantum algorithms, such as those used to break encryption.

Debnath and his colleagues are still a long ways from where we'd like to be with quantum computers. Their machine can only handle small algorithms, and gives answers more slowly than even the most sluggish traditional computer. But having a quantum computer that can be reprogrammed without being physically disassembled and reconstructed is a good start.

SpaceX completed the first full duration test 🚀

Elon Musk's SpaceX is preparing to reuse one of the rockets it launched and landed safely this year by sending it back into space.

Now the company has begun testing this rocket as it prepares to meet its goal of relaunching a 'reusable' rocket by October.

On Thursday, July 28, SpaceX engineers successful conducted a full duration engine test firing of a recovered Falcon 9 first stage booster on a test stand at the company’s rocket development test facility in McGregor, Texas.

The used 15 story Falcon booster had successfully carried out an intact soft landing on an ocean going platform after launching a Japanese commercial telecommunications satellite only two months ago on May 6 of this year. 

SpaceX has managed to land four rockets from space back on Earth, one on land and three on sea, with the latest successful sea landing on 28 May.

Mr Musk plans to relaunch the second rocket it successfully landed within the next few months.

If it goes ahead, this would make it the first relaunch of the private space company's rockets.

This move would take the firm, and the aerospace industry as a whole, another step closer towards reusable rockets becoming commonplace.

This could make deep space travel cheaper, helping pave the way for a viable manned mission to Mars.

Elon Musk’s goal is to radically slash the cost of launching rockets and access to space via rocket reuse in a way that will one day lead to his vision of a ‘City on Mars.’

The company plans to start offering a service to send payloads to Mars as early as 2018, with prices starting at 62 million $ for the Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX Lands Another Rocket 🚀

For the second time ever, Elon Musk's SpaceX has landed one of its Falcon 9 rocket boosters back on land after launching a payload into orbit. 

The Falcon 9 took flight at 12:45 a.m. ET Monday carrying an uncrewed Dragon capsule filled with thousands of pounds of supplies and experiments toward the International Space Station for NASA.

The contents will help to support over 250 scientific experiments due to take place aboard the ISS, and contains a number of interesting articles, most intriguingly of all a DNA sequencer.

Astronaut DNA is usually sequenced back on Earth, which takes months, so being able to do so from the comfort of their own space station is an interesting development. The custom built Biomolecule Sequencer is designed to demonstrate that “DNA sequencing is feasible in an orbiting spacecraft,” and will identify microbes, diagnose diseases and understand crew member health.

It could also “potentially help detect DNA-based life elsewhere in the solar system,” according to NASA.

That’s not all that’s on board. As CNET points out , astronauts will also sign for a Phase Change Heat Exchanger and three dimensional solar cell. 

Shortly after launch, the first stage of the rocket, known as the booster, separated and softly touched down on a pad in Florida as part of a spectacular nighttime landing.

This is the second booster SpaceX has brought back to land and the fifth the company has recovered after launching a payload into orbit. 

Landing pad landings are somewhat easier than landing on a drone ship, because it's an easier target to hit. It does require more fuel for success, however, meaning that for missions that burn a lot of fuel, landing on a drone ship in the sea will be necessary.

SpaceX is performing rocket landings with the goal of eventually reducing the cost of launching to space by reusing rocket bodies for multiple spaceflights.

Currently, rockets are spent after launching one payload to space, but if reusable boosters become a reality, companies that hope to get their wares to space will only need to pay for the cost of the spacecraft and the fuel for launch.

The company is expected to re-fly its first landed rocket sometime in September or October, but the actual mission it will launch hasn't yet been decided, according to SpaceX.

NASA's Juno Spacecraft in Orbit Around Mighty Jupiter 🚀

After an almost five-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet, NASA’s Juno spacecraft successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit during a 35-minute engine burn. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth 

Preplanned events leading up to the orbital insertion engine burn included changing the spacecraft’s attitude to point the main engine in the desired direction and then increasing the spacecraft’s rotation rate from 2 to 5 revolutions per minute (RPM) to help stabilize it.

The burn of Juno’s 645-Newton Leros-1b main engine began on time at 8:18 p.m. PDT (11:18 p.m. EDT), decreasing the spacecraft’s velocity by 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second) and allowing Juno to be captured in orbit around Jupiter. Soon after the burn was completed, Juno turned so that the sun’s rays could once again reach the 18,698 individual solar cells that give Juno its energy.

Over the next few months, Juno’s mission and science teams will perform final testing on the spacecraft’s subsystems, final calibration of science instruments and some science collection.

NASA has published a time-lapse video of the Galilean moons orbiting around Jupiter.

The movements of Jupiter’s four largest moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were captured from June 12 to 29 as Juno traveled closer and closer toward Jupiter, starting when the spacecraft was 10 million miles away until it was 3 million miles away.

The video also shows that Callisto, the outermost of the moons, is dimmer than the others, Bolton said. Scientists did not previously know this was the case and don’t know why—another question they’ll have to try to answer as Juno continues its exploration of Jupiter.

NASA's Juno Spacecraft Getting Close to Jupiter 🚀

Jupiter is thought to be the first planet which formed in the solar system and was first spotted from earth by the Babylonians in the 8th century BC.Little is known about the huge gas giant which is so big it can be seen from Earth without a telescope, and which produces the most spectacular auroras in the solar system.

Scientists are not even sure if there is a solid core beneath its turbulent atmosphere or what drives the enormous magnetic field which surrounds the planet. If the invisible magnetosphere glowed in visible light, it would appear twice the size of the full Moon from Earth.

The Juno spacecraft - named after the Roman goddess and wife of Jupiter - is packed with nine instruments capable of peering into the planet's heart.Spacecraft has spent the past five years travelling the 1.7 million mile journey to reach Jupiter and will arrive on Monday, when it will fire its main thruster to brake, and slip into orbit around the planet.

In the evening of July 4, Juno will perform a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second).It will fly 2,600 miles above the cloud tops - 3,000 miles closer to the surface than any other mission has ever achieved.

The entry – dubbed Jupiter Orbital Insertion – is the trickiest part of the mission. Nobody even knows if the spacecraft can survive the radiation and turbulence of being so close to Jupiter. It’s a gamble and the craft has been fitted for a titanium vault to try and protect its sensitive instruments.

Once in Jupiter’s orbit, the spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months.This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.“We’re going to go in close, get the data and get out. And the first time we go in, that’s the most dangerous.”

Signals from Earth take 48 minutes to reach mission controllers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, so they cannot intervene if something goes wrong.

Once the mission is over, Juno will dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere and burn up to avoid accidentally crashing onto one of the planet’s moons.

Asymmetric Molecule, Key To Life, Detected In Space For First Time 🔬

Molecules with "right-handed" and "left-handed" versions are essential to all life on Earth, and have been found in meteors and comets. Now, for the first time, one has been spotted in interstellar space.

Discovering such molecules in deep space, called chiral molecules, can help researchers understand the development of life on Earth, which is rich in those complex molecules — what presenters at the American Astronomical Society's summer meeting in San Diego called "life's first handshake."

This discovery is going to provide us with a laboratory to try to test theories about the role that chiral molecules played in the origins of life here on Earth and how that chirality might play a role in the origins of life elsewhere in the galaxy.
The researchers used the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to pinpoint the intricate molecule propylene oxide near the center of the Milky Way, in the mammoth star-forming cloud of gas called Sagittarius B2.

Key biological reactions on Earth rely on molecules with the property called chirality compounds that can form in two different varieties that are mirror images of each other, sort of like left and right hands. Though the molecules are made of the same components, it's impossible to flip one around to make it exactly match the other.

On Earth, most chiral molecules exist largely in a single formation, even though when you create them chemically from scratch, both varieties will form. Many chemical reactions only work when molecules of a particular "handedness" interact with each other.

"When you shake somebody's hand, your right hand shakes another right hand, and it forms that nice, interlocking gesture; if you try to shake a left hand with your right hand it's a little awkward because the interaction is different," McGuire said. "Chiral molecules work the same way." (For instance, the chemical carvone will smell like spearmint in one configuration, but its mirror image smells like caraway.)

Processes powered by one particular "handedness" will produce more of that same type of molecule, and molecules with the wrong "handedness" won't work at all in many biological systems. Because of that, most of the important chiral molecules on Earth, like amino acids, are all the same "handedness" as each other. But scientists don't know how the Earth came to favor particular varietie.

Researchers have found complex organic molecules on meteorites and comets, including chiral molecules which have shown a slight preference for one handedness over the other. Just a few percent excess "could be the tipping point that pushed life in a single direction, and that gave life the push it needed to, say, use only left-handed amino acids," Brandon Carroll, the work's other first author and a chemistry graduate student at California Institute of Technology, said at the conference.

"But if we want to understand where and how this started, we have to go even further back than the meteorites; we have to look at the gas clouds where these molecules formed from," he added.

In this case, they spotted a hefty dose of propylene oxide in distant interstellar space — about 80 percent Earth's mass, which at room temperature would take up five and a half earths' worth of space, Carroll said.

If chiral materials had existed already in the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system formed, or if they'd fallen to Earth on a meteorite or had been carried on a comet, that could explain Earth's preference — and also help explain the process of life's first formation on Earth.

The researchers' measurements of the propylene oxide don't reveal which handedness the far-off molecules have; the data from the radio telescopes show only the composition, not how each molecule is put together. However, future work could try to determine that by watching how the molecules interact with polarized light, which corkscrews in a particular direction, the researchers said.

BEAM Opens Up For Checks

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module’s (BEAM) hatch was opened up for the first time today. Astronaut Jeff Williams entered BEAM and checked sensors, installed air ducts and reported back to Earth that it was in pristine condition.

This first ingress by two members of the International Space Station’s Expedition 47 crew was done primarily to collect air samples and begin downloading data from the on board sensors. The duo entered wearing headlamps and masks.

. Williams also checked to ensure the on board air tanks, which helped pressurize the module, were empty. After Williams completed the BEAM checks he exited and closed the hatch for the day.

There will be two more opportunities for the crew to enter BEAM over the next couple of days to add more sensors and equipment. Each time, the hatch will be closed and sealed. After Wednesday, there is currently no timetable for more entries into the module.

BEAM will be entered between six to seven times per year. Over the next two years, sensors on board the module will measure radiation levels, micrometeorite impact as well as temperature levels.

This is the first human-rated inflatable habitat. Modules like BEAM could be used on future deep space exploration missions.

Planet Discovered 1,200 Light Years Away Could Support Life

Discovered alien planets might be water worlds whose global oceans are teeming with life, scientists say.Computer models suggest both planets are covered by uninterrupted oceans, which could theoretically support a wealth of aquatic lifeforms.
"Look at our own ocean — it is just absolutely full of life,"

A planet discovered by the Kepler space telescope just 1,200 light years away could actually support life.

The revelation is part of a study on the planet by lead author Aomawa Shields and her team from UCLA’s department of physics and astronomy.

Kepler-62f was in fact discovered back in 2013 by the exoplanet-hunting telescope along with a number of other planets within that solar system.

Shields and her team however wanted to focus on just one of those, 62f. What they found was that despite being some considerable distance from its host star 62f had rocky composition that was not unlike ours on Earth.

While Kepler was able to confirm the planet’s composition it could describe 62f’s atmosphere, so Shields joined forces with another team from the University of Washington to find out.

What they found was that despite being further from its star than we are from Earth, the planet could actually support life and liquid water under a number scenarios.

“We found there are multiple atmospheric compositions that allow it to be warm enough to have surface liquid water,” said Shields.

For example: 62f could quite happily support life, but only if it had 2,500 times more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere than is currently found on Earth.

Why? Well because it’s further from the star it needs to somehow stay warm enough for liquid water and there’s nothing more warming for a planet than a big surrounding atmosphere of CO2.

While this would normally be the end of the matter the team discovered that actually Kepler-62f could still theoretically support life even if that wasn’t the case.

“But if it doesn’t have a mechanism to generate lots of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere to keep temperatures warm, and all it had was an Earth-like amount of carbon dioxide, certain orbital configurations could allow Kepler-62f’s surface temperatures to temporarily get above freezing during a portion of its year,” she said.

“And this might help melt ice sheets formed at other times in the planet’s orbit.”

NASA astronomers recently announced the discovery of 1,284 previously undetected planets, including nine which could be habitable. This is the biggest collection of planets ever discovered.

Using NASA’s powerful Kepler telescope, astronomers were then able to utilise a new statistical analysis method developed by Princeton University which drastically increases number of planets that can be discovered.

Google/Alphabet's big projects for 2016 is Project Abacus

Google is set to begin testing a new login method which replaces passwords with a 'trust-based' system which monitors the way you typically use your phone.

In the grab bag of Google/Alphabet's big projects for 2016 is Project Abacus. 

Former Googler Chris Messina sounded ecstatic about it on Twitter, saying that Abacus would beat the current gold standard, two-factor authentication, since losing access to SMS wouldn't break the whole system.

During its first public demo at Google's I/O conference, Regina Dugan claimed that with its "trust score" method, Project Abacus "may prove to be ten-fold more secure than just a fingerprint sensor." And it's easy to believe this could be true.

For keeping out attackers, the password is a manageable solution that can range from weak to tough -- and right now, "killing the password" is a trendy set of words. Regular password systems are considered the weakest, especially ones that require a password to be short and simple.

Coming more into fashion now is two-factor authentication. This typically combines login with a text message or email you need as a second step for verifying it's really you. It's tougher to hack, and this year it's being phased in for banking customers by federal mandate. And then we have fingerprints, which are very secure and onerous to imitate, although a thumbprint can be obtained by physical force. Instead of any of these current "front door locks" on our phones, accounts and logins, someone using Abacus would ... actually do very little.

The system is designed to be used on smartphones, and works by constantly checking for a number of personal indicators which can grant access to accounts or the phone itself.

Instead of asking for a password, the phone might analyse your face, your voice, how you type, how you swipe, how you move and where you are. All of these bits of data are fed into the API, which then generates a 'trust score' which indicates how likely it is that it's actually you carrying the phone.

The idea is to make devices more secure. Someone could easily steal a password, but it would be much harder for them to mimic the unique way someone else uses their phone. Google believes a login system based on a combination of these factors could be 10 times more secure than a fingerprint scan.

Facebook live interactive map now allows you to look inside your neighbor's bedroom

Once you click on the tab, you'll be taking through to a world map which is covered in blue dots, each one represents a person who is using the Facebook live function.

When you click on the dot you will be transferred to watch your chosen live video and immediately able to join the people filming at that exact moment.

You could be entering into the strange goings on of people across the globe as it allows anyone to share whatever they're doing.

Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that this will become the next big way we communicate.

"Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world," he said.

Elon Musk planning SpaceX mission to Mars by 2018

SpaceX, announced Wednesday morning it planned to send one of its spaceships to Mars by 2018, the most ambitious goal set to date by the burgeoning private space travel industry funded by billionaires instead of governments.

The mission would be unmanned, Musk said in a Twitter post, but the flights will be used to learn how to land the sorts of large payloads humans would need should they ever colonize the red planet, another SpaceX executive said.

These days it takes about eight months to get to Mars via rocket, according to Nasa. And as Musk notes, the inside of his Dragon 2 rocket offers about as much space as a sport utility vehicle.

SpaceX recently made a breakthrough in privatized space flight. In early April it landed a reusable rocket on a robot-controlled floating platform; the idea being that would make it much cheaper to keep sending people beyond the atmosphere.

Nasa meantime is working on its own Mars missions, including an effort to send humans there by the 2030s. But the US government has restricted the space program’s funding in recent years, leaving it up to billionaires such as Musk, Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin’s Richard Branson to fund their own would-be galactic fleets. 

The SpaceX executive said Nasa would offer some technical support, such as use of a deep-space communications network, but its Mars flight would be a “SpaceX mission”.

2018 is the very near future. If SpaceX were starting their Mars program today, their deadline would be a total joke. “They’ve said for a long time that they intend to test their Dragon 2 capsule by going to Mars and trying to land,” says David Hewitt, a rocket scientist with private spaceflight company Dynetics. SpaceX has been working on its human-capable capsule for several years. It is not only bigger than the original cargo-only Dragon, but capable of making planet landings using eight thrusters.

SpaceX Keeps Aborting Liftoffs Because Rocket Fuel Is Tricky
Or at least, it will be once it’s built. If the craft isn’t ready in time, the next Mars window won’t be for another 2.2 years. “I feel like they can do it,” says Hewitt, “it’s just a matter of how fast.”

The second big challenge will be successfully launching a Falcon Heavy rocket (which is basically just three Falcon 9s strapped together). The company is aiming to get one off the ground sometime this year, but so far has nothing planned. If it does meet that goal, SpaceX will only be able to launch a few Heavies before it’s time for Mars.

The company has been relatively successful at launching its smaller Falcon 9s without exploding, but the Heavy is, well, heavier. And with three times the engines as the Falcon 9, it’s way more complicated to fly. “Flying twenty-seven engines at once is very challenging,” says Hewitt. “But if you can get those rockets working together, you can boost all that mass out of Earth’s gravity well all the way up to that delta freaking vee.”

Launching a rocket is hard. But it is easy compared to landing a spacecraft on a planet. Hewitt thinks landing the Dragon 2 cargo capsule on Mars will be the mission’s riskiest moment. You can’t just land on Mars using parachutes—not with a capsule the size of a small tank. The red planet’s atmosphere is way too thin, and won’t generate enough drag in the chute to slow it down. Instead, the Dragon 2 will use eight paired SuperDraco boosters to control its descent. If you’ve kept up with SpaceX’s saga of landing rockets on barges, you’ll know that this is going to be hard. Although not impossible. Mars’ low gravity—about one-third that of Earth’s—will help. As will all the practice SpaceX is getting by crash-landing (and sometimes actual-landing) Falcon 9s on oceanic barges.

The so-called Red Dragon mission is a no-funds-exchanged partnership with NASA, which means the space agency will provide its expertise and let SpaceX use its Deep Space Network, which will make it easier for SpaceX to communicate with the Dragon 2. “This collaboration could provide valuable entry, descent, and landing data to NASA for our journey to Mars, while providing support to American industry,” says Tabatha Thompson, a NASA spokesperson.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to colonize Mars. Earlier this year, Musk teased that he would reveal more about his company’s plans at this September’s International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. A successful first foray would set SpaceX up for regular supply drops to Mars, eventually scaling up to a future crewed colonization mission. That future begins in 2018.

SpaceX successfully lands its rocket on a floating drone ship.

What Space X and its founder Elon Musk accomplished Friday by landing a reusable rocket on a moving drone ship is no small feat. So you’ll want to watch this historic moment.

The crew did what it had failed to accomplish four times before by not only fulfilling its contract with NASA to transport 4,409 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station but it also stuck the landing.

And what a landing it was. Hundreds of Space X employees gathered to watch the event outside the control room while millions more tuned in to the live stream from home or at work. The launch went smoothly, quickly propelling the rocket into space. But the real fanfare was all about the landing, which happens quickly as the rocket has to slow its momentum at the last seconds before touching down.

Why does Space X keep focusing on these ocean landings? A drone ship floating on the ocean is a harder target to hit than a large expanse of ground, since it is smaller and floating on moving water. Plus, all of Space X's ocean landing attempts have resulted in the rocket exploding. Still, landing at sea can be less tricky than ground landings, and the main reason has to do with fuel. To return back to Earth, the Falcon 9 has to use the fuel leftover from takeoff to reignite its engines in a series of burns. These burns help to adjust the rocket's speed and reorient the vehicle into the right position for entering Earth's atmosphere and then landing.

Different types of landing techniques require different amounts of fuel, though, and that revolves around how the Falcon 9 launches. The rocket doesn't travel straight upward into space but follows a parabolic arc up and away from the launch pad. Because of this, the rocket has to go through a lot to conduct a ground landing. The vehicle has to slow down in the direction it's heading, completely turn around, and then retread the vertical and horizontal distance it's covered to get back to the landing site. That requires a lot of extra fuel.

The whole point of landing these rockets is to help save Space X money on launch costs. Right now, most rockets are destroyed or lost after they launch into space, meaning entirely new rockets must be built for each mission. Space X hopes to recover as many rockets as possible to cut down on cost of creating new vehicles. The Falcon 9 costs $60 million to make and only $200,000 to fuel. If a recovered rocket doesn't need too much updating and refurbishment between launches, reusability could eliminate a good chunk of that manufacturing cost.

IBM's 'brain-inspired' supercomputer.

It's often said that the human brain is the world's most powerful supercomputer and now a team of computer scientists is looking at the organ as inspiration for building a new, neural network-based supercomputing platform.

“Neuromorphic computing opens very exciting new possibilities and is consistent with what we see as the future of the high performance computing and simulation at the heart of our national security missions,” said Jim Brase, LLNL deputy associate director for Data Science. “The potential capabilities neuromorphic computing represents and the machine intelligence that these will enable will change how we do science.”

The technology represents a fundamental departure from computer design that has been prevalent for the past 70 years and could be a powerful complement in the development of next-generation supercomputers able to perform at exascale speeds, 50 times (or two orders of magnitude) faster than today’s most advanced petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) systems. Like the human brain, neurosynaptic systems require significantly less electrical power and volume.
“The low power consumption of these brain-inspired processors reflects the industry’s desire and a creative approach to reducing power consumption in all components for future systems as we set our sights on exascale computing,” said Michel McCoy, LLNL program director for Weapon Simulation and Computing.
“The delivery of this advanced computing platform represents a major milestone as we enter the next era of cognitive computing,” said Dharmendra S. Modha, IBM Fellow, chief scientist, brain-inspired computing, IBM Research - Almaden. “We value our relationships with the national labs. In fact, prior to design and fabrication, we simulated the IBM TrueNorth processor using LLNL’s Sequoia supercomputer. This collaboration will push the boundaries of brain-inspired computing to enable future systems that deliver unprecedented capability and throughput, while helping to minimize the capital, operating and programming costs – keeping our nation at the leading edge of science and technology.”

A single TrueNorth processor consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons that communicate with one another via 256 million electrical synapses. At 0.8 volts, it consumes 70 milliwatts of power running in real time and delivers 46 giga synaptic operations per second – orders of magnitude lower energy than a conventional computer running inference on the same neural network. TrueNorth was originally developed under the auspices of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program in collaboration with Cornell University.
Under terms of the contract, LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system representing a total of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. LLNL will also receive an end-to-end ecosystem to helps create and program energy-efficient machines that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. The ecosystem consists of a simulator; a programming language; an integrated programming environment; a library of algorithms as well as applications; firmware; tools for composing neural networks for deep learning; a teaching curriculum; and cloud enablement.

New iPhone SE has the power of an iPhone 6s and the price of a 5s.

Apple has bucked the bigger-is-better phone trend and released a revamped version of its 4in iPhone 5S, the new iPhone SE.

It will be the smallest smartphone in Apple’s current lineup and the first smartphone to be released with a screen smaller than 4.7in since the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014.

The iPhone SE – possibly harking back in name to the Macintosh SE computer, which was released in 1987 – has a similar form-factor to 2013’s iPhone 5S. It has a metal body, 4in screen, Touch ID fingerprint scanner and a flush camera lens, unlike Apple’s most recent iPhones. The phone will be available in black, white, gold and rose gold.

The outside of the device resembles an iPhone 5S but the inside will be similar to the iPhone 6S, using Apple’s A9 processor, an NFC chip with support for Apple Pay and a better 12-megapixel camera, in line with Apple’s 2015 iPhones.

The iPhone SE has double the processing power and four times the graphics performance of the iPhone 5S, as well as longer battery life.

Apple hopes that the smaller smartphone will convince those still using an iPhone 5, 5S or 5C that do not want a larger phone of the size of the 4.7in iPhone 6S or 5.5in 6S Plus to upgrade. Cook estimates that 60% of those using Apple’s smaller iPhones have not yet upgraded to an iPhone 6 or newer, meaning there is a large potential market waiting to be tapped.

Larger smartphone screens have proved popular and have allowed manufacturers to add more features supported by larger batteries, Apple’s iPhone with its 4.7in screen is remained one of the smallest.

As a smaller, premium smartphone the new iPhone SE has little in the way of competition. Only Sony produces a widely available flagship smartphone with a smaller screen with the 4.6in Xperia Z5 Compact. Other smaller phones made by Motorola, HTC and Samsung are cut-down, cheaper versions with poorer components that target a more budget-conscious section of the market.

Whether there is still demand for a smaller premium-priced smartphone remains to be seen. The downward pressure on price has meant decent smartphones now cost as little as £130 with features similar to top-end models costing four times their price.

For Apple, the iPhone SE represents a way to target a more cost-sensitive market without stooping to budget levels. In the past the company has used older models of the iPhone, maintaining the 2012 iPhone 4S for sale until the release of the iPhone 6 in 2014, and previous models before that. But selling older smartphones concurrently with new models has added to the company’s burden to maintain smartphone updates for longer, which it typically does for at least three years after release.

The iPhone SE, with internals similar to an iPhone 6S at a lower price, is easier to cater for with software updates because it reduces the number of hardware variants Apple has to support.

This time around, Apple has priced the SE cleverly at the sweet spot for instant sales, meaning there is no reason why this four-inch handset and its chamfered edges shouldn’t fly off the shelves from the word go
The iPhone SE will be released on 31 March with pre-orders starting 24 March costing from $399 in the US.