A comet that was first discovered at the beginning of the year will soon approach Earth. It will be its first visit for about 70,000 years.

Gregory J. Leonard, a senior researcher at the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona, discovered the comet at the Mount Lemmon Observatory, which has been appropriately named C/2021 A1 Leonard. The comet is now expected to make a close approach to Earth in December, and researchers are hoping that it will be close enough and bright enough to be visible with the naked eye. Researchers suspect that C/2021 A1 Leonard may be visible for several days despite the speed at which it will be traveling by Earth.

So, why hasn't it flown past Earth for 70,000 years? Research suggests that the comet's orbit is severely elliptical. A good way to envision this is to picture Earth's circular orbit around the Sun and change the circle shape into an oval. C/2021 A1 Leonard is due to enter the inner solar system, where it will then gain speed and be shot off in slingshot-like fashion by the immense gravity of the Sun back into deep space, where it will remain there for some tens of thousands of years.

If you are after awesome deals on technology, then Amazon's Cyber Monday deals are exactly what you need to check out.

Amazon has slashed prices across a large range of technology and electronic products, and one range of items seeing massive price reductions is laptops and Chromebooks. Looking at Amazon's Cyber Monday listings for discounts on Chromebooks and laptops, you will notice a variety of different brands have been discounted. Known laptop and Chromebook brands such as Lenovo, Acer, HP, and ASUS are included.

If you were thinking about getting a new laptop or Chromebook or were considering changing from a laptop to a Chromebook, now is definitely the time to have a look at some prices. Additionally, sales such as these are an excellent opportunity to secure a Christmas present for a technology-inclined friend, child, or family member. In the entirety of this article, you will find some of the deals listed. To see the full list check out this link here.

A statement from the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) are partnering with NASA to get a nuclear reactor onto the Moon within the next 10 years.

According to the statement, the INL is partnering with NASA to figure out a way to get a uranium-powered nuclear reactor to fit inside a 12-foot-long by 18-foot-wide rocket. Both agencies are currently seeking proposals from the private industry and the proposal has requirements, which are as follows; the reactor must be a uranium-powered nuclear fission reactor that weighs no more than 13,200 pounds, that gives at least 40 kilowatts of power for at least 10 years and has controls to make sure the temperature is regulated.

NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in the statement, "Plentiful energy will be key to future space exploration. I expect fission surface power systems to greatly benefit our plans for power architectures for the moon and Mars and even drive innovation for uses here on Earth."

The possibilities are endless with micro-cameras as they could be used for health purposes such as detecting problems within the human body, or being outfitted to robots that have severe size and weight requirements.

However, the technology has quite made it there yet as previous creations of nano or micro cameras haven't been able to produce high-quality images with accurate color. Now, researchers from Princeton and the University of Washington have overcome some of those previous hurdles with a new micro-camera that is about the size of a grain of salt.

Instead of using curved glass as a typical camera would, the tiny camera uses what is called a "metasurface", which is about half a millimeter wide and is covered in cylindrical posts that are about the same size as the virus HIV. All of these posts seen on the metasurface serve as an optical antenna, and when partnered with machine learning algorithms, the camera is able to produce an image that far exceeds previous creations in its category.

Space weather forecasters announced that the Earth was going to be sideswiped by a blast from the Sun, and now the blast has arrived.

On November 27, forecasters predicted that a coronal mass ejection (CME) was going to hit Earth and possibly cause G1-class geomagnetic storms, and as predicted, the blast from the Sun hit Earth's magnetic field but didn't cause any geomagnetic storms. Instruments monitoring the Sun observed a plasma filament snapping, which caused a "canyon of fire" to be seen for more than six hours.

Spaceweather watches predicted that the CME could cause Arctic auroras to appear, which is a fantastic opportunity for incredible photographs. As Earth passed into the wake of the CME, a crack was opened in Earth's magnetic field, which caused the solar wind to hit the atmosphere, sparking an aurora to be created around the Arctic Circle. An aurora tour guide, Marianne Bergli, photographed the above aurora from Tromso, Norway. Bergli said, "My guests were a little skeptical at first ... then Boom! Wow, Fantastic. The colors were absolutely amazing."

The American Meteor Society (AMS) has confirmed multiple sightings of a fireball lighting up the night sky over multiple US states.

A new event has been confirmed on the American Meteor Society website details a fireball sighting reported by 34 individuals across L, AR, GA, MS, and TN on Sunday, November 28th, 2021, at around 23:50 UT. For those that don't know, a fireball is a meteor that has entered Earth's atmosphere and has begun burning up. For a meteor to be considered a fireball, it must shine brighter than the planet Venus.

The above video was captured and sent to the AMS by Justin Oden from Dora, Alabama. The video shows the fireball entering the field of view in the top right and exponentially getting brighter and brighter. The AMS event log states that Oden saw the fireball for around 3.5 seconds before it disappeared in the night sky. If you are interested in reading more about these fireball sightings, check out the AMS event log here.

A collection of images of the International Space Station (ISS) have been published by NASA, showcasing the floating laboratory in all its glory.

The images were taken back on November 8 when the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Endeavor was leaving the ISS for a return journey back to Earth with four astronauts. Before Endeavor made its way back down to the surface of Earth, it did a complete 360-degree fly-around the ISS, which Space.com reports is a maneuver that hasn't been performed since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet back in 2011. So, why fly around the ISS?

Besides the fun that the astronauts would have had flying around the ISS, the maneuver was also practical as it assisted Endeavors navigation system and allowed for astronauts to take photos of the ISS from angles that aren't usually visible to ISS managers. The photos are truly stunning and capture an incredible feat the human civilization has achieved. The ISS is a $100 billion floating laboratory used by many nations around the world, and these images represent a successful joint effort between many countries. What an achievement!

Samsung has a big discount on its gargantuan 85-inch 8K TV, offering an instant savings of $3500 bringing the original $9000 price down to "just" $5500, and that this is the last chance to save $3500 on the 85-inch 8K TV.

This is the very latest 2021 model with the 8K side of things giving you a huge 7680 x 4320 @ 60Hz, while 4K is offered at a much-smoother 120Hz. In Samsung's own words: "Feel the power of every frame with 33 million pixels that provide an incredible sense depth and clarity, all with four times the resolution of 4K".

You can buy the 85-inch Class QN800A Samsung Neo QLED 8K Smart TV for $3500 discount right here.

For watching 8K content you're going to be stretching it... there's no native 8K movies out, but there are plenty of gorgeous 8K videos on YouTube and then there's 8K gaming on the PC. I've run a bunch of 8K benchmarks across the years, and you're going to need (not just want) the very best graphics card you can find which is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with its 24GB of ultra-fast GDDR6X memory.

Innosilicon has just held its "Fantasy One GPU Product Press Conference" where it unveiled the new Fantasy One GPU family, and a few interesting new graphics cards.

Starting with the Innosilicon Fantasy One GPU itself, which is based on a multi-chip (chiplet) design and flagship dual-GPU graphics card in the form of the new "Type-B" dual-GPU solution uses 2 x Fantasy One GPUs and are connected using Innosilicon's just-announced Innolink interface.

Innosilicon's dual-GPU card has up to 10 TFLOPs of compute performance, and can handle 32 simultaneous 1080p 60FPS streams, or up to 64 streams at 720p 30FPS. The dual-GPU beast packs 32GB of GDDR6X memory, but they're super limited by the 128-bit memory bus on each of the respective Fantasy One GPUs.

Well, the moment has come... our AI "xenobot" self-replicating robots are going to rule us all and we won't be able to stop it.

But seriously, researchers have just announced they've created tiny living robots capable of self-replicating themselves inside of a dish by pushing loose cells together. They're called "xenobots" and they're made from frog cells, representing the first time a multicellular organism has found a way to reproduce in this particular way.

The cells collect together in clumps where they'll form a sphere that would have around 3000 cells, taking around 5 days to happen. Each individual clump is around half a millimeter wide and is covered in a minuscule hair-like structure, which sounds weird but the hair-like structure acts like flexible oars in water... they move the xenobots forwards in corkscrew paths, explains Joshua Bongard, senior author and computer scientist at the University of Vermont.