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A recent rocket launch by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) has seen debris come crashing back to Earth.

The nation launched a Long March 5B to deliver the second module of its in-progress space station, Tiangong, to orbit on July 24th, 2022. The 25-ton rocket was then expected to make an uncontrolled descent back to Earth on July 31st, contrasting with the standard practice of a controlled re-entry to land in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, the falling rocket booster slowly lost altitude as it fell through Earth's atmosphere and broke up over Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

China's Tiangong space station has been expanded with a new module, including a new robotic arm.

The space station is continually expanding as it is still under construction following its launch in April 2021, with the new Wentian module launching on July 24th, 2022, to join the assembly. The new module brings the station's total module count to two. It includes additional astronaut sleeping quarters, as well as a robotic arm on its exterior that spans about six meters (19.6 feet).

The arm completed an array of tests after the module docked with the space station on July 25th. These included inspecting itself, deploying single joints, and confirming the arm's crawling ability. The distal end of the arm can dock with adapters across the surface of the space station, after which its base can detach, allowing it to "walk" around on the surface of the space station. The Wentian module's arm can work independently or combine with the existing 10-meter (33 feet) long robotic arm that launched with Tiangong's core module, Tianhe.

A new video by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) highlights what the Curiosity Mars rover has learned in the last ten years.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover landed on the Red Planet inside the Gale Crater on August 6th, 2012, and was lowered to the surface by a jetpack after launching from Earth on November 26th, 2011. The rover has since driven almost 18 miles (29 kilometers) and ascended 2,050 feet (625 meters) while exploring the crater. Work by the engineering team managing the rover to minimize wear and tear has allowed the rover's mission to be extended by another three years.

One of Curiosity's most notable achievements is determining that liquid water and many other chemicals necessary for supporting life were present on Mars for tens of millions of years. The Gale Crater once stored a lake and is home to Mount Sharp, a 5.5-kilometer (3.4 miles) high mountain, which Curiosity has been ascending, with each layer Curiosity climbs revealing a more recent history of Mars. Curiosity is currently heading to a new region thought to bear sulfates, salty minerals left behind after water has dried out.

Etienne Klein has apologized for causing a stir online after labeling a picture of chorizo as a photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Klein is the research director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and posted the picture on August 1st, captioning it as a "Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us." Klein continued by saying "She was taken by the JWST. This level of detail... A new world is revealed day after day."

The post was made amongst recent image releases from NASA taken by the JWST throughout July, showing off the capabilities of the new $10 billion space telescope. In replies to the original tweet, Klein jested by warning readers not to let their cognitive biases get the best of them, seemingly referring to being tricked by something blatantly false posted by a reputable individual. He continued with the remark, "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth."

A recent NASA livestream clarified details about how the SpaceX rocket became damaged.

The Crew-5 mission, SpaceX's next delivery of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), was delayed after the Falcon 9 rocket's interstage and some onboard instrumentation were "damaged during transport" in mid-July, requiring removal and replacement. The rocket was being transported from Hawthorne, California, at SpaceX's production factory, to its McGregor test facility in Texas.

Benjamin Reed, SpaceX's senior director of the human spaceflight program, revealed during a NASA livestream on August 4th that the new Falcon 9 booster "came in contact with a bridge on the route," while it was being transported on a tractor-trailer. According to Reed, "it was a fairly minor incursion, but it still caused some damage."

Australian company CopterPack has released new footage of its second-generation device in action.

The CopterPack Gen2 is a fully "electric backpack helicopter," sporting two housings on either side of the pilot, each containing a rotor blade, and featuring a "self-leveling autopilot and lightweight, carbon-fiber construction. The company recently completed a test of its latest revision while tethered down, allowing them to evaluate its ability to stabilize during flight and flight dynamics. The first generation was first revealed taking flight in May last year.

Unfortunately, the company's website and social media are scarce with details. No plans have been revealed regarding when it will be available for sale to the general public or anyone else. However, they have made it possible for people to contribute to its development by donating Binance Coin, with the address for its wallet being listed in the description here.

EA reveals its major motivations behind singleplayer games while reiterating that live services are the bedrock of its business.

In a recent earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson discussed how singleplayer games fit into its portfolio and why the company will continue to make them. Wilson says that EA makes games for two reasons: storytelling and building online communities. Singleplayer games like Jedi: Fallen Order--whichsold so well that EA changed how it thinks about singleplayer games--fit into the more personal entertainment experience category.

Wilson didn't necessarily say that singleplayer games are "really really important," but did indicate that singleplayer experiences are more creatively-driven and less weighted on EA's business than live service games. Wilson seems to delineate singleplayer from live games and may hint that multiplayer/microtransactions won't be feature in future games like Mass Effect 5 and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

Singleplayer games might be important to Electronic Arts, but they are the farthest thing from for Activision-Blizzard.

It's no surprise that Activision-Blizzard is focused on live games. The publisher makes billions every year from online games like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and World of Warcraft, and in Q2 2022 it made $1.2 billion from in-game microtransactions.

While scouting Activision's latest earnings report, I noticed an interesting breakdown of its revenue sources. There's two types of revenue streams for Activision-Blizzard's games: Point-in-time, which is basically a singleplayer/multiplayer game that you buy and receive in full that has no microtransactions (think Tony Hawk 1+2 remasters), and point-over-time, or live games with expanding content with in-game purchases (practically every other ATVI game).

A study on the planets titled "Detection of Atmospheric Escape from Four Young Mini Neptunes" has been submitted to the The Astronomical Journal and is awaiting peer review.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have analyzed three newly discovered exoplanets known as mini-Neptunes, and a fourth mini-Neptune discovered earlier this year. The previously known one is TOI 560b, and the three new ones are TOI 1430.01, TOI 1683.01, and TOI 2076b, with all of them being between 2.1 and 2.8 times the size of Earth.

The four mini-Neptunes exist relatively close to their host stars and have been observed steadily losing their atmosphere to said stars. Mini-Neptunes are a class of exoplanets (a planet found outside of our solar system) denoting planets larger than Super-Earths (exoplanets that have between 1 and 1.5 times the radius of Earth) but are smaller than Neptune. Very few exoplanets have been found with radii between 1.5 and 2 times the radius of Earth in what's known as the small planet gap.

A study on the molecule titled "Observation of Light-Induced Dipole-Dipole Forces in Ultracold Atomic Gases" has been published in the journal Physical Review X.

Researchers from the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) have a special bonding state between atoms using a laser to polarize two atoms. The atoms became positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other, causing them to be weakly attracted to one another. The energy from the photons produced by the laser means the atoms effectively form a molecule of matter and light. However, the polarization only allows for a relatively weak bond compared to normal molecular bonds.

Researchers from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, have achieved what they believe is the world's first international holographic teleportation.

Also known as "holoportation," holographic teleportation means transporting the hologram of a person or object instantaneously to another location. On July 27th, 2022, a team from the Western Institute for Space Exploration holoported an individual from Huntsville, Alabama, to London, Ontario, and instantly holoport themselves to Huntsville.

In a recent interview with Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO revealed when he believes the largest flying object ever made will launch.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has been developing Starship for quite some time, and recently Musk sat down with the Full Send Podcast to discuss its timeline ahead of its expected first orbital launch. The SpaceX CEO says that he spends most of his day working on getting Starship to orbit, describing the process as "complicated" and "challenging" as Starship is "more than double the thrust of the Saturn V and twice the weight".

Musk further explains that the Saturn V is the largest rocket that has ever reached orbit and was the rocket that took the human race to the moon. Notably, Musk explains that there are numerous hurdles in Starship's development process, but the company is making progress on the "largest flying object ever made," with Musk estimating Starship's first orbital test launch to occur between "maybe 1 and 12 months from now".

A study on the brain after midnight titled "The Mind After Midnight: Nocturnal Wakefulness, Behavioral Dysregulation, and Psychopathology" has been published in the journal Frontiers in Network Psychology.

Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have published a new hypothesis, dubbed the "Mind After Midnight" hypothesis, suggesting that neurophysiological changes occur in the brain when people are awake after midnight. The absolute time these changes occur is relative to your Circadian rhythm but typically occur after midnight, impacting the brain's reward processing, impulse control, and information processing functions.

The researchers found people were more likely to view the world negatively and make impulsive decisions or engage in harmful behaviors without fully considering the consequences. Part of the biological basis for these effects is the circadian influence of positive affect and negative affect, the tendency to view information in a positive or negative light, respectively. Positive affect is highest in the morning after waking and falls to its lowest levels at night when the body is ready for sleep, and negative affect is at its lowest and highest at the opposite times.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has sat down for an interview where he explained the backlash he received from the US government over smoking weed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Musk recently sat down with the Full Send Podcast to discuss various topics, and throughout the interview, the Tesla CEO recounted the backlash he experienced for smoking weed on the Joe Rogan Experience episode #1169 in 2018. Musk said that he "got a lot of backlash" as the drug is "still federally illegal", which resulted in him being required to have many random drug tests to "prove that I'm not a drug addict".

Musk was asked who required him to have these drug tests, and he replied by saying, "the federal government because SpaceX has federal government contracts, and it's still illegal federally, so SpaceX competitors were like 'why aren't you doing anything.'" Notably, Musk said the government randomly drug tested him "for everything" over the course of a year and that the overall consequences of that action weren't good for him or SpaceX as the whole company was also required to have random drug tests.

Elon Musk has responded to reports claiming that he is going to build his own private airport in the state of Texas.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has taken to Twitter to refute the claims from mysanantonio.com that wrote that Musk is developing a plan to construct a private airport near Bastrop. The publication cites reports that the idea is in a conceptual phase, with there being no official timeline for its construction laid out. Now, Musk has taken to Twitter to respond to the rumors by simply saying they are "untrue."

Musk explains in a tweet that the Tesla facility is "5 mins" from the Austin International airport and that it would be "silly to build another private airport". The world's richest man did poke some fun at the Austin International airport by writing that it needs to add another runway due to the speed of Austin growing fast with many individuals, companies, and businesses rushing to the growing location.

Since humans could document anything, we have been recording the relationship between the Earth, the sun, and the moon.

The documentation of the Earth, the sun, and the moon goes back thousands of years and is present cross-culturally. However, there are gaps in our recorded history, with one gap standing out - the May of 1110, when the moon disappeared from view for an entire month. With little knowledge of the phenomenon, researchers set out to uncover the mystery, with one study published in 2020 providing an updated theory on its disappearance.

According to the study, the moon disappearing from the night sky was a result of the Hekla volcanic eruption that occurred in 1110. However, this theory was wholly completed as researchers sifted through numerous medieval documentation for references to a "dark lunar eclipse" or "black eclipse". Scientists concluded that it wasn't just the Helka eruption that blotted out the sun but a string of volcanic eruptions that happened in various locations.

Officials have confirmed that debris from one of Elon Musk's SpaceX missions have crash landed in a farmers paddock.

An Australian sheep farmer was stunned when he found a part of a space mission lying in his field. The object was found in Dalgety, located near Australia's Snowy Mountains, which is about a five-hour drive southwest of Sydney. The farmer described the discovery as "astounding". An Australian Space Agency spokesperson recently confirmed that the debris is from a SpaceX mission, and according to astrophysicist Brad Tucker, the debris is from a trunk jettisoned by the Crew-1 capsule that re-entered Earth in 2021.

The astrophysicist explains that the trunk had split up on re-entry as there were reports of more debris being found scattered in surrounding properties. Since the majority of the planet's surface area is water, most of the space debris that makes it to Earth's surface crash land into the ocean. However, with the space expansion only getting exponentially more real as more companies join in on the race and push to other worlds, debris crashing down into Earth is only going to get frequent.

Many individuals across a country have been onlookers at the many meteors that are entering Earth's atmosphere over their country.

On July 7, a large meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over New Zealand. The space rock streaked across the sky and eventually exploded above the ocean near Wellington. The explosion caused a sonic boom that was heard by residents living in various locations across the South Island. Following that event was another meteor seen above Canterbury just two weeks later.

Individuals have posed many questions to Fireballs Aotearoa, a group project run by astronomers and citizen scientists, with the most requested question being why the meteors turn the sky green and if the same green that is seen in auroras.

Intel itself has confirmed it will be showing off its very first Arc GPU for workstation PCs at SIGGRAPH 2022 next week.

The news is coming directly from Intel's own website, where it says "Intel will be showing our just announced Intel ARC Pro graphics workstation GPUs running Trimble, Inc's Sketchup with D5 renderer to seamlessly provide beautifully rendered architectural images with hardware accelerated Raytracing and hardware assisted AI (XeSS). An entry-level workstation segment first providing hardware accelerated ray tracing and AI".

Hopefully, this means we'll get some more demos and details on Intel XeSS technology, but if we do it will be more professional-based... not for gaming, unfortunately. Still, it's good to see that Intel will be showcasing workstation Arc GPUs at SIGGRAPH 2022 starting Monday.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 is "still planned" for an October launch, according to the very latest from leaker Moore's Law is Dead.

In his latest video, Tom at Moore's Law is Dead explains that his sources teased that NVIDIA has "begun sending out embargo details to their partners this week that specifically denotes a plan to launch in October, but final dates are not decided yet". Another source added that the "RTX 4090 (at least) is still planned to launch in October".

NVIDIA's next-gen Ada Lovelace GPU architecture will debut with the GeForce RTX 4090, but we will also see the GeForce RTX 4080 and GeForce RTX 4070 shortly after. The question has been whether the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 would launch this year, or whether NVIDIA debuts the new monster GeForce RTX 4090 -- in 450W form at first, a 600W+ SKU is reportedly coming after AMD drops Navi 31 -- and leaves it at that.