Space is full of mysteries which we will never likely solve but, generally, we at least know a thing or two about craft we send out into the cosmos. Not so, when it comes to one probe which has just touched back down on Earth after 276 days in orbit. The experimental spacecraft was launched by China’s space agency, ostensibly to test the nation’s reusable space technologies. According to state media agency Xinhua News, the mission’s aim was to help with the development of “more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future”. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter That all sounds pretty similar to what SpaceX and NASA are up to, except that the Chinese spacecraft and its journey have been shrouded in secrecy. No information has been released on the altitude it reached or the systems it tested. We don’t even know where it went or, indeed, what kind of spacecraft it was – not a single image has been released to the public. Commentators on Chinese social media have speculated that Beijing has been developing a spacecraft like the UAir Force's X-37B, an autonomous spaceplane that can remain in orbit for years. However, no one knows how well this is going nor, indeed, if it’s going at all. All we do know about China’s latest unidentified flying object is that it was launched from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on August 5, 2022 and returned to the same site on 8 May, 2023. It follows an earlier mission, carried out in July last year, which saw a Chinese spacecraft fly to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and back on the same day. The country’s main space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), hailed the success of the craft’s brief celestial jaunt at the time. It gushed: "The development of reusable space transportation technology is an important symbol of China's transition from a 'big' space-faring nation to a 'powerful' space-faring one.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Scientists have confirmed that the first black hole to ever be captured on camera is spinning in a major new discovery. The famous doughnut-shaped M87* black hole, 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun, first drew people’s attention in 2019 for becoming the first void to be pictured. Now, it has been confirmed that the M87* black hole is spinning, but experts have yet to determine just how fast. The announcement was made on 27 September. M87* has been observed for the last two decades via a network of radio telescopes. It is located in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, which is around 55 million light-years away from Earth in the Virgo constellation. The instruments monitoring the black hole have observed a powerful jet of radiation and particles being expelled from its poles. According to research, the relativistic jets appeared to be on a kind of pendulum that swings every 11 years, observed over decades. Experts believe this is caused by interactions between gravitational interactions between the black hole and the material making up the disk around it. They say this provides “unequivocal evidence” that the black hole is spinning. Cui Yuzhu, a researcher at Zhejiang Lab in China and the study’s lead author explained in a statement: “We are thrilled by this significant finding,” adding, “Since the misalignment between the black hole and the disk is relatively small and the precession period is around 11 years, accumulating high-resolution data tracing M87’s structure over two decades and thorough analysis are essential to obtain this achievement.” Their findings matched with computer simulations, confirming that the jets emitting from the black hole change direction by around 10 degrees every 11 years. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

In a vertical city like New York, any serious effort to address climate change has to focus on the greenhouse gas emissions caused by buildings

Artificial intelligence startup Cohere, backed by investors including Oracle Corp. and Nvidia Corp., is working with banks to

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There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A new WhatsApp feature could stop people from being found through phone calls, the company has said. The tool, named “Protect IP Address in Calls”, is aimed at letting people ensure that they do not give away unwanted information to the people who call them up. At the moment, WhatsApp calls are made in one of two ways: peer-to-peer or through WhatsApp’s servers. The new setting allows users to choose between them to ensure that they are able to keep information private. Peer-to-peer calling works as it sounds: the two phones are directly in contact. That usually allows for better call quality, but means that the two phones need to know each other’s IP address. If calls are instead relayed through WhatsApp’s servers, it means that the IP address can be kept secret. That address could potentially be useful to hackers or other malicious cyber criminals, since it can be used to work out a person’s general location or their internet provider. Now users can choose to use the new feature and always have their calls sent through WhatsApp’s servers and protect their IP address. WhatsApp cannot intercept those calls even when they go through its servers since they are end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp stressed that the new feature is aimed at their “most privacy-conscious users”. It may lead to less fast connections and lower quality calls, for instance. The new update follows another, released over summer, which WhatsApp refers to as “Silence Unknown Calls”. That stops phone calls from unknown numbers from even getting through to your phone – which means that it will not only limit spam and other annoying calls, but will also keep people cyber attacks, WhatsApp said. Read More Apple just released an iPhone update you should download right now Nasa gets ‘puzzling’ data back from spacecraft exploring distant object Scientists invent mind-reading device

TAMPA, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 6, 2023--

The problem with AI-created images is that, well, AI is creating images. That means a

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