Typically, there’s a bit of a delay between when astronauts launch from Earth to the International Space Station, and when they actually dock with the orbital lab. This has to do with the relative orbits of the launch spacecraft and the ISS, as well as their takeoff point from Earth. Expedition 64, which launched today, however, docked with the station just around three hours after leaving Earth from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov took off at just before 2 AM EDT, and docked with the ISS at 4:48 AM EDT – three hours and two minutes after liftoff. The hatches between the capsule and the station opened at 7:07 AM EDT, officially beginning the operational duty roster stint for the three new ISS crew members. Coincidentally it’s also Rubins’ birthday.
Blue Origin set a new mark for recycling rockets Tuesday morning by sending the same New Shepard spacecraft to the edge of space for the seventh time.
The spaceflight company founded and funded by Amazon head Jeff Bezos completed its 13th New Shepard mission from its private launch facility in west Texas while also testing some key equipment for future NASA missions to the moon.
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The mission was originally set for late September from the Texas site, but was delayed multiple times due to weather and technical issues. It finally left Earth at 6:37 a.m. PT (8:37 a.m. Texas time) Tuesday and returned to land at the same facility in two pieces just about 10 minutes later.
Researchers have developed an ultrafast fiber laser that delivers an average power more than ten times what is available from today’s high-power lasers. The technology is poised to improve industrial-scale materials processing and paves the way for visionary applications.
Michael Müller, a Ph.D. student of Prof. Jens Limpert from the Friedrich Schiller University’s Institute of Applied Physics and the Fraunhofer Institute of Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena, Germany, will present the new laser at the all-virtual 2020 OSA Laser Congress to be held 12-16 October. The presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, 13 October at 14:30 EDT.
High power without the heat
In lasers, waste heat is generated in the process of light emission. Laser geometries with a large surface-to-volume ratio, such as fibers, can dissipate this heat very well. Thus, an average power of about 1 kilowatt is obtained from today’s high-power
Using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other organisations around the world, astronomers have spotted a rare blast of light from a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest such flare recorded to date at just over 215 million light-years from Earth, and has been studied in unprecedented detail. The research is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The idea of a black hole ‘sucking in’ a nearby star sounds like science fiction. But this is exactly what happens in a tidal disruption event,” says Matt Nicholl, a lecturer and Royal Astronomical Society research fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the lead author of the new study. But these tidal disruption events, where a star experiences what’s known as spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole,
A rare blast of light, emitted by a star as it is sucked in by a supermassive black hole, has been spotted by scientists using telescopes from around the world.
The phenomenon, known as a tidal disruption event, is the closest flare of its kind yet recorded, occurring just 215 million light-years from Earth. It is caused when a star passes too close to a black hole and the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material — a process called ‘spaghettification’. During this process some of the material falls into the black hole, releasing a bright flare of energy which astronomers can detect.
Tidal disruption events are rare and not always easy to study because they are usually obscured by a curtain of dust and debris. An international team of scientists led by the University of Birmingham were able to study this
Physicists achieve a noise level 10 times lower than the previous record
Demonstration proves to take a major step closer to a full-scale silicon quantum processor
Next step could be a 10-qubit prototype quantum integrated processor by 2023
The lowest noise level on record for a semiconductor quantum bit has been demonstrated by a team of quantum physicists, bringing the development of a commercially available silicon quantum computer one step forward to possibility.
In a study published in Advanced Materials, the physicists said they were able to achieve a noise level 10 times lower than previously recorded for any semiconductor qubit. Specifically, they demonstrated a low-level charge noise of S0 = 0.0088 ± 0.0004 μeV2 Hz−1.
As a next step, the team is now looking forward to demonstrating the capability required to produce a reliable 10-qubit prototype quantum integrated processor by 2023.
The PC market just saw its highest growth in a decade, with Lenovo regaining the number one spot … [+] with a 24.3% surge in sales. Canalys has credited this growth to the COVID-19 pandemic.
picture alliance via Getty Images
The global PC market grew by almost 13% in the third quarter, according to Canalys, marking the biggest surge in sales in the last decade.
According to the analyst firm’s estimates, shipments of PC and laptop devices reached 79.2 million units during the quarter, an increase of 12.7%, as sales “continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis”.
Laptops accounted for the majority fo these sales, with 64 million units shipped during the third quarter as employees continue to work from home. Laptop and mobile workstation shipments also saw sales increased by 28.3% year over year, though desktop and desktop workstations saw a 26% decline in shipments.
In wealth management, merger and acquisition activity is peaking – and quickly re-shaping the … [+] composition of the industry’s landscape.
getty
The third quarter of 2020 will be remembered as one of the most unique periods of merger and acquisition activity in the history of the wealth management industry.
There were a record number of deals in Q3 – 55 transactions in total, according to the latest ECHELON Partners RIA M&A Deal Report – which surpasses the previous high of 53 deals that our research tracked in Q4 2019.
This record period comes directly after just 35 deals took place in Q2. This 57% increase in quarter-over-quarter M&A activity also registers as one of the sharpest increases in the industry’s history, marking a major rebound after the COVID-19-related market declines delayed and prolonged normal deal-making activity, as the figure below illustrates:
Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. surged to a record high after the Indian giant announced a share buyback of as much as 160 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) and said technology spending was recovering faster than anticipated.
Asia’s largest software outsourcing provider reported a larger-than-expected 7% fall in net income to 74.7 billion rupees in the September quarter. But Chief Executive Officer Rajesh Gopinathan said IT budgets were bouncing back and growth should accelerate as clients spend on digital services such as cloud migration, security and work tools to trim costs and adjust to a post-pandemic environment.
Like Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., TCS is struggling to serve global financial services giants and corporate clients after a nationwide lockdown forced hundreds of thousands of their employees to work from home. But spending is loosening as
LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY – AUGUST 25: Ice melts near Nordenskjodbreen glacier as man past by with a … [+] boat on August 25, 2020 on the Norwegian Arctic Svalbard archipelago, Norway. Nordenskiöldbreen (Nordenskiöld Glacier) is a glacier in Spitsbergen, named after Finnish geologist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Getty Images
September 2020 was the warmest September on record globally, according to scientists at the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The agency also revealed that the Arctic sea ice is at its second lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979.
September temperatures were well above average in many regions across the globe, including off the coast of northern Siberia, in the middle East, in parts of South America and Australia, with the exception of eastern tropical Pacific. The month was 0.05 C warmer than September 2019, the previous warmest September on record.
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