Angry T-Mobile customers have filed a class action lawsuit over the carrier’s decision to raise prices on plans that were advertised as having a lifetime price guarantee. “Based upon T-Mobile’s representations that the rates offered with respect to certain plans were guaranteed to last for life or as long as the customer wanted to remain … Read more
Photo: Costfoto/NurPhoto (Getty Images) Coal — the rock, not the roll — is one of the dirtier fuel sources out there, with both mining and burning it often leading to serious medical complications for those involved. Now, though, research suggests yet another way coal hurts people: Just transporting it. ‘Twister’ Remains The Greatest Car Commercial … Read more
Illustration: Lockheed Martin Nuclear-powered spacecraft could be the apex vehicle of this century’s space race. Concepts and designs for reactor-equipped rockets have been around for over 50 years but have never left the experimental stage. Despite ambitions to boldly go where no one has gone before, America’s latest push to get nuclear propulsion is to … Read more
Space Solar is working on a satellite design called CASSIOPeiA, which Physics World describes as looking “like a spiral staircase, with the photovoltaic panels being the ‘treads’ and the microwave transmitters—rod-shaped dipoles—being the ‘risers.’” It has a helical shape with no moving parts. “Our system’s comprised of hundreds of thousands of the same dinner-plate-sized power … Read more
Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which “excess words” started … Read more
The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza—an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of a new Rapid Response Partnership … Read more
One of the most promising Chinese space startups, Space Pioneer, experienced a serious anomaly last weekend while testing the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket near the city of Gongyi. The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are … Read more
Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as … Read more
In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was “adjusting” the date of the Starliner spacecraft’s return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July. The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and … Read more
June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven’t exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years … Read more
