UK Space Agency funds tech for orbital awareness

NASA chief says cost-plus contracts are a “plague” on the space agency

Enlarge / NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA) Administrator Bill Nelson is seen in firing room four during the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-4 mission in April. (credit: Joel Kowsky/NASA via Getty Images) NASA Administrator Bill Nelson appeared before a US Senate Appropriations subcommittee […]

A brief overview of IBM’s new 7 nm Telum mainframe CPU

Enlarge / Each Telum package consists of two 7nm, eight-core / sixteen-thread processors running at a base clock speed above 5GHz. A typical system will have sixteen of these chips in total, arranged in four-socket “drawers.” (credit: IBM) From the perspective of a traditional x86 computing enthusiast—or professional—mainframes are strange, archaic beasts. They’re physically enormous, […]

The human family tree keeps getting more complicated

Enlarge (credit: Avi Levin and Ilan Theiler, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University) It’s probably long past time to stop thinking of humanity’s nearest relatives as forming a family tree. Our close relatives like the Neanderthals and Denisovans clearly interbred both with us and each other. There are also indications that an older African […]