The Biden administration officially launched its online portal (StudentAid.gov) to apply for student debt cancellation on Monday, after a soft-launch over the weekend. And though the site appears to be working so far—with more than 8 million borrowers filing applications in just the first few days—the federal…
For the past 30 years, Geotail has been sailing through the magnetic envelope that surrounds Earth to study this region of our atmosphere. But the long-running mission may be coming to an end as NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency recently discovered that the spacecraft’s last remaining data recorder has…
Due to developing regulations in the EU regarding uncrewed aviation regulations, today drone delivery company Wing announced a new service area in Lusk, Ireland that is slated to begin sometime in the coming weeks.
Currently, Wing offers drone deliveries in four other cities (Christiansburg, Virginia; Helsinki, Finland; and Logan and Canberra, Australia), with Lusk, Ireland soon to be the fifth. Wing says it chose Ireland as its next area of operation because the country has embraced drone technology and looks to be a “great incubator for future innovations.” The company claims it’s using existing partnerships and approvals granted in Finland to support its operation in Ireland including recognition from the IAA (Irish Aviation Authority).
The company says it hopes to use Lusk as a testbed to expand its European operations and gain more experience when it comes to integrating its service into the local community. However, with Lusk having a population of less than 10,000, Wing’s next expansion will be more small-scale with the company admitting its operation in Ireland will function differently than its other commercial services in the US, Australia and Finland.
Recently, Wing says the company completed its 300,000th drone delivery as it continues to seek ways to use autonomous flying vehicles to replace deliveries made by less efficient gas-based cars.
The EGOT winner admitted he was selfish in the early days of his relationship with the cookbook author.
Priced to bust wallets at $550, the LEGO Avengers Hulkbuster set is the toy giant’s largest Marvel set to date, with an impressive 4,049 pieces. For reference, that’s $200 more but only 277 pieces more than the LEGO Daily Bugle set. Those extra 277 pieces must really be expensive ones.
The set will be released on November 9th and is also the largest LEGO mech set, standing over 20.5″ tall with an optional Iron Man figure that goes INSIDE the mecha. It features light-up arc reactors in both hands and chest, as well as several other new LEGO elements like special glow-in-the-dark and gold bricks. The whole upper body is articulated for posing and includes a Tony Stark in Mark 43 suit minifig. It is currently listed in the coveted spot #3 on my Christmas list.
With the popularity of both LEGO and The Avengers, I’m sure the set will be a hit. Although how many people will be willing to dig $550 out of their wallets to buy one remains to be seen. Of course, there are probably a lot of LEGO and Avengers fans out there that are richer than I am. Most of them, actually.
[via Gizmodo]
While time traveling to hang out with your younger self may only seem possible in movies like The Adam Project, a real-life photographer and musician in Montreal has come pretty close to pulling it off. Unlike in the film, Conor Nickerson didn’t bring together his adult and younger selves to save the world—he simply…
The hits keep coming from Webb Space Telescope, which has now spotted a rainbow “knot” consisting of an extremely red quasar and a snarl of massive galaxies that existed about 11.5 billion years ago.
Jordan Peele’s Nope is full of unexpected elements—including an alien that doesn’t look or act the way anyone thinks it will, and human characters who surprise us almost as much. One of the film’s biggest breakouts is Brandon Perea (The OA), who plays UFO enthusiast Angel Torres; ahead of Nope’s arrival on Blu-ray…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the state is suing Google for allegedly collecting biometric data from millions of Texans without consent, his office said in a press release Thursday. The case is part of a recent flood of lawsuits against tech companies over biometrics, which measure physical…
The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its second revelatory image in as many days. Scientists using the observatory have discovered a tightly-packed “knot” of at least three galaxies that were forming around a quasar 11.5 billion years ago, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The telescope’s near-infrared spectrograph not only showed that the galaxies were orbiting each other at high speeds (up to 435 miles per second), but that this one of the most dense known areas of early galaxy formation. The density is unusually high enough that lead researcher Dominika Wylezalek suggested there may even be two “halos” of dark matter merging in this area.
The quasar itself is unusual. The not-so-elegantly-named SDSS J165202.64+172852.3 is a very red example that doesn’t emit as wide a variety of light as already-rare ‘normal’ quasars. These objects serve as active galactic nuclei and are powered by the gas tumbling into a supermassive black hole at the core of their galaxies.
The imagery also underscores the strength of the Webb telescope’s sensors. Earlier studies using the Hubble and Gemini-North telescopes spotted the quasar’s outflows, but didn’t reveal more than one host galaxy.
More study is necessary to determine how galaxy clusters like this take form and are affected by supermassive black holes. However, the Webb findings already promise to improve humanity’s understanding of how the present-day web of galaxies came to be, not to mention how quasars might stifle star formation through their flows.
This is also just the start of Webb-based quasar discoveries. The team noted that Hubble data suggests there may be still more galaxies twirling around the quasar. This is also the first part of a trilogy of studies using Webb to analyze quasars at multiple points in the universe’s history. These efforts could shed considerably more light on cosmic evolution in the years ahead.
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