NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 with nine Merlin engines from Kennedy Space Center at 11:43 a.m. EDT on August 1, 2025, on the Crew Dragon Endeavour for NASA’s Crew-11 mission. The Crew-11 Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9’s second stage less than 10…
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3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar object ever recorded. It was first spotted on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile. The designation 3I/ATLAS marks it as the third interstellar object in our solar system. Its orbit is hyperbolic with an eccentricity of about 6.2, meaning it is unbound and will…
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September 21, 2025 – Partial Solar Eclipse visible mainly from the Southern Hemisphere, with up to 80% Sun obscured over the South Pacific, including Fiji, Tahiti, New Zealand, and parts of Antarctica. February 17, 2026 – Annular “ring of fire” over Antarctica, with annularity lasting about 2 minutes at maximum, while a partial eclipse will…
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Aug 4, 2025: Blue Origin New Shepard NS-34 launches from Site One, West Texas, on a suborbital tourism flight carrying a private crew of six, Blue Origin’s 14th crewed mission. Aug 4, 2025: SpaceX Falcon 9 launches Starlink 10-30 from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral, delivering a batch of 22 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, adding…
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New Zealand regards drones as aircraft, requiring compliance with Civil Aviation Rules Part 101 (up to 25 kg) and Part 102 (advanced operations). The Civil Aviation Act 2023 came into force on 5 April 2025, reaffirming drone pilots’ duties and enabling new rules like registration and Remote ID. Part 101 requires drones to weigh 25…
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Fujitsu unveiled plans to build a superconducting quantum computer with over 10,000 qubits by fiscal 2030 in Japan, including a target of 250 logical qubits by 2030 and 1,000 logical qubits by 2035 under the STAR architecture. IonQ and Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrated a hybrid quantum-classical grid-optimization solution using IonQ’s 36-qubit Forte system to…
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During the Aug 2–3 predawn hours under dark skies at mid-northern latitudes, observers could see about 20 meteors per hour as the Perseids rise. The Moon is in first-quarter and will set in the early morning, washing out fainter Perseids and potentially reducing observed rates by about 75% near the maximum. Delta Aquariids are tapering…
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NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 1, 2025 at 11:43 a.m. EDT aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov to the International Space Station. Dragon Endeavour, on its record sixth flight, is set to dock at the ISS early Aug. 2 for a…
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Intel announced layoffs of about 24,000 employees (roughly one-quarter of its workforce) as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan cuts projects and halts planned mega-fab factories in Germany and Poland. AMD released the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, a Zen 5-based CPU with 64 cores and 128 threads that reaches up to 5.4 GHz and costs $4,999, with shipping…
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OpenAI plans to launch GPT-5 this month (August 2025), integrating the ‘o3’ model and using multiple specialized models instead of a single system. Google DeepMind released Gemini 2.5 “Deep Think” as its most advanced reasoning AI, available August 1, 2025 to subscribers of Google’s AI Ultra plan at $250 per month, and it achieved a…
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