Science News • The Register

Science

Hubble space 'scope brings its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph back online

Work continues on code to make the observatory operate happily when control unit message sync glitches out

30 Nov 06:58 | 1

AI-enhanced frog stem cells start to replicate in entirely new ways

Xenobots scoop up loose cells to make more of themselves. We welcome our new overlords

30 Nov 05:01 | 10

James Webb Space Telescope may actually truly launch this century, says NASA

Will it fly by Christmas? Betteridge's law probably applies

29 Nov 21:58 | 10

UK Space Agency wants primary school kids to design a logo for first Brit launches

Submissions must create a 'sense of pride.' What could possibly go wrong?

29 Nov 12:39 | 52

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

A win in the rocketry world: 'Flames came out of the right end'

26 Nov 15:20 | 50

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

25 Nov 10:33 | 30

Theranos' Holmes admits she slapped Big Pharma logos on lab reports to boost her biz

'I wish I had done it differently' she tells jury in fraud trial

24 Nov 23:10 | 51

NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one

Bruce Willis not required

24 Nov 12:28 | 76

LoRa to the Moon and back: Messages bounced off lunar surface using off-the-shelf hardware

... and a damn big radio telescope

24 Nov 09:30 | 49

Genetically modified E coli bacteria produce ink for 3D printing programmable objects

Drug delivery, environmental clean up, building in space among possible applications

23 Nov 19:35 | 12

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Space agencies have been planning this thing since 1996, so what's four more days?

23 Nov 06:57 | 39

Fancy being an astronaut but didn't go to uni? Your time may have finally come

Japanese space agency wants 'nauts with good eyesight and work experience – no degree required

23 Nov 05:05 | 5

China's hypersonic glider didn't just orbit Earth, it 'fired a missile' while at Mach 5

Middle Kingdom suggests US is making it all up to justify arms development. As if!

23 Nov 00:35 | 100

Russia's orbital insanity is almost beyond redemption – but there's space for improvement

Every debris cloud has a silver lining

22 Nov 09:30 | 94

Everything but the catch: '90s pop act or a successful mission for Rocket Lab?

2022's plan: Playing with boosters and helicopters

18 Nov 17:30 | 17

New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space

Tech promises to support boom in small satellites

18 Nov 11:46 | 47

It's fake ooze, don't fall for fake ooze: Alien fossils found on Mars might just be simple chemistry, uni pair warn

Similar mistakes have been made in the past, after all

18 Nov 07:29 | 37

Northrop Grumman throws hat in the ring to design NASA's next-gen Lunar Terrain Vehicle

Caution: Story contains questionable Lego recreation

16 Nov 18:34 | 24

Russia blows up old satellite, NASA boss 'outraged' as ISS crew shelters from debris

Moscow slammed for 'reckless, dangerous, irresponsible' weapon test

16 Nov 02:46 | 119

A diverse range of processing units linked via interconnects. Sounds familiar? Yes, it's IBM's quantum computing

System Two takes modular, data-center-inspired approach. Plus: 127-qubit Eagle Big Blue hopes will fly

16 Nov 01:55 | 4

Popular

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

For those of you who virtualise Microsoft’s finest and struggle with the pointer, this developer has an answer

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

'Keep it running a few weeks.' Fast-forward 5 years. 'Why'd it break, man!?'

Warning: China planning to swipe a bunch of data soon, so quantum computers can decrypt it later

Meanwhile, the Middle Kingdom’s military plans an AI offensive – in the labs and on the field of combat

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

At the same time, will overrule court decision that traditional publishers are liable for comments on social media

Indian government warns locals not to use Starlink's internet services

If you are going to sell satellite internet subscriptions in India, you Musk get a license, says regulator

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

IoT still needs its lightbulb moment

AWS is on the threshold of adulthood, but is nowhere near grown up

The cloudy concern is a prodigy, but early promise is no guarantee of dominance

Register Debate

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

We're back with another debate you can vote on as we argue back and forth – this time over cloud computing

Want to buy your own piece of the Pi? No 'urgency' says Upton of the listing rumours

A British success story... what happens next?

Nextcloud and cloud chums fire off competition complaint to the EU over Microsoft bundling OneDrive with Windows

No, it isn't the limited levels of storage that have irked European businesses

MORE
STORIES

NASA auditor's reality check says '2026 at the earliest' for Artemis Moon landing

All stacked up and nowhere to go

15 Nov 17:04 | 11

Earth's wobbly companion is probably the result of a lunar impact, reckon space boffins

Reflected light points to Moon-like material on recently discovered rock

12 Nov 17:15 | 38

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an Electron rocket descending to the ocean?

Everything but catching the thing: Rocket Lab prepares for recovery

12 Nov 11:12 | 12

ESA tries listening to a red rover on the Red Planet: How did it go? The sound of silence

Mars Express wanted to demonstrate its relay smarts once again, but space agency mum on progress

11 Nov 11:44 | 2

International Space Station fires rockets to dodge chunk of destroyed Chinese satellite

Meanwhile, next crew of astronauts all set to launch on Thursday

11 Nov 02:56 | 30

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

Proof of concept produces tiny volume of hydrocarbons, but makes a big point

10 Nov 13:13 | 75

NASA delays crewed Moon landing until 2025, citing technical infeasibility

The space agency wants you to know they are still committed to the project

10 Nov 07:57 | 31

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Private-sector investment could unlock additional government cash

09 Nov 12:30 | 211

Now that's a splash down: Astronauts spend 8-hour trip to Earth in diapers after SpaceX capsule toilet breaks

Puts a whole new spin on 'To boldly go where no one has gone before'

09 Nov 07:04 | 38

Hibernating instrument on Hubble roused as engineers ponder message problem

A software workaround for an iffy component looms. Sound familiar?

05 Nov 12:15 | 45

So it is possible for Jeff Bezos to lose: Court dismisses Blue Origin complaint about Moon contract award to Elon Musk

NASA and SpaceX to resume working on the next lunar lander

05 Nov 03:18 | 27

NASA picks spot at Moon's South Pole to perform first ice-drilling experiment

Featuring two sidekicks: A rover using Nokia's 4G and a hopping recon bot

04 Nov 07:11 | 19

Of course we've tried turning it off and on again: Yeah, Hubble telescope still not working

Science suspended as engineers study synchronisation issue

02 Nov 12:32 | 54

SpaceX-powered trip to ISS grounded by 'medical issue'

It's not COVID-19 and it's not an emergency, insists NASA

02 Nov 05:39 | 22

Google lab proposes solar-powered moisture farming to provide water for billions

From Tatooine to Earth

01 Nov 12:13 | 59

Trick or treat? Massive solar storm could light up American skies this Halloween

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a warning of a geomagnetic storm

29 Oct 22:03 | 22

Juno what? Jupiter's Great Red Spot is much deeper than originally thought

Boffins release treasure trove of findings from NASA probe, including weird cyclones around the poles

29 Oct 13:26 | 7

Pack your bags – we may have found the first planet outside of our galaxy

Alas, we will have to wait 70 years to confirm the sighting

28 Oct 02:04 | 37

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

From developers and Mount Evans ASICs to zettascale-by-2027 promises – what's Chipzilla got planned for us?

28 Oct 00:58 | 55

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Horizons Europe carrot dangled amid protocol wrangling

27 Oct 10:30 | 201

31-year-old piece of hardware not working very well: Hubble telescope back in safe mode over 'synchronization issues'

James Webb Space Telescope in line for a December flight

26 Oct 11:03 | 100

Jeff Bezos wants to build a business park in space

Pretty ambitious – none of this Blue-Origin-led consortium can put humans in orbit yet

26 Oct 00:04 | 46

NASA sets a date to begin lunar tuning

First Artemis mission is stacked on a rocket – now for five punishing sets of tests before liftoff

25 Oct 00:18 | 17

After more than a decade of development, South Korea has a near miss with Nuri rocket test

Nation playing catch-up following release from 1979 ban

21 Oct 13:59 | 10

Boeing's Starliner capsule corroded due to high humidity levels, NASA explains, and the spaceship won't fly this year

Meanwhile Elon's running orbital tourist trips and ISS crew missions

21 Oct 10:14 | 75

Theranos blood-test machine demos for VIPs rigged to hide any failures, court told

Error messages effectively piped to /dev/null, it is alleged

21 Oct 01:15 | 45

UK's ARIA innovation body 'hasn't even begun to happen' says former research lead

DARPA imitator not doing much after two years of Johnson government

20 Oct 14:38 | 17

Lunar rocks brought to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 show Moon's volcanoes were recently* active

* Just a couple of billion years

20 Oct 09:58 | 18

Darmstadt, we have a problem – ESA reveals its INTEGRAL space telescope was three hours from likely death

Gamma ray-spotting 'scope was spinning uncontrollably and unable to make 'leccy until dramatic rescue

20 Oct 08:17 | 41

Engineers investigating iffy solar array latch on NASA's Lucy as probe begins long journey to Trojan asteroids

Spacecraft otherwise stable and working well

18 Oct 18:46 | 8

Dishing up the goods: Square Kilometre Array moves out of the theoretical and into the contractual

Plus: Australian telescope precursor finds weird waves in the middle of the galaxy

18 Oct 16:44 | 23

Oops, they did it again – rogue Soyuz spurt gave ISS an attitude problem

Crew successfully de-orbited on Sunday carrying vital payload: footage for a movie shot in space

17 Oct 23:59 | 16

Space boffins: Exoplanet survived hydrogen-death of its host star

Hope extended to gas giants across the universe... well, it is Friday

15 Oct 14:24 | 31

Register Debate

Reg readers: Don't assume anything when sharing health data

Debate exhibits chronic distrust of policy makers, Big Pharma, and insurance companies

15 Oct 10:30 | 21

Forget everything you learned playing Lunar Lander: Chinese boffins reveal secrets of Chang'e 5 probe's touchdown

Landing with liquid fuel aboard made slosh-avoidance essential. Plus: China names first woman to visit Tiangong space station

15 Oct 07:51 | 8

Register Debate

Sharing medical records with researchers: Assumed consent works in theory – just not yet in practice

The UK shows us how not to run an opt-out approach

14 Oct 10:45 | 31

James Webb Space Telescope completes its voyage to French Guiana

Only a million or so miles to go

13 Oct 17:30 | 25

Register debate

I'm diabetic. I'd rather risk my shared health data being stolen than a double amputation

You want my medical records? Good, take them – now find me a cure

13 Oct 10:45 | 110

Saturday start for NASA's Lucy probe on its 12-year quest to map Jupiter's Trojan asteroids

Astronomers will be searching for clues on how the Solar System formed

12 Oct 23:50 | 13

Register debate

Patients must know how their health records are used – and approve any sharing for research

Who really benefits from 'secondary use' of your medical data?

12 Oct 10:45 | 44

Boeing's Calamity Capsule might take to space once again ... in the first half of 2022

'Oxidizer and moisture interactions' blamed for iffy spaceship valves

11 Oct 13:01 | 40

Register Debate

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

If assumed consent is informed consent, it’s individuals who benefit

11 Oct 10:45 | 121

Nothing says 'We believe in you' like NASA switching two 'nauts off Boeing's Starliner onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon

All change on 2022 ride to the ISS

07 Oct 17:30 | 30

Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to boffins studying complex systems, organic catalysts

20m Swedish kronor – close to 2 million quid – to be shared

07 Oct 10:28 | 6

D-Wave claims it can build a gate-model quantum computer

And if it works, you could play with it in a cloud around 2024

05 Oct 20:25 | 25

Italian researchers' silver nano-spaghetti promises to help solve power-hungry neural net problems

Back-to-analogue computing model designed to mimic emergent properties of the brain

05 Oct 10:23 | 18

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

William Shatner joins crew for Bezos' number two

04 Oct 16:23 | 151

ESA and JAXA release Mercury eyecandy, courtesy of spacecraft BepiColumbo

Fourth of nine scheduled planetary assists completed as spacecraft inches closer to releasing its orbiters

04 Oct 12:13 | 19

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

'Putting rocket boosters the size of Saturn V's F1 under Brit space biz.' Yikes. But where's the money, Boris?

01 Oct 10:27 | 74

Honda to build reusable rockets to sling sats, but won't scare SpaceX

Also plans remote-controlled robots with fingers and jar-opening capabilities, to help run a moon base

01 Oct 05:05 | 3

Blue Origin employees complain of sexist culture that ignores safety concerns

At Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, billionaire egos create fear of flying

01 Oct 01:13 | 24

Airline meal-sized £700k awarded by UK.gov for green aviation: That's for eco-tech rather than planes, mind

Infrastructure to support lower-emission aircraft, is the hope

30 Sep 14:44 | 13

Virgin Galactic cleared to fly again after a spell on Federal Aviation Administration's naughty step

More airspace and a hotline to the authority fixed up for the next flight

30 Sep 11:01 | 20

YouTube expands vaccine misinfo crackdown, nukes anti-vax channels for good

Public health experts wonder what took so long

30 Sep 00:16 | 114

FYI: Catastrophic flooding helped carve Martian valleys, not just rivers of water

Thanks, science

29 Sep 23:25 | 22

NASA halts Mars comms for two weeks as Sun gets in way of Red Planet

Who wouldn't want a break from Earth's noise?

29 Sep 07:31 | 26

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Astronomers are still figuring out how the planet's storm continues to rage

28 Sep 06:44 | 84

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

'Here I am, 100 billion neurons and all you want me to do is calculate all the ways this could possibly go wrong?'

27 Sep 15:16 | 72

Airbus to help build Mexican Moon-mining automata

Commercial partner's ad-funded expedition plans the ultimate pop-up in 2022

27 Sep 06:59 | 17

Scientists took cues from helicopter seeds to invent tiny microchips that float on wind

'Microfliers' could carry sensors to monitor air pollution and more

24 Sep 16:29 | 36

Boston Dynamics' Spot robot embarks on its latest thrilling adventure: Insurance!

US company equips cybernetic pooch to help in building inspections, post-disaster assessments

23 Sep 20:27 | 6

US Congress ponders setting up permanent UFO investigation office

Nothing to do with little green men, mind, unless they can be defined as state or non-state actors

21 Sep 16:48 | 31

China discloses new space tech: Coloured cargo labels to replace beige ones taikonauts found fiddly

Slaps 'em on six tonnes of kit – enough to sustain space station crew for six months – and successfully sends it to Tianhe

21 Sep 07:32 | 13

NASA hopes VIPER rover will search for water in Moon's Nobile crater in 2023

Machine could help unlock natural resources for future lunar base dwellers

21 Sep 06:03 | 8

US Federal Aviation Administration issues draft assessment of SpaceX Super Heavy impact

The environmental impact, not the smoking crater made by an impact

20 Sep 11:43 | 21

China's taikonauts return from heavenly palace after 92-day mission

Plenty more launches planned to attach another couple of modules

20 Sep 04:57 | 17

Space tourists splash down in Atlantic Ocean after three days in orbit

Some sightseeing, music, gambling, chatting to folks back home – just like a regular roadtrip

19 Sep 05:30 | 67

UK funds hydrogen-powered cargo submarine to torpedo maritime emissions by 2050

Green machine will also suck up microplastics between Glasgow and Belfast

16 Sep 11:28 | 56

SpaceX successfully sends four amateurs into orbit for three-day tour

Vision from window seats didn't stream, everything else worked

16 Sep 01:40 | 29

SpaceX prepares to launch four civilians and a glass dome into space

Musk to demonstrate his is mightier than Bezos or Branson's

15 Sep 18:31 | 14

UK gives military's frikkin' laser cannon project a second roll of the dice

First try had a habit of melting its mirrors, apparently

14 Sep 21:36 | 33

Boffins say Martian colonists could pee in buckets, give blood if they want shelter

In terms of building materials, Mars has nothing to offer but blood, soil, sweat and tears. And urine. Lots of urine

14 Sep 17:33 | 52

NASA's Perseverance rover nabs two Martian rock samples for scientists on Earth to study one day

Too early to confirm ancient alien life, but a 'potentially habitable sustained environment,' though...

14 Sep 00:08 | 11

The day has a 'y' in it, so Virgin Galactic has announced another delay

A potentially iffy component in the flight actuation system this time

13 Sep 11:30 | 29

Spot the dog? No, we couldn't either because Spot is a robot employed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Plans to send remote devices to work at 70-year-old decommissioned nuclear power station may not be so barking

10 Sep 10:43 | 44

Orolia inks €70m deal to provide atomic clocks for second generation of EU's Galileo navigation satellites

Time to hit the road

Dozy ISS cosmonauts woken by smoke alarm on eve of 5-hour spacewalk

Air purified, everyone back to bed, says Roscosmos, studiously ignoring smoke, burning smell

09 Sep 16:01 | 16

James Webb Space Telescope penciled in for launch this century. Yes, Dec 18, 2021

This thing better not explode on the pad

09 Sep 06:26 | 31

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Her attorney argues she made mistakes ... like trusting her former partner and COO Sunny Balwani

09 Sep 00:29 | 46

Astronomers detect burps of interstellar cannibal from 480 million light years away

In space, everyone can see you emit brightly shining gas, X-rays, and radio waves

07 Sep 17:01 | 16

ABOUT US

MORE CONTENT

SITUATION PUBLISHING

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

SIGN UP TO OUR DAILY NEWSLETTER

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021

Do not sell my personal information Cookies Privacy Ts&Cs