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Tech News
NASA released a 360-page request for proposals asking US companies to develop commercial space stations that could replace the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit as early as 2030. Industry responses are due December 8, with NASA planning to select two or more contractors by April, each guaranteed at least $100 million in this initial phase.
Startup Xona Space Systems is set to launch six satellites this month, marking the debut of what it calls the first precision commercial alternative to GPS. Founded in 2019 by five Stanford-trained engineers, the company aims to sell more accurate, harder-to-jam positioning and timing signals than government-run systems like GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS. CEO Brian Manning said the company built a new satellite architecture that avoids costly onboard atomic clocks by relying on close ground communication.
Amazon announced it will donate more than $1 billion over five years to communities near its data centers, letting residents direct funds toward education, job training, energy affordability and water initiatives. AWS CEO Matt Garman also pledged the company won't raise local power bills or deplete water supplies, claiming 75 percent of projects already meet a 2030 'water positive' goal. Garman argued that opposition to data centers risks letting China overtake the US in AI development.
A new satellite constellation called FireSat has been deployed specifically to detect the earliest signs of wildfires from space. It is described as the first constellation built solely for this purpose, aiming to identify fires before they spread widely.
New research indicates that Earth underwent multiple episodes of true polar wander—a shift in the planet's rotational axis relative to its surface—during the age of dinosaurs. Scientists say these shifts, which occur as the planet rebalances its mass distribution, were accompanied by changes in global sea levels.
At Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, mineral physicist Alisha Clark completed the final shot of a multi-year project using the Z machine to recreate the extreme pressures found deep inside Earth. The device, normally used to test the reliability of US nuclear weapons, fired an electrical pulse into water-infused glass samples to examine how water behaves when trapped in Earth's interior during planetary formation.
A personal tech history post describes growing up with a Packard Bell 386 SX running MS-DOS, playing games like SimCity 2000, Scorched Earth and Oregon Trail. The author recalls that tinkering with SimCity 2000's saved game files became the moment they first learned about bytes and hexadecimal data on disk.
SpaceX has told NASA and private space station developers including Axiom Space, Voyager Space, and Vast Space that it intends to stop flying Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 missions to low-Earth orbit after supporting the International Space Station through 2030. The move threatens the crew transportation backbone for NASA's two-decade effort to build a commercial human spaceflight market in orbit.
Two geologists from Australian National University analyzed zircon minerals in ocean sediments to trace the outlines of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. Their findings, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggest Antarctica contained substantial material dating to Gondwana's formation between 650 and 450 million years ago.
Researchers publishing in Nature propose that gravitational interactions between Earth's inner core and mantle help explain decades-long changes in the length of a day. Because the inner core rotates at a slightly different rate than the rest of the planet, it becomes misaligned with mass irregularities in the mantle, and the resulting gravitational pull works against other core-mantle interactions. Geophysicist Mathieu Dumberry and colleagues say this tug-of-war produces small accelerations and decelerations in Earth's spin over time.
Muju Earth has built the Aeropod, a fingernail-sized device farmers plant alongside seeds that bursts open from soil temperature, pressure and moisture to loosen compacted soil without machinery. The startup, founded by Ifeoluwa Afolayan and Wangyang Hu at Imperial College London, says the device can match tilling's results at roughly a quarter of the cost. Muju Earth is running paid field trials with nine UK onion farmers this fall and will present at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield in October.
Researchers report that massive mountain ranges formed by continental collisions once existed in what is now Antarctica. As these supermountains eroded over millions of years, they released nutrient-rich sediment that scientists say coincided with periods of rapid biological expansion on Earth.