Space junk isn’t going away anytime soon—and neither are the problems it causes. We’re poised to see more satellite launches with every passing year, which means more pieces of rocketry and spacecraft getting loose and zipping around at over 22,000 mph. At those speeds, even an object just a few centimeters long could instantly destroy a satellite, and send even more debris...

SpaceX successfully flew a prototype of its next-generation Starship vehicle for the first time ever on Tuesday, a major step forward in the company’s quest to eventually send people to Mars. What happened: Around 8:00pm Eastern Time, from its testing site at Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX flew the prototype about 500 feet into the air (the company has not yet stated what the exact altitude of the...

The news: The UK Home Office has said it will stop using an algorithm to process visa applications that critics claim is racially biased. Opponents to it argue that the algorithm’s use of nationality to decide which applications get fast-tracked has led to a system in which “people from rich white countries get “Speedy Boarding”; poorer people of color get pushed to the back of the...

Researchers have demonstrated that they can fool a modern face recognition system into seeing someone who isn’t there. A team from the cybersecurity firm McAfee set up the attack against a facial recognition system similar to those currently used at airports for passport verification. By using machine learning, they created an image that looked like one person to the human eye, but was...

The news: Maryland biotechnology company Novavax has announced encouraging results from a preliminary study of its experimental coronavirus vaccine. The trial enrolled 131 healthy volunteers in Australia, gave them either a placebo or one of four escalating doses of its vaccine, and found that everyone who received the vaccine produced a high level of antibodies against covid-19. Novavax signed a...