Toggle light / dark theme

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – If you missed the last few Space Coast launches because they happened late at night or during the workday, this weekend’s SpaceX launch will be a good opportunity to see one.

SpaceX is targeting Saturday morning to launch another round of internet-beaming satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 40.

The launch window opens at 10:46 a.m. and ends at 11:02 a.m.

The rapidly falling cost of getting into orbit has spurred a boom in the space industry as a host of new applications become economical. Now a secretive startup plans to slash the cost to just $250,000 by flinging rockets into space rather than firing them.

Over the last decade, the pioneering work done by SpaceX has shown that getting stuff into orbit doesn’t need to be so expensive and that there are viable business opportunities to be had in the private space industry. Combined with advances in satellite technology, there’s now a thriving market for small, inexpensive spacecraft in low- E arth orbit doing everything from remote sensing to delivering broadband internet access.

But while costs have fallen dramatically, the cheapest option for reaching low-Earth orbit —a rideshare on SpaceX’s Falcon 9—still starts at $1 million, and launches only happen twice a month at best. California-based startup SpinLaunch says its technology will allow up to five launches a day for as little as $250,000.

Data can be stolen from an air gapped personal computer just by using variations in screen brightness. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University wrote a paper on it.

As the team defines them, “Air-gapped computers are systems that are kept isolated from the Internet since they store or process .”

That they have come up with yet another discovery on how to wrest from a came as no shock to Naked Security, which recognized that “Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have made a name for themselves figuring out how to get data out of air-gapped computers. They’ve dreamed up ways to communicate using speakers, blinking LEDs in PCs, infrared lights in , and even computer fans.”

No, these are not pictures of caramel corn—they’re the new close-ups of the sun, taken by the largest solar telescope ever built, and they’re what the Internet has been abuzz about for a week. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is able to capture imagery three times more detailed than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re looking at here in this video are huge bubbling cells as big as Texas, transferring heat from the sun’s interior to its surface, but the telescope can also resolve tiny features as small as Manhattan Island within the cells!

The DKIST is about 13 feet wide and has a better-than-bird’s-eye-view at 10,000 feet above sea-level on the summit of Haleakala, a massive shield volcano on Hawaii’s island Maui. The area covered in this image is about 22,600 miles by 22,600 miles, but the cell-like structures shown are about the size of Texas.

This is only the first time it’s been used so far, and scientists are hoping that in the future it will be helpful in predicting solar weather. Scientists still have a lot of questions about the dynamical processes in the sun and space weather is a focus that can have significant impact on the everyday individual. Space weather has a huge influence on our air travel and satellite communication, sometimes causing power outages and system failures, and our technology has only given us about 48 minutes’ notice until now. The DKIST will help us predict solar flares 48 hours in advance and understand space weather like we never have before.