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If the state of the planet is getting you down or you’re just terrified that ducks can now speak human words 0 then I advise you to stop what you’re doing for a few moments and gaze in awe at this photo by Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut currently residing inside the International Space Station.

Pesquet, an engineer with the European Space Agency, is one of the members of the SpaceX Crew-2 mission and member of NASA’s Expedition 65, which launched to the station in April. It’s his second spaceflight and he’s become known around these parts for delivering some absolutely surreal images of our home planet.

This may be his best yet.

The first observation of a brand-new kind of supernova had been predicted by theorists but never before confirmed.

In 2,017 a particularly luminous and unusual source of radio waves was discovered in data taken by the Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey, a project that scans the night sky in radio wavelengths. Now, led by Caltech graduate student Dillon Dong (MS ’18), a team of astronomers has established that the bright radio flare was caused by a black hole or neutron star crashing into its companion star in a never-before-seen process.

“Massive stars usually explode as supernovae when they run out of nuclear fuel,” says Gregg Hallinan, professor of astronomy at Caltech. “But in this case, an invading black hole or neutron star has prematurely triggered its companion star to explode.” This is the first time a merger-triggered supernova has ever been confirmed.

Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup that is building the classical hardware and software infrastructure to help run quantum machines, announced a $50 million Series B investment today.

Today’s round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners with help from Exor, Claridge Israel, Samsung NEXT, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, LP, as well as TLV Partners, Battery Ventures, 2i Ventures and other existing investors. The company has now raised approximately $83 million, according to Crunchbase data.

While quantum computing in general is in its early days, Quantum Machines has developed a nice niche by building a hardware and software system, what they call The Quantum Orchestration Platform, that helps run the burgeoning quantum machines, leaving it plenty of room to grow as the industry develops.