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Blog – Page 6821

SPARKS, Nev. (KOLO) — Their headquarters sits on a hill overlooking east Sparks, but Sierra Nevada Corporation’s sights are set much higher.

Long known for the development of high-tech equipment for applications here on Earth, they are also a major player in space exploration and research.

They provided some key parts to the latest Mars rover, Perseverance, and in a virtual press conference from their plant in Colorado Wednesday they announced an ambitious timeline for their latest projects—commercial flights with its Dreamchaser spaceplane to the International Space Station next year…and by 2028, a replacement for the space station itself.

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Company officials say it will likely be summer before the ship begins glide flight testing at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic has reached space twice before — the first time from California in December 2018. The company marked its second successful glide flight over Spaceport America last June.

RELATED: 1st private space crew paying $55M each to fly to International Space Station

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In Wednesday’s announcement, StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer said the COVID-19 pandemic created new demand for her company’s expertise. “When the pandemic first hit, we reached out to the federal government and started looking at ways we could help take seven of our laboratories around the United States and start offering COVID testing on a local basis, not only to support nursing homes, but Indian Tribal Communities as well as just the general public.”

PayCertify is a financial technology (FinTech) firm that “encompasses both a complete merchant and consumer experience front to back, pulling analytics and valuable insights to connect data sets in real-time from both the consumer and merchant side of the transaction.”

The two companies are expected to bring a combined 200 biotech and fintech jobs to the region.

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The earliest bones, however, were very different from human skeletons today. In the prehistoric past, bone was more like concrete, growing on the exterior of fish to provide a protective shell. But according to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the first bones with living cells—like those found in humans—evolved about 400 million years ago and acted as skeletal batteries: They supplied prehistoric fish with minerals needed to travel over greater distances.

The fossilized creatures in the analysis are known as osteostracans. “I affectionately call them beetle mermaids,” says Yara Haridy, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Museum of Nature and lead author of the study. These fish had a hard, armor-encased front end and a flexible tail growing out the back. They had no jaws, and their bone tissue encased their bodies. These kinds of fish are critical to understanding the origins of the hard parts that shaped vertebrate evolution.

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Crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells are among the most promising solar technologies on the market. These solar cells have numerous advantageous properties, including a nearly optimum bandgap, high efficiency and stability. Notably, they can also be fabricated using raw materials that are widely available and easy to attain.

In recent years, many companies and engineers specifically focused their research efforts on Si heterojunction (SHJ) . These solar cells, which consist of amorphous silicon layers deposited on crystalline silicon surfaces, have been found to achieve remarkable power conversion efficiencies (PCE).

Researchers at Beijing University of Technology, the Hanergy Chengdu Research and Development Center, and Jiangsu University in China recently carried out a study aimed at closely examining the structure of the c-Si/a-Si:H in high-efficiency SHJ solar cells. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, offers valuable insight that could help to improve the performance of SHJ solar cells further, by allowing engineers greater control over the c-Si/a-Si:H interface.

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The School of Computer Science and Statistics in Dublin, Ireland, has begun investigating how much user data iOS and Android send to Apple and Google, respectively. Overall, they discovered that, even when the devices are idle or minimally configured, each tends to share an average of 4.5 minutes’ worth of data every day.

For instance, Apple and Google both receive the devices’ IMEI, hardware serial number, SIM and IMSI, handset phone number and other items. Moreover, Android and iOS continue to transmit telemetry to their , even if the user specifically opts not to share this data. In fact, as soon as the user inserts a SIM card into either , corresponding user data beacons out to the parent companies of each.

Meanwhile, users have no way to avoid iOS devices sharing with Apple the MAC addresses of nearby devices—such as other handsets or home gateway—as well as GPS location. Indeed, these users do not even have to log in for the device to share their data. On the other hand, Google collects a much larger amount of data from nearby devices than Apple. As a comparison, Google receives about 1MB of data versus 42KB for Apple. While idle, the Android Pixel sends around 1MB every 12 hours, while iOS shares 52KB of data. Furthermore, Google even collects about 20 times more handset data than Apple, and the majority of users in the US have Android devices.

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