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Meet the cranky misfits who get to name new varieties of the species.

Microsoft veteran on knowing the difference and convincing approvers to accept a change

An anonymous reader shares this report from Space.com: On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart, besting its old mark — set on Aug. 31, 2024 with two Starlink missions — by 27 minutes. The first liftoff, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, occurred Saturday at 9:12 p.m. EDT (0112 GMT on Aug. 16) and carried eight satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for Louisiana-based telecom company Globalstar. All eight spacecraft were deployed successfully, separating over a six-minute span beginning 56.5 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX announced via social media. While that Falcon 9 was powering its way to low Earth orbit, another one launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on California's central coast. That liftoff, at 9:50 p.m. EDT (6:50 p.m. local time; 0150 GMT on Aug. 16), kicked off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called USSF-366... Both of Saturday's missions featured successful rocket landings. The Falcon 9 first stage that launched the Globalstar mission came back for a touchdown at Cape Canaveral about eight minutes after launch. It was the 14th flight for that particular booster. The USSF-366 Falcon 9 first stage, meanwhile, came back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after its launch, touching down in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." That booster now has 18 missions under its belt. Saturday's doubleheader brought the tally of Falcon 9 launches in 2026 to 96. The vast majority of those — about 75% — have been Starlink missions.

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A warehouse in Harwich is up in flames after a blaze started, with plumes of smoke in the sky.

A warehouse in Harwich is up in flames after a blaze started, with plumes of smoke in the sky.

When the King's Norfolk estate closes to day trippers, some lucky tourists get to stay. Alesia Fiddler checks into a deluxe safari tent close to Charles' home.

The actor and his wife Christie Goddard have officially divorced after 19 years of marriage, according to reports.

I've been getting a surprisingly decent night's sleep, despite having to endure London's fifth heatwave.

The pub had 'suffered extensive fire and water damage'

The couple were seen for the first time since their secret wedding.

Roopie Gill's family call it her 'Peggy Mitchell moment', a reference to the EastEnders scene when the landlady of the Queen Vic faced down interlopers and told them: 'Get outta my pub.'

Striking images show passengers waving from the windows as a long line of buses made its way across Salisbury Plain to the 'ghost' village of Imber in Wiltshire.

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill aims to establish a Legacy Commission to investigate killings during battles with Republicans and Loyalists as far back as 1969.

They say they are a 'traditional' pub that's "the perfect place to sit back, relax with your favourite drink in hand"

Scott pled no contest in May to a DUI charge stemming from an earlier car crash, and days later she was arrested for DUI yet again.

He might be playing the most laid-back Beatle, Ringo Starr, but Barry Keoghan's latest on-set tantrum has left the crew praying he'll learn to Let It Be sooner rather than later.

Phys.org reports: Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that rival the extreme temperatures faced by spacecraft upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Copper and its alloys are primary candidates for handling these intense heat fluctuations, making it vital to understand exactly how the metal behaves when pushed to its melting point. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and collaborators have captured a detailed, step-by-step look at copper atoms as they underwent extreme heating. Published in Nature Communications, the results revealed a key parameter that allowed copper's crystal lattice to melt steadily rather than collapse instantaneously, as earlier simulations predicted. "These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers," said Mianzhen Mo, a SLAC staff scientist who led the research. "They also demonstrate the incredible, atomic-scale resolution imaging we can achieve at SLAC's electron camera...." Researchers use computer simulations, aided by AI and machine learning, to sift through innumerable combinations of elements and identify promising candidate materials for real-world testing. "Whether the copper melts slowly or suddenly collapses, by the time the researchers look, the sample resembles nothing more than a metallic brown puddle," the article points out. But SLAC's powerful electron camera captures atomic and molecular movements down to the femtosecond — a millionth of a billionth of a second — and revealed that at around 1,424 degreesC (2,595 degreesF) there was still gradual melting as the temperature rose beyond the superheating limit, with real-world conditions showing the atoms shifted and retained some order. "It's a straightforward solution," said Mianzhen Mo, a SLAC staff scientist who led the research. "But molecular dynamics simulations had been overlooking it for years. When you have complex simulations attempting to capture every aspect of reality, down to individual atoms, it takes real-world data to show you what's missing from the calculations."

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David Beckham and his wife Victoria's close bond with Harper was clear to see as they hung out together in Portofino, Italy, on the latest stop of their summer holiday.

Residents in Witham are living with a “stinking mess” as communal bins for their flats have not been collected for more than a year.

The county council say that the plan to stop discretionary net zero policy commitments will save it £3million a year