By Gabriella Borter WASHINGTON In 1998, the year a voter-approved measure barring the use of race-conscious admissions policies

A YouTuber who advises Nigerians on coming to the UK says some students are motivated by work not study.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Richard Branson's bankrupt satellite launch firm Virgin Orbit said in a Tuesday court filing it plans to sell

About 20 per cent of US academic respondents in a survey have reported that they, or someone they know, have seen unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Over a third of the nearly 1,500 respondents are interested in conducting research into such unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), suggested the results of the survey, published in the journal Humanities and Social Science Communications. The US government has undertaken new hearings, reports and investigations into UAP, with a report by the Pentagon suggesting there were over 500 reports about UFOs with the agency as of August 2022. In the current research, scientists, including those from the University of Louisville, surveyed 39,984 academics, including professors, associate professors and assistant professors from 144 US universities across 14 different disciplines. Despite the stigma associated with the topic, researchers said these developments merit asking university faculty about their perceptions on the sightings of UFOs. Researchers asked the 4 per cent of individuals who responded to the survey about their perceptions of, experiences with and opinions of UAP. Nearly a tenth of the participants worked in political science, another tenth in physics, 10 per cent in psychology and 6 per cent in engineering. About 276 of the respondents – or 19 per cent of participants – reported that they or someone they knew had witnessed UAP. A further 9 per cent said they or someone they knew “may have witnessed” UAP, according to the study. Thirty-nine percent of all the participants said they did not know what the most likely explanations for UAP were, but a fifth of them attributed the sightings to natural events and 13 per cent to devices of unknown intelligence. About 4 per cent of participants said they had conducted academic research related to UAP, and over a third said they had some degree of interest in conducting research in this area. Among the respondents, 37 per cent ranked the importance of further research into UAP as either “very important” or “absolutely essential”, while nearly two-thirds of them considered academia’s involvement in UAP-related research to be “very important or absolutely essential”. The findings hinted that many American academics across disciplines consider academia’s involvement in research into UAP to be important. “Results demonstrated that faculty think the academic evaluation of UAP information and more academic research on this topic is important,” scientists wrote in the study, adding that curiosity on the topic “outweighed scepticism or indifference”. Researchers also suggested many may be cautiously willing to engage with UFO research if others they consider to be reputable within their field also do so. However, they said more surveys among larger and diverse cohorts are needed to understand attitudes of academics towards UAP. Read More Some strange ‘highly manoeuvrable’ UFOs seem to defy laws of physics, scientists say UFOs, UAPs and ETs: Why some people believe aliens are visiting us right now Nearly 200 recent UFO sightings in US remain unexplained, Pentagon says Ancient galaxy discovered 25 million light years away Watch: Axiom Mission 2 arrives at the International Space Station Nearly 350 licences issued to UK space companies

Saudi biomedical scientist Rayyanah Barnawi will carry out breast cancer research while in orbit.

Nasa has named Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin as the second company to build a lunar lander under its Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon for the firs time in more than 50 years. The US space agency awarded the first contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2021 in a $3 billion deal that was disputed by Mr Bezos at the time. Those initial missions using SpaceX’s Starship system are slated for later this decade. “We want more competition, we want two landers,” Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said at an event in Washington on Friday. “It means you have reliability, you have backups. It benefits Nasa, it benefits the American people.” Today’s announcement evokes deja vu for Amazon.com founder Bezos and defense contractor Dynetics Inc, the head of a partnership with Northrop Grumman. Those companies lost out to SpaceX for the 2021 contract, part of an initial moon lander procurement program. Nasa under that program said it could pick up to two companies, but blamed budget constraints for only going with SpaceX. The new contract is the biggeset ever deal for Blue Origin, which Mr Bezos founded in 2000. The Amazon founder has invested billions of dollars into the company to compete for high-profile commercial and government space contracts with SpaceX. After losing in 2021, Blue Origin unsuccessfully fought to overturn Nasa’s decision to ignore its Blue Moon lander, first with a watchdog agency and then in court. Blue Origin and lawmakers had pressured Nasa to award a second lunar lander contract to promote commercial competition and ensure the agency has a backup ride to the moon. Nasa in early 2022 announced the program for a second lander contract. Nasa chief Bill Nelson said at the time: “I promised competition, so here it is.” Blue Origin has already named its corporate partners for the lunar lander: Lockheed Martin , Boeing, spacecraft software firm Draper, and robotics firm Astrobotic. Northrop Grumman, previously a key partner in Blue Origin’s unsuccessful Blue Moon bid in 2021, switched teams to join its former rival Dynetics. Nasa’s multi-spacecraft plan for the Artemis moonshots involves its Space Launch System rocket launching astronauts toward the moon aboard the Lockheed-built Orion capsule. That will dock in space with a lunar lander that will ferry the crew the rest of the way to the Moon’s surface. Additional reporting from agencies Read More ‘It’s becoming like an airport’: How SpaceX normalised rocket launches Watch live: Nasa reveals who will build second Artemis lunar lander Nasa Mars lander study reveals ‘main source of heat’ on Red Planet Saturn’s rings are no more than 400 million years old – study

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A team led by Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin won a coveted NASA contract

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON Elon Musk's SpaceX has tapped NASA's former human spaceflight boss Kathy Lueders to help

Nasa has built an artificial intelligence model to predict where on Earth an impending solar storm would strike, a new system that scientists said can provide “30 minutes of advance warning”. The AI model analyses Nasa satellite data to raise the alarm on dangerous space weather, said researchers from the American space agency’s Goddard Space Center. The warning may provide just enough time for countries to prevent severe impacts of these storms on power grids and other critical infrastructure, according to the new study published recently in the journal Space Weather. Solar storms are caused when the Sun emits a burst of electrically charged plasma in what is called a coronal mass ejection. These charged particles create so-called geomagnetic storms that may cause blackouts and technological malfunctions of instruments on Earth as they interfere with the protective magnetic field around the planet. While these storms range from mild to extreme, their effects could become increasingly disruptive in a technologically dependent world. For instance, a solar storm in 1989 caused blackouts across Quebec, Canada for 12 hours, plunging millions into the dark and closing schools and businesses. Another popular solar superstorm event known as the Carrington Event sparked fires at early telegraph stations in 1859 that prevented messages from being sent. Scientists warned that the risk of such a devastating solar storm is increasing as we approach the next “solar maximum” – a peak in the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle. To prevent such a devastation, Nasa scientists developed the new AI model to identify links between solar wind measurements from previous Sun missions and geomagnetic disturbances observed at ground stations across Earth. The computer model they developed, called DAGGER, can quickly and accurately predict geomagnetic disturbances worldwide, “30 minutes before they occur,” researchers said. When they tested the model against two geomagnetic storms that happened in August 2011 and March 2015, it was able to “quickly and accurately” forecast the storm’s impacts around the world. The new prediction system is the first to combine swift analysis of AI, with real measurements from space and across Earth to generate frequently updated predictions. Scientists believe the early warning provided by the system can help take action to protect infrastructure from an impending solar storm, such as temporarily taking sensitive systems offline or moving satellites to different orbits. Read More Stunning aurora lights up skies over Australia: ‘Brightest one I’ve ever seen’ How a severe solar storm could leave a lasting impact on our world The world is not yet ready to overcome a once-in-a-century solar superstorm, warn scientists Astronomers find ‘objects that no one has ever seen before’ Saturn’s rings are no more than 400 million years old – study Strange sounds recorded by balloons in stratosphere leave scientists puzzled

Astronauts have been adjusting to the challenges of sleeping in space for years, including light exposure and zero gravity. The lessons learned from their experiences could help ensure that the first crewed missions to Mars get enough rest.

The biggest explosion ever seen has been spotted in space – and scientists don’t know for sure where it came from. The blast was brighter than almost anything ever seen and has been going on for years, making it by far the most powerful such event witnessed by scientists. It has been ongoing for more than three years, and took place nearly 8 billion years away. Astronomers have proposed a host of possible explanations for the blast: it may be a vast cloud of gas that was torn apart by a black hole, for instance. But nothing on such a scale has ever been seen before and the explosion may have come from something else entirely. It is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole. The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, took place when the universe was around six billion years old, and is still being detected by a network of telescopes. The astronomers, led by the University of Southampton, believe the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, that has been violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Fragments of the cloud would be swallowed up, sending shockwaves through its remnants, as well as into a large dusty “doughnut” surrounding the black hole. Such events are very rare and nothing on this scale has been witnessed before, the researchers say. Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record – a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. Although this was brighter than AT2021lwx, it lasted for just a fraction of the time, meaning the overall energy released by the AT2021lwx explosion was far greater. AT2021lwx was first detected in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, and subsequently picked up by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) based in Hawaii. But until now the scale of the explosion had been unknown. Dr Philip Wiseman, research fellow at the University of Southampton, who led the research, said: “We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova. “Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual.” The Southampton-led team believe the most feasible explanation for what caused the explosion is an extremely large cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) or dust that has come off course from its orbit around the black hole and been sent flying in. Dr Wiseman added: “With new facilities, like the Vera Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, coming online in the next few years, we are hoping to discover more events like this and learn more about them. “It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key processes to how the centres of galaxies change over time.” The findings are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Additional reporting by agencies Read More Biggest explosion ever seen spotted in space – and we don’t know what it is Scientists think they have explained a ‘mysterious structure in the universe’ Astronomers spot the largest cosmic explosion ever seen Astronomers spot the largest cosmic explosion ever seen Astronomers see ‘objects that no one has ever seen before’ in incredible observations ‘Meteorite? shooting star? missile?’: Officials explain strange ‘fireball’ over Japan

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON Vast, a startup backed by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb, is aiming to launch a