Author: Brett Venter

The main question we have about Apple’s 14 September event is whether it’s going to be an event like the one(s) in 2020 or if we’re heading back to 2019 in terms of presentation. If it’s 2019, then we’ll see everything Apple has to offer the world in one two-hour-ish event. If we’re looking at a repeat of 2020, then we’re only likely to see one of the following topics covered, with followup events taking place a little later in the year — which is great for Apple, but it gets a little… exhausting. But we’ll deal with the event…

Everyone wants to go to space and the US Department of Defense (DoD) is hoping to increase the number of missions that can travel outside of Earth’s orbit. The agency aims to achieve this by soliciting proposals for new commercial propulsion systems, specifically nuclear tech that “…enables high delta-V and electrical power to payloads, while maintaining fuel efficiency”. Going nuclear on the Department of Defense Nuclear powered spacecraft are not a new phenomenon, having been used for everything from generating electricity to making sure that tech doesn’t freeze out in space. The DoD is specifically looking for a nuclear propulsion…

Lego might be the brick with a thousand uses but the company’s various partnerships, with Nintendo, Disney, Land Rover and pretty much anyone else who wants a licensed set, are more or less designed to suck money out of wallets and into Danish bank accounts. It’s Ninty who has the most recent new set of constructible bricks for fans to marvel over — a new 2,064-piece Super Mario 64 Question Mark Block construction that a) looks like a Mario question mark block and b) conceals tiny little Mario 64 dioramas inside. Any more questions, Nintendo? Unlike other Nintendo sets from…

Samsung, at Global Tech Korea 2021, has unveiled a new take on its flexible screens. Well, flexible is the wrong term — the South Korean company is billing this particular 13in OLED panel as ‘stretchable’, because that’s just what it does. Its presentation consists of a 2D image of lava flow, augmented by bumps and curves that make it look as though the liquid-hot magma is bubbling and boiling on the screen. Which, you know, is pretty and all but not massively useful at this point. Samsung needs this… why? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2Izr6krY0 This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the company do…

It takes a long time to send something to space but the James Webb Space Telescope has taken longer than most. The replacement for astronomy hero Hubble has faced several delays since it was first pitched — it’s over fourteen years late — but NASA finally has a date for this bit of scientific hardware’s ascension — 18 December 2021. Things are looking up for the James Webb Space Telescope The space agency says that, following successful testing of the hardware itself (because you don’t fly more than $10 billion into space without making damned sure it’s going to work),…

Facebook has spent years stealing features from Snapchat and pretending that it’s innovating so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories, the company is launching with Ray-Ban later today remind us a whole heck of a lot of Snap’s first-generation Spectacles. Oh, the Ray-Ban Stories you will tell… See, the glasses themselves are set to be properly revealed at a Facebook event sometime later this evening but, as ever, someone on the internet knows what’s coming in advance. That someone is Evan Blass, who usually spoils all of Samsung’s fun but who is tacking a crack at…

Samsung has, over the past few years, released increasingly more bonkers smartphone sensors, first offering its users a 64MP camera before jumping to 108MP and, soon, a 200MP smartphone camera. But the company’s got an even larger number in mind for its cameras — 576MP. Samsung’s eye on the future The company has revealed, through a presentation made by the company’s head of automotive sensors, Haechang Lee, at the SEMI Europe Summit earlier this month, that it’s looking at having a 576MP camera sensor available by about 2025. But since Samsung has previously said that camera sensors and human eyes…

Someone at China’s National Space Science Centre (CNSSC) has been copying someone else’s homework, by the look of things. The country’s agency unveiled a prototype of the helicopter the country intends to send to Mars at some unspecified point in the future and it looks… well, it looks like we’ve seen it before. How much Ingenuity did that take, China? Which makes a weird kind of sense, really. You don’t want to go making space technology unique so that folks don’t accuse you of copying. You want an idea that has already proven to work because it’s hard enough to…

A relatively inexperienced space company, Firefly Aerospace, become considerably more experienced last week when it attempted its inaugural rocket flight and demonstrated exactly why people equate ‘rocket science’ with ‘something that’s really hard to do’. And that’s because the company’s Alpha launch vehicle, which was attempting to reach orbit on Thursday, 1 September, exploded a few minutes after liftoff. Or, rather, it was terminated. Unlike that other Firefly, this one’s getting another season https://twitter.com/thejackbeyer/status/1433618654889865216? See, Firefly Aerospace is a relatively young company, one aiming to provide launch services for smaller (up to 10,000kg) payloads that need to live out in…

Joby Aviation, in case you need a reminder, is a flying taxi company that recently saw some success testing its prototype flying taxi. The unmanned electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) craft flew some 240km on a single charge without crashing, blowing up or destroying anything. And now, the company’s testing its vehicle with NASA. A Joby well done See, NASA doesn’t just send large phallic objects into space. It’s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and this test falls under the ‘Aeronautics’ bit of the name. The flying taxi is being tested with NASA at Joby’s Electric Flight Base in California as…