Comment on Astronauts stuck in space in Boeing’s Starliner are confident they’ll return home despite mishaps

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) As part of today’s blockbuster prisoner swap between the US and Russia, which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition figures, Russia received in return a motley collection of serious criminals, including an assassin who had executed an enemy of the Russian state in the middle of Berlin. But the Russians also got two hackers, Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, each of whom had been convicted of major financial crimes in the US.

Enlarge (credit: Tony C. French/Getty) A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak. The finding adds some data to what many experts have suspected amid the outbreak. But the authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential. "Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few," the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. (credit: NASA) It has now been eight weeks since Boeing's Starliner spacecraft launched into orbit on an Atlas V rocket, bound for the International Space Station. At the time NASA officials said the two crew members, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, could return to Earth as soon as June 14, just eight days later. Yes, there had been some problems on Starliner's ride to the space station that involved helium leaks and failing thrusters.

Enlarge / Astroscale's ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15. (credit: Astroscale) There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet. In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small satellite into low-Earth orbit on top of a Rocket Lab launcher.

Enlarge / Samsung's 2022 The Frame is one of the edge-lit TVs that RTINGs tested. (credit: Samsung) Thin LCD-LED TVs are appealing because they're easy to find space for and are aesthetically pleasing. To stay slim, most thin TVs, like Samsung's The Frame pictured above, use edge-lit backlights. But beyond the image quality limitations of these designs, new testing from RTINGs suggests that there are inherent flaws in edge-lit TV designs that hurt durability. Review site RTINGs has been running extreme tests on dozens of TVs and a few monitors that are meant to simulate years of use.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images) Apple reported its earnings results for the third quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, and it satisfied investors' expectations at the top level with 5 percent growth year over year. The company set a third-quarter record with $85.8 billion in revenue. Despite that growth, a couple of key things investors were concerned about—overall iPhone sales and revenue in China—slipped downward, and Apple's stock fell slightly in after-hours trading. Revenue in China fell to $14.7 billion, down 6.3 percent from a year ago, as Apple faces fierce competition from Huawei and other smartphone companies.