The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has selected Rocket Lab’s medium-lift reusable Neutron for the Rocket Cargo mission...Earlier this year, the company announced that its Neutron rocket will land its payloads at sea. To facilitate this, the company is modifying an offshore barge, named “Return on Investment,” to serve as an ocean landing platform for returning missions...Rocket Lab, along with Stoke Space, will now be eligible to bid against established giants like Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance.

Utilities’ high returns on equity outpace riskier stocks and cost the average customer $300 a year, national study finds.

The study: https://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250102-aelp-ror-v5.pdf

[Investor-Owned Utilities] are granted regional franchises not subject to competition under the rationale that they are “natural monopolies”: their service can be most efficiently provided by a single entity...As investor-owned businesses, IOUs seek to maximize their profits, which often runs headlong into regulators’ goal of achieving just and reasonable rates...Over the last three years, IOU residential electricity rates have increased 49% more than inflation. In contrast, their publicly owned counterparts have increased 44% less than inflation.

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A joint research team has successfully demonstrated the complete confinement of mechanical waves within a single resonator—something long thought to be theoretically impossible...Many technologies around us—from smartphones and ultrasound devices to radios—rely on resonance, a phenomenon in which waves are amplified at specific frequencies. However, typical resonators gradually lose energy over time, requiring constant energy input to maintain their function..."We have broken a long-standing theoretical boundary," said Professor Junsuk Rho, who leads the research. "While this is still in the fundamental research phase, the implications are significant—from low-loss energy devices to next-generation sensing and signal technologies."

...According to the standard cosmological model, small galaxies merge over time in a chaotic process to form larger ones, leaving behind swarms of faint dwarf galaxies that orbit massive host galaxies in an almost random arrangement...Instead of being randomly spread around their host galaxy, as the standard model of cosmology predicts, over 80% of these dwarf galaxies are concentrated on one side of the Andromeda galaxy...Specifically, all but one of Andromeda's satellites lie within 107 degrees of the line pointing towards the Milky Way, a region covering only 64% of the host galaxy's surroundings..."We have to look at more than three hundred simulated systems to find just one that is similarly extreme in its asymmetry as observed." This makes Andromeda an extreme outlier, defying cosmological expectations.

...there are two different ways to measure this cosmic expansion rate, and they don’t agree. One method looks deep into the past by analyzing cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. The other studies Cepheid variable stars in nearby galaxies, whose brightness allows astronomers to map more recent expansion.

You’d expect both methods to give the same answer. Instead, they disagree—by a lot. And this mismatch is what scientists call the Hubble tension...Webb’s data agrees with Hubble’s and completely rules out measurement error as the cause of the discrepancy. It’s now harder than ever to explain away the tension as a statistical fluke. This inconsistency suggests something big might be missing from our understanding of the universe - something beyond current theories involving dark matter, dark energy, or even gravity itself. When the same universe appears to expand at different rates depending on how and where you look, it raises the possibility that our entire cosmological model may need rethinking.

...Scientists have believed dark energy was a "cosmological constant," but it is actually changing over time in unexpected ways...current data shows that, at the beginning of the universe, dark energy was very strong. But it has weakened with time and will continue to do so...The new research builds on data released from DESI in April 2024 that found signs that dark energy was changing. DESI has been surveying the universe for four years and an analysis of five years' worth of data is next for its research

sound on

Narrator: "The shape goes into a shape press that presses the shape into a pressed shape."