Figures for 2020 show that 88,324 cars were registered last year The number of new cars registered last year was down 25% according to figures released by the Society of the Irish Motor Industry. There were 88,324 cars registered in 2020. More than 43% of new cars were diesel, almost 37% were petrol. Almost 12% were hybrid and more than ...
Read More »Daily Archives: 04.01.2021
Spontaneous Robot Dances Highlight a New Kind of Order in Active Matter
Predicting when and how collections of particles, robots, or animals become orderly remains a challenge across science and engineering. In the 19th century, scientists and engineers developed the discipline of statistical mechanics, which predicts how groups of simple particles transition between order and disorder, as when a collection of randomly colliding atoms freezes to form a uniform crystal lattice. The ...
Read More »Stopping the Shuttle: Remembering the Drag Chute, 30 Years On
Columbia shows off her drag chute during the STS-83 landing on 8 April 1997. Photo Credit: NASA We watchers of the space program became accustomed to Space Shuttle landings, almost as much as we did their launches. On more than a hundred occasions between April 1981 and July 2011, we watched as the sleek black-and-white orbiters appeared in the Florida, ...
Read More »Two payloads orbited by SpaceX’s launch of NRO mission
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off on the NROL-108 mission Dec. 19 from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: SpaceX Tracking information released by the U.S. military indicates two government payloads rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Dec. 19 on the NROL-108 mission, a dedicated launch for the National Reconnaissance Office. The identities and ...
Read More »NASA approves heliophysics missions to explore Sun, Earth’s aurora
(29 December 2020 – NASA) NASA has approved two heliophysics missions to explore the Sun and the system that drives space weather near Earth. Together, NASA’s contribution to the Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, or EUVST, and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will help us understand the Sun and Earth as an interconnected system. Understanding the ...
Read More »Astronomers Improve Their Distance Scale for the Universe. Unfortunately, it Doesn’t Resolve the Crisis in Cosmology
Measuring the expansion of the universe is hard. For one thing, because the universe is expanding, the scale of your distance measurements affects the scale of the expansion. And since light from distant galaxies takes time to reach us, you can’t measure what the universe is, but rather what it was. Then there is the challenge of the cosmic distance ...
Read More »More ways to fine-tune your personal finances in 2021
From banking to pensions and taxation, we’ve been looking at more areas where lasting savings can be made in 2021 and beyond Despite it being a record year for savings in Ireland, much of it was accidental given that large sections of the economy were shut down for long periods in 2020 so there was reduced opportunity to spend. And ...
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