Author name: KMFranck

A list of various related news items and clips from this, and recent, weeks: Apple Newsroom, on Wednesday — “Apple Increases U.S. Commitment To $600 Billion, Announces American Manufacturing Program”: Apple today announced a new $100 billion commitment to America, a significant acceleration of its U.S. investment that now totals $600 billion over the next four years. […]

When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III, both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early 2000s,  fossil discoveries suggested it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived. But

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to identify a new possible example of a rare class of black holes. Called NGC 6099 HLX-1, this bright X-ray source seems to reside in a compact star cluster in a giant elliptical galaxy.

Bad news if you’re one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now comes with a notice announcing

Texas lawmakers, seemingly not content with getting NASA’s endorsement to move a retired space shuttle to Houston, are now calling for an investigation into how the Smithsonian allegedly objected to relocating the orbiter it has owned for more than a decade. Senator John Cornyn and Representative Randy Weber on Thursday sent a letter to John

“Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!” a physicist bellowed into a microphone one evening in June, and the cavernous banquet hall of Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic erupted into cheers and applause. Some 300 quantum physicists had traveled from around the world to attend the opening reception of a six-day conference marking the centennial of the most successful

The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment. The move

I shared a snapshot of last week with the WCU event, but the final events are always the highlights. After a week of numismatic education and camaraderie, the week ends with a special guest speaker (Kevin Lipton of KLRC this year), a banquet, and a small private coin show for the young folks. All of

The Artemis II crew (from left to right) CSA (Canadian Space Agency) Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist; Christina Koch, mission specialist; Victor Glover, pilot; and Reid Wiseman, commander, don their Orion Crew Survival System Suits for a multi-day crew module training beginning Thursday, July 31, 2025, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Behind the crew,

It’s now clear that Apple plans to survive Donald Trump’s trade war by playing to the president’s ego. On Wednesday, Trump announced that Apple would be exempt from a threatened 100 percent tariff on semiconductors that could have driven up the cost of iPhones globally, Reuters reported. In an apparent effort to secure this exemption,