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THE number of coronavirus cases in the Braintree district has increased by more than 150 in the last 24 hours.

The Learning Disability Mortality Review programme found 44 per cent of the deaths last year were related to coronavirus

As with packaging systems, lightweight efficient approaches look set to lose out

Analysis  A new version of Linux distro NixOS has been released, just one day after a contentious blogpost that asked "Will Nix overtake Docker?"…

He was found unresponsive on the ship

More countries could be added to the red list this month as the Omicron variant spreads across the world

Take your breath awayyyyyyyy

Something for the Weekend, Sir?  "Breathe into the tube, sir." Oh yes, dear reader, I am being breathalysed.…

They assured fans they aren't splitting up

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) -- the largest our telescopes have ever spotted -- is on a journey from the outer reaches of our Solar System that will see it flying relatively close to Saturn's orbit. Now, a new analysis of the data we've collected on BB has revealed something rather surprising. Digging into readings logged by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) between 2018 and 2020, researchers have discovered that BB became active much earlier, and much farther out from the Sun, than was previously thought. A comet becomes active when light from the Sun heats its icy surface, turning ice to vapor and releasing trapped dust and grit. The resulting haze, called a coma, can be useful for astronomers in working out exactly what a particular comet is made out of. In the case of BB, it's still too far out for water to sublimate. Based on studies of comets at similar distances, it's likely that the emerging fog is driven instead by a slow release of carbon monoxide. Only one active comet has previously been directly observed at a greater distance from the Sun, and it was much smaller than BB. "These observations are pushing the distances for active comets dramatically farther than we have previously known," says astronomer Tony Farnham, from the University of Maryland (UMD). "We make the assumption that comet BB was probably active even farther out, but we just didn't see it before this. What we don't know yet is if there's some cut-off point where we can start to see these things in cold storage before they become active." The research has been published in the Planetary Science Journal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angel of the North asteroid story upsets us mightily

A local rag in Britain has gone wildly off-piste by measuring the size of an asteroid swinging by the Earth using units of measure derived from a rusting statue.…

The lottery funds good causes in Basildon but officials say it could 'exacerbate problem gambling'

New legislation has been introduced

Fix the printer, fix the phones

On Call  A story with a difference from the On Call vaults today. Who do you call when the phones stop working? A Register reader reveals all.…

Updates bare metal Macs-a-service and claims up to 60 per cent better price performance vs cloudy x86 Macs

Amazon Web Services has added Apple’s Arm-powered M1 CPU to its range of cloudy desktop offerings.…

The Ted Baker version costs £130 but you can buy the Primark dupe for much cheaper

Just two days after officially (and quietly) confirming that it intends to replace the International Space Station with a commercial station by 2030, NASA has awarded over $400 million in agreements to three companies to further develop private station plans. TechCrunch reports: The three companies, which received the awards under the agency's Commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) Destinations program, are: Nanoracks for $160 million; Blue Origin for $130 million; and Northrop Grumman for $125.6 million. NASA received eleven proposals in total, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister said Thursday. He added that of the three chosen proposals, there was a diversity of technical concepts and a variety of logistical and launch vehicle options offered. "This diversity not only enhances the likelihood of success of NASA strategy, but it also leads to a high degree of innovation, which is critical in most commercial space endeavors," he said. The three companies have already released a handful of details about their proposals. Blue Origin is calling its station concept "Orbital Reef," and it is designing it with Boeing, Sierra Space and others. The team said it wants to launch the station in 2027. Meanwhile, Nanoracks is calling its station, which is being developed with its parent company Voyager Space and aerospace prime Lockheed Martin, "Starlab." While Northrop didn't give its station proposal a flashy name, it's working with Dynetics to deliver a modular design based around its Cygnus spacecraft. These substantial awards mark the first phase of a two-phase process as NASA seeks to ensure that there will be no gap between the retirement of the ISS and the introduction of a new station. NASA has repeatedly stressed, both to Congress and more recently in a report by the Office of Inspector General, that the overall success of the development of a thriving economy in LEO is dependent upon avoiding this gap. "If there is no habitable commercial destination in low Earth orbit after the ISS is decommissioned, NASA will be unable to conduct microgravity health research and technology demonstrations needed for long-duration human exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, significantly increasing the risk of -- or delaying -- those missions," the agency said in the report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version 4.16 adds first look at TPM 2.0 and better big.LITTLE support

The Xen Project has delivered an upgrade to its hypervisor.…

Shares fell over 20 per cent in its first day on NASDAQ

Singaporean superapp Grab has signaled an intention to further its digital banking segment and beef up its mapping tech to improve its ride-hailing services, after an underwhelming debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange.…

A bid to build 90 homes in Black Notley faces a planning inspection following an appeal by its developers.

POLICE recorded almost 200 gun crimes in Essex during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

HISTORY is being repaired after a castle has been handed funds to help rebuild after damages.