India this morning successfully launched a new "spy satellite" capable of keeping a lookout from space even in cloudy conditions, leaving no room for doubt the next time its armed forces conduct an operation such as the Balakot air strike carried out earlier this year.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) used its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle to launch the 615-kg RISAT-2B satellite, capable of clear viewing during the day, night and even under adverse weather conditions, at 5:30 am on Wednesday. ISRO chief Dr K Sivan called the launch of RISAT-2B a "fantastic mission". The home-grown space agency has sent 354 satellites into orbit and crossed a landmark of lifting a total of over 50 tonne of material into the space.

Dr Sivan announced that RISAT-2B has "special imaging capabilities to take strips of images and mosaics of images". The launch also saw the use of made-in-India Vikram Processor for the first time, realised by the semiconductor complex at Chandigarh.

'Oumuamua's strange trajectory back out to interstellar space can be explained if the object was a comet fragment with the density of air.

'1/'Oumuamua, the interstellar mystery object that briefly visited the inner solar system in 2018, has proven a difficult nut to crack. Astronomers are still arguing about what it even is - asteroid, comet, or something else altogether? Now, in a pair of studies posted recently on the arXiv (paper 1, paper 2), Zdenek Sekanina (JPL-Caltech) suggests the object might be an ultra-low density fragment from a comet that disintegrated while passing near the Sun.

Huawei could have its own operating system for smartphones and laptops ready for use in China by fall this year, the head of the company's consumer division told CNBC.

Still, he stressed that would only happen if the company were completely stopped from using Google's and Microsoft's software.

The Chinese technology giant was placed on a U.S. blacklist that required American firms to get permission from the government before selling anything to Huawei. That meant Huawei would no longer be able to license the version of Google's Android operating system that's complete with all of the U.S. firm's services.

However, Washington granted a temporary 90-day reprieve for Huawei, which will allow it to continue using American technology - for now.

If you ask your typical garden variety evolutionist, he will tell you that all is well in the land of Darwinia. But if you look behind the right curtains, you find that some highly placed, mainstream evolutionary biologists concede that neo-Darwinism is in deep crisis. They acknowledge its imminent fall even as they cling to the hope that some purely blind, materialistic version of evolution can be cobbled together to replace it.

Such thinking was front and center at a recent University of Cambridge event, held April 1 to 4 on the campus of Churchill College. Entitled "Evolution Evolving," the meeting sought to encourage novel thinking about evolution, starting from the premise that existing textbook theory fails to explain many of the most interesting and important phenomena in biology.

A 2016 meeting of the Royal Society of London, which included many distinguished evolutionists, struck a similar note. Such recognition is significant, since no one bothers to look for a new theory if the one they already have is doing its job.

In the remote desert of western Egypt, near the Libyan border, lie clues to an ancient cosmic cataclysm.

Libyan desert glass is the name given to fragments of canary-yellow glass found scattered over hundreds of kilometres, between giant shifting sand dunes.

Interest in Libyan desert glass goes back more than 3,000 years. Among items recovered from King Tut's burial chamber is a gold and jewel-encrusted breastplate. In the centre sits a beautiful scarab beetle, carved from Libyan desert glass.

Libyan desert glass - raw and carved - is easily available today, but how the glass formed has long puzzled scientists.

Our research has found the answer.

Is it possible for light to travel faster or slower in the distant corners of our universe? The speed of light, like dozens of other so-called fundamental constants, is essential to how physicists understand the cosmos. These numbers even help define our units of measure, such as the meter, the second and, as of this Monday, the kilogram. However, there is no scientific consensus as for why the constants must be constant, or fundamental.

A new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters proposes experiments to investigate whether these unwavering pillars of physics are, in fact, fluctuating over space-time. If so, scientists will need to reevaluate the current models of our universe -- or at least give these numbers a different name.

How fundamental are the constants?

"Fundamental constants are essentially just parameters that appear in a theory," said Peter Mohr, a physicist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, who was not involved in the new paper. "They have fundamental importance to the theories, but their values are not predicted by the theories and have to be measured experimentally."

Mohr and his colleagues were part of the international effort to create a new definition for the kilogram -- one that is derived from fundamental constants rather than a block of platinum alloy that's been sitting in France since 1889. The goal was to create a standard for measuring mass that can withstand the test of time and not gain or lose weight through contaminations and degradations like a physical block of material would. The change took effect this Monday, May 20, on World Metrology Day.

It might seem like shifting fundamental constants would negate the whole premise of the redefinition.

But decades of experimental data have shown than any potential changes to the constants would be incredibly tiny -- less than one part in a hundred thousand trillion.

"That's pretty stable," said Mohr. "The variations -- even if they're there -- would be so small that we won't even have to think about them in most experiments."

In our culture, the old have failed the young. Hate-driven shootings in schools and houses of worship, rising suicide and addiction rates - these are the most dramatic indications. But a quieter sense of numbness and despair, concealed in mindless social media and the omnipresent screens, is far more widespread.

What Lies Behind It All?

Questions about biological origins are NOT of merely scientific importance. These questions go to the heart of how we think about the value of individual human beings. Increasingly evident is the relationship between noxious racial theories, devaluing or demonizing whole classes of men and women, and the philosophy of scientific materialism.

As the news hammers home to us, young people are especially vulnerable to poisonous, Internet-mediated messages. That's one reason Discovery Institute has teamed up with a gifted cinematographer who wanted to create a new video series, Science Uprising, that would be relevant to viewers in their thirties and younger. The series will launch on June 3, with new episodes to be released weekly through July 8.

While many futurists, tech entrepreneurs and science fiction fans are all abuzz about the idea of a manned human colony on Mars within the next few decades, one evolutionary biologist has shared a rather cold dose of reality.

NASA, Elon Musk and many others, including current and former US presidents, have publicly discussed plans to colonize Mars within the next few decades, focusing on the logistics of getting manned spacecraft to the red planet, but an evolutionary biologist at Rice University, Scott Solomon, has been focusing on one specific question: "what if we're actually successful?"

"I don't think there has been nearly as much discussion about what would become of the people that are living in these colonies generations later," Solomon told Inverse.

Solomon has some rather bold and somewhat alarming predictions about what might become of future generations of Mars colonists, or should we say, Martians.

We've all lost track of time at one point or another, but astronomers really go all in. Recent studies show they may have overestimated the age of the universe by more than a billion years - a surprising realization that is forcing them to rethink key parts of the scientific story of how we got from the Big Bang to today.

The lost time is especially vexing because, in a universe full of mysteries, its age has been viewed as one of the few near-certainties. By 2013, the European Planck space telescope's detailed measurements of cosmic radiation seemed to have yielded the final answer: 13.8 billion years old. All that was left to do was to verify that number using independent observations of bright stars in other galaxies.

Then came an unexpected turn of events.

WASHINGTON-The stark difference between the Moon's heavily-cratered farside and the lower-lying open basins of the Earth-facing nearside has puzzled scientists for decades.

Now, new evidence about the Moon's crust suggests the differences were caused by a wayward dwarf planet colliding with the Moon in the early history of the solar system. A report on the new research has been published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The mystery of the Moon's two faces began in the Apollo era when the first views of its farside revealed the surprising differences. Measurements made by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission in 2012 filled in more details about the structure of the Moon - including how its crust is thicker and includes an extra layer of material on its farside.

There are a number of ideas that have been used to try and explain the Moon's asymmetry. One is that there were once two moons orbiting Earth and they merged in the very early days of the Moon's formation. Another idea is that a large body, perhaps a young dwarf planet, found itself in an orbit around the Sun that put it on a collision course with the Moon. This latter giant impact idea would have happened somewhat later than a merging-moons scenario and after the Moon had formed a solid crust, said Meng Hua Zhu of the Space Science Institute at Macau University of Science and Technology and lead author of the new study. Signs of such an impact should be visible in the structure of the lunar crust today.

"The detailed gravity data obtained by GRAIL has given new insight into the structure of the lunar crust underneath the surface," Zhu said.