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Virgin Group founder Richard Branson announced his spaceflight company’s comeback in space race. In a statement on Thursday, the business magnate said that Virgin Galactic is eager and all set to rejoin race to send humans and spacecraft into space.

The announcement by Branson has come about 16 months after a deadly accident, which killed a pilot aboard a crewed spacecraft. “To have three or four people who are fairly entrepreneurial competing with each other means we’ll be able to open up space at a fraction of the price that governments have been able to do so in the past”, Branson said.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has already broken several space records during his special year-long mission to the International Space Station (ISS). He holds the record of most number of spaceflight to the space station by a US astronaut. But, the commander of the habitable artificial satellite on the one year mission isn’t satisfied with this and decides to be part of Third Rock Radio of the NASA.

During the 120-minute web broadcast, the 51-year-old astronaut will appear as a guest host. The special online broadcast is scheduled to start at 5 pm on Thursday, as per a statement by NASA officials. During the program, Kelly will take people here on earth inside his extraordinary one-year mission aboard the space station in low earth orbit.

Wild salmons are quite different from their counterparts raised in hatcheries on farms, having as many as 736 genetic variations. Researchers at Oregon State University in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife conducted a study to throw light on these differences, which have long been theorized to exist.

During the study, published Wednesday in Nature Communications, the researchers found DNA evidence to corroborate their claim as they compared the offspring of first-generation salmon raised in a hatchery with those in the wild.

Different regions across the world are more and less sensitive to climate change. Now, scientists have used satellites for mapping which regions are most sensitive to climate change on a global scale.

In a news release, Alistair Seddon, one of the researchers, said that based on the collected satellite data, they can identify areas that in the last 14 years have shown high sensitivity to climate change.

The researchers have come to know about the climate drivers of vegetation productivity on monthly timescales, in the new study. This has specifically revealed the climate ecosystem among many ecosystems worldwide.

Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are now having an added incentive to chase their goals: $5 million dollars. The announcement regarding the prize money came on Wednesday at the annual TED conference, in a joint project between technology giant IBM and X Prize. X Prize is the company that was behind the world’s first private space race to visit the moon.

Motivating the competition backers is one of the other things it is a desire to showcase the potential advantages to mankind of advances in AI however some skeptics aren’t convinced so far.

At the time of unveiling the prize, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis said that he was personally sick and fed up of the dystopian conversation related to artificial intelligence.

A space rock mystery could finally get solved. Since long, scientists used to think that asteroids bring their lives to an end in the solar system by making a final death-dive in the sun, however, a latest study suggested that a few space rocks appear to disintegrate before ever coming near to the star.

The study could bring scientists closer to understanding how they can protect Earth from an asteroid hit.

Published in the journal Nature this week, the study has provided details about theoretical modeling done with 100,000 pictures of roughly 9,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) noticed over a time period of eight years by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.