Queues snaked around Covent Garden in London’s West End as Apple fans gathered in their thousands to get their hands on the newly unveiled iPhone 5, with many having camped outside in a bid to be among the first to own the device.
When the doors finally opened at 8am this morning, Apple staff and the crowds outside chanted and cheered as the first customer, 22-year-old Ryan Williams, was ushered into the shop.
Mr Williams had spent a week in a tent in front of the shop to make sure he was first in line – not because of an overwhelming desire to own an iPhone 5, but rather as part of a charity fundraising effort for Cancer Research – the phone he collected was passed on moments later for £1000, with the same amount having been raised by a friend who sold his place in the queue to an eager iPhone enthusiast.
Some reviews have noted some flaws with the phone, but The Telegraph’s Technology Reporter Lucy Kinder believes the momentum is firmly in Apple’s favour for the moment.
“There are some concerns about software issues, especially in the mapping service on iOS6, but the Apple hysteria shows no signs of dying down just yet”
Category Archives: Science
iPhone 5 goes on sale at Apple’s flagship UK store
The Neil Armstrong – The Man on the Moon
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. The DIFF celebrates this great achievement. Learn about it on the Quicken Loans blog.
Look tonight at the moon. And think of Neil Armstrong, reluctant hero, the quiet man whose footsteps still rest upon the moon and in history.
Armstrong was a pilot first and foremost, and with the dust flying, craters looming and fuel running low on July 20, 1969, he never wavered. As everyone else on Earth held their breath on that day, his heartbeat never changed as he and co-pilot Buzz Aldrin made the first piloted landing upon the moon.
“Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong informed mission controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, with the restrained aplomb that marked his life. Two and a half hours later with the words, “That’s one small step for man. One g Read more →
NASA maps out proposed travel plans for Curiosity, decides to head for the hills
As the vista on Mars gradually gets ever clearer, and the system checks continue to show that the rover is in good stead, the team behind Curiosity will be increasingly eager to stretch its legs wheels. The first trip might be just a cautious few meters, but plans for a more adventurous jaunt have just been revealed. The first location in Curiosity’s sights is an area referred to as Glenelg, which, based on initial pictures, offers three different geological characteristics, as well as potentially being an area where water used to be present. The site is only 1,300 feet (400 meters) from where the rover landed, but it could still take several weeks to get there. This is merely a quick dash compared to the next leg of its journey, which sees Curiosity heading out to an area called Mount Sharp — a large mound of layered rock which is hoped to contain visible geology potentially dating back millions of years. With seven kilometers (4.4 miles) lying between the rover and the mountain’s foothills, it’ll be a much longer journey, but one that could provide the first real evidence of the planet’s ability to host, or have hosted, life
UPDATE 2-US hypersonic aircraft crashes seconds into military test flight
The problem with the fin on the craft known as the Waverider or X-51A was identified in a test flight on Tuesday, 16 seconds after a rocket booster on the remotely monitored craft was ignited to propel it forward, the Air Force said in a statement.
Fifteen seconds later, when the X-51A separated from the rocket booster, it lost control due to a “faulty control fin,” the statement said. The 31 seconds of flight fell far short of the military’s goal for the X-51A to fly for five minutes.
The aircraft broke apart immediately and fell into the Pacific Ocean near Point Mugu northwest of Los Angeles, said Daryl Mayer, a spokesman for the 88th Air Base Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Even if the test had been a success, the aircraft would have crashed at the end of the flight in any case and was not considered retrievable.
The Waverider was designed to reach speeds of Mach 6 or above, six times the speed of sound and fast enough to zoom from New York to London in less than an hour. The military has its eye on using the Waverider program to develop missiles with non-nuclear explosives that could strike anywhere in the world within an hour, analysts said.
The cost of the experimental aircraft, which military officials said was dropped from a B-52 bomber before its rocket booster was ignited, has not been disclosed because many details of the program are classified.
The aircraft is known as the Waverider because it stays airborne, in part, with lift generated by the shock waves of its own flight. The Boeing Co’s Phantom Works division performed design and assembly on the craft, the military said.
Soyuz rocket takes Sunita, two others to space station
The 46-year-old Williams along with two flight engineers—Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and Yury Malenchenko of Russia—departed on a two-day voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at around O8:10 IST, Russian news agency Ria Novosti reported.
Williams, a flight engineer on the station’s Expedition 32 crew, will take over as commander of Expedition 33 on reaching the space station.
The Soyuz TMA is due to dock with the ISS’s Zvezda service module at 10:22 IST on Tuesday.
The crew will join the current ISS occupants – Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, who have been in orbit since mid-May.
The new crew members are expected to conduct over 30 scientific missions during their stay on board the ISS.
Williams and Hoshide visited the ISS once each, traveling on board a US space shuttle. It is their first flight experience with the Soyuz spacecraft.
Williams, whose father hailed from Gujarat, was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998. She was assigned to the ISS as a member of Expedition 14 and then joined Expedition 15.Indian-American Sunita Williams, a record-setting astronaut who lived and worked aboard the International Space Station for six months in 2006, today took off on her second space mission in a Russian spacecraft from Baikonur
She holds the record of the longest spaceflight (195 days) for female space travellers.
She received a Master’s degree from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1995.
In the space, Williams and her team of astronauts plan an orbital sporting event to mark the Summer Olympics in London.
World’s oldest, largest meteorite crater discovered
WASHINGTON: Scientists claim to have discovered the oldest and largest ever meteorite crater on Earth which they believe could have caused by the impact of a 30km wide extraterrestrial object some three billion years ago.
The crater found near the town of Maniitsoq in Greenland currently measures about 100 km from one side to another. But before it eroded, it was likely more than 500 km wide, which would make it the biggest and oldest crater ever found on Earth, said Danish researcher Adam Garde.
Calculations suggest that the crater was caused by a 30km-wide meteorite, which, if hits the Earth today, would wipe out all higher life, Garde told OurAmazingPlanet.com.
In the three billion years since the impact, the land has been eroded down to about 25 km below the original surface. But the effects of the intense shock wave and heat penetrated deep into the Earth, and remain visible today, said Garde, a researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
Garde had been conducting research on Greenland’s geology and noticed several strange features that didn’t make sense. In September 2009, he came up with the extreme explanation of an impact from a meteorite.
His team collected samples over the years and published the results in the current issue of journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He’s now “100 per cent positive” it’s a crater, for several reasons, he said.
For one, he found widespread crushed rocks in a circular shape that seemed to be caused by the shock waves of a massive impact. Second, there are deposits of a melted mineral called K-feldspar (or potassium-feldspar) that could have been liquefied only at extremely high heat, like that caused by anmeteorite’s crash-landing.
There’s also widespread evidence of weathering by hot water, which he thinks was caused by the ocean rushing into the crater after it struck the area. The area may have been covered by a shallow ocean at the time, but even if it wasn’t, it doesn’t matter, Garde said.
“The crater from a meteorite that big would have caused the sea to rush in,” he said.
Before this discovery, the oldest crater was thought to be the Vredefort crater in South Africa, estimated to be two billion years old. At 186 miles (300 km) wide, it’s also the largest crater that remains visible.
Scientists expect that there were many more craters formed around three-four billion years ago when Earth lacked a protective atmosphere.