Los Angeles Weekly Times

Wingbeat scanner: the lidar system in operation. The bright line in the upper right of the beam reveals the motion of a mosquito. (Courtesy: Mikkel Brydegaard) Lidar technology has been used to monitor how mosquito activity varies throughout the day in a natural African landscape. The measurements were made by an international team led by

One of the most captivating aspects of the summer Olympics is watching the world’s best athletes push their bodies to the edge of what is humanly possible. In 2016, the world watched in awe as Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt won his third consecutive Olympic gold in each of three distances—the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay.

If you’re on the receiving end of a snapping shrimp’s attack, prepare to be stunned. Also known as pistol shrimp, these little crustaceans shoot lethal rounds at predators and prey at highway speeds—a direct hit can be outright fatal or shock the recipient into submission. It’s not just the force of the attack that’s stunning

UUltrasound is a powerful tool for looking inside the body. The scans see through layers of tissue to reveal pumping hearts, developing fetuses, troublesome blood clots, and injured muscles. They are relatively low-cost, portable, and have few side effects. Patients aren’t exposed to ionizing radiation or confined in a small space. They are, however, slathered

The unit known as Detachment 3 is responsible to rescue astronauts if they have to abort the mission. WASHINGTON — As NASA and SpaceX prepare for a May 27 mission to fly astronauts to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center, a unit of the U.S. Space Force will be on alert should

WASHINGTON — German space company OHB is moving ahead with plans to launch a commercial lunar lander mission in cooperation with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in late 2022 as it looks for government and commercial customers. OHB and IAI announced an agreement in January 2019 to cooperate on an initiative to deliver payloads to the

SAN FRANCISCO — Capella Space announced a contract May 13 to provide airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and analytics services to the U.S. Navy. Capella, a San Francisco startup focused on establishing a constellation of SAR satellites, is not planning to offer airborne imagery as a product line. Instead, the airborne campaign is “a

SAN FRANCISCO – Silicon Valley space mapping startup LeoLabs unveiled a service May 13 to help commercial and government satellite operators avoid collisions with debris and other satellites in low Earth orbit. LeoLabs operates three ground-based phased array radars to track satellites and debris in low Earth orbit. Drawing on the radar data, LeoLabs created

Six SkySat satellites will be evenly split across two Starlink launches on Falcon 9. WASHINGTON — Planet announced that its next six SkySat satellites will fly to low Earth orbit on SpaceX Starlink missions scheduled later this summer. The six SkySats will be evenly split across two launches on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Planet said May

WASHINGTON — Maxar Technologies said this week it has received a contract to build multiple geostationary communications satellites for an undisclosed customer. The announcement was made in tandem with an earnings report showing that the coronavirus pandemic roiling the global economy put a crimp in Maxar’s satellite manufacturing revenue even as its satellite imagery division