Month: January 2023

Enlarge / Three hours after the coolant leak was initially detected Wednesday night, it remained ongoing. (credit: NASA TV)

Four weeks ago, as two Russian cosmonauts were preparing to conduct a spacewalk, a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station started to leak uncontrollably.

The spacewalk was canceled, and since then, Russian and US spaceflight engineers have been analyzing the cause of the leak and its implications for future travel to and from the large laboratory in low-Earth orbit. They have now deduced that a micrometeoroid or small piece of orbital debris struck the external cooling loop of the Soyuz spacecraft, causing all of its coolant to vent into space, and put a recovery plan into place.

Although there were no immediate threats to the seven astronauts on board the space station, there was the not-insignificant question of how the three people who had ridden on board this Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft into orbit— cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA's Frank Rubio—would subsequently get home.

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  The Apple Business Connect web portal. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple introduced a new feature called Business Connect that's primarily aimed at brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants or retail stores. With it, businesses can access and update their information in the cards that represent them in apps like Apple Maps.

They'll do that through a new web portal at businessconnect.apple.com. After creating an Apple ID or logging in with an existing one, they can search through Apple's database of locations and claim theirs or create a new one from scratch.

From there, they'll update details like hours, address, search categories and subcategories, "about" text, and so on. They can even adjust the exact position of the pin on the map to reflect the location of their entrance.

Enlarge (credit: James Marshall/Getty Images)

Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran’s capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation.

Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran’s strict laws for women’s dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head.