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(credit: Mayak project)

A group of engineers and space enthusiasts from Moscow University of Mechanical Engineering have hit the goal for a crowdfunding project that may change the night sky for a while. The team's "Mayak" (Beacon) satellite project has raised enough money to launch what amounts to an orbital night-light into orbit—a solar-synchronized satellite that will deploy a 16-square-meter tetrahedron-shaped reflector. The reflector will bounce back the sun's rays at the Earth as it orbits, making it brighter than any star in the night sky.

The team behind Mayak (which translates as "Beacon") has raised 1.72 million rubles ($23,000) on the Russian crowdfunding site Boomstarter (which looks suspiciously like Kickstarter). According to the group's page, the Russian space launch company Roscosmos has "Confirmed the possibility of (Mayak) being added to a launch on a Soyuz-2 rocket in the middle of 2016." The scheduled launch is also carrying the Canopus-B-IR satellite, an earth observation satellite for monitoring forest fires.

Like most crowdfunding efforts, this one comes with a mobile app, which will give users the location of the satellite at any time. And it has stretch goals as well—the next goal is to fund construction of a model of Mayak for Moscow's Museum of Cosmonautics. After that, the team hopes to construct an experimental atmospheric braking system that would help Mayak (and potentially other future satellites) re-enter the atmosphere and be recovered without the use of retro-rockets.

(credit: Eric Hunsaker)

Trips to the pharmacy are getting more and more expensive. From 2006 to 2013, the average retail cost of a year’s supply of 622 common prescriptions doubled—from about $5,500 to more than $11,000—according to a new report from AARP, a senior citizen advocacy group.

The rising costs are likely to hit senior citizens hardest, the AARP cautioned, noting that the 2013 average cost would come out to about 75 percent of the average Social Security retirement benefit, which is $15,526.

“If these trends continue, more and more Americans will simply be unable to afford the medications that they need to get and stay healthy,” Debra Whitman, AARP’s Chief Public Policy Officer, said in a statement.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

A judge in New York ruled Monday in favor of Apple in a case where investigators wanted the court to compel the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, which the company does have the ability to unlock.

This case involves a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty. It pre-dates Apple's current battle with the government over a locked iPhone 5C that belonged to one of the shooters in the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino—that case is due to be heard in court next month in nearby Riverside, California. (By contrast, the San Bernardino case involves an iPhone 5c, running iOS 9, which Apple says it cannot unlock. In the California case, federal investigators asked for and received an unprecedented court order compelling Apple to create a new firmware to unlock the device. Last week, Apple formally challenged that order, and the outcome is pending.)

However, on both coasts, Apple is fighting the government's attempt to use the same law, known as the All Writs Act—an obscure catchall statute that dates back to the 18th Century. There are several related AWA cases involving unlocking Apple devices that remain pending nationwide.