Cape Canaveral, April 11 (AP/UNB) — SpaceX has delayed the launch of its newest mega rocket because of dangerously high wind.

The Falcon Heavy was poised to blast off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday night with a communication satellite. But SpaceX chief Elon Musk said upper-level wind shear was extremely high.

SpaceX will try again Thursday evening. It will be just the second time a Falcon Heavy soars. Last year's test flight put a sports car — Musk's own Tesla convertible — into space. It's almost certainly still in orbit around the sun with a mannequin at the wheel.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket in use today. SpaceX will try to land two of the first-stage boosters back at Cape Canaveral and the core booster on an ocean platform.

Washington, Apr 10 (AP/UNB) — Scientists have revealed the first images ever made of a black hole.

Astronomers revealed the picture on Wednesday in Washington. They assembled data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world to show the violent neighborhood near a supermassive black hole.

The image looks like a glowing eye. Co-discoverer Jessica Dempsey says it is a vivid ring of light that reminds her of the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Nothing, not even light, escapes from supermassive black holes. They are the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades. The event horizon is the point of no return around them.

The results are being published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Cape Canaveral, Apr 8 (AP/UNB) — Spacewalking astronauts are tackling battery and cable work outside the International Space Station.

It's the third spacewalk in just 2 ½ weeks for the station crew.

NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques got an early start Monday morning. They need to complete battery swap-outs that began last month and lay cable.

The new cabling will provide a backup power circuit for the station's Canadian-made robot arm and expand wireless communications. The battery work involves re-installing two old batteries. One of the six new lithium-ion batteries doesn't work, and so the outdated pair made of nickel hydrogen need to go back into the slot.

NASA says it will send up another new battery.

Dhaka, Mar 13 (UNB) - Scientists have reversed the direction of time with a quantum computer, reports Independent.

The breakthrough study seems to contradict basic laws of physics and could alter our understanding of the processes governing the universe.

In a development that also represents a major advance in our understanding of quantum computers, by using electrons and the strange world of quantum mechanics, researchers were able to turn back time in an experiment that is the equivalent of causing a broken rack of pool balls to go back into place.

Anyone watching the computer would see the event as if time had turned backwards.

The researchers – from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and helped by colleagues in Switzerland and the US – expect the technique to improve in time, becoming more reliable and precise with time.

Lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information at the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), said: "We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time."

The "time machine" described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron "quabits".

A qubit is a unit of information described by a "one", a "zero", or a mixed "superposition" of both states.

In the experiment, an "evolution program" was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.

During this process, order was lost – just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.

But then another program modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved "backwards", from chaos to order.

It meant the state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.

Most laws of physics work both ways, in the future and the past. If you see a video of a pool ball knocking into another one, for instance, and then reverse that same video, the physical processes would both make sense and it would be impossible at the level of physics to know which way around would be correct.

But the universe does have one rule that goes only in one way: the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the progression from order to disorder.

If you saw a video of someone breaking a perfectly arranged triangle of pool balls into a mess, for instance, then watching that backwards would obviously look nonsensical.

The new experiment is like giving the pool table such a perfectly calculated kick that the balls rolled back into an orderly pyramid.

The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, "time reversal" was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent. When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate.

The error rate is expected to drop as scientists improve the devices used to be more sophisticated, the researchers behind the discovery said.

The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said.

"Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programmes written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors," said Dr Lesovik.

Cape Canaveral, Mar 3 (AP/UNB) — SpaceX's new crew capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, acing its second milestone in just over a day.

No one was aboard the Dragon capsule launched Saturday on its first test flight, only an instrumented dummy. But the three station astronauts had front-row seats as the sleek, white vessel neatly docked and became the first American-made, designed-for-crew spacecraft to pull up in eight years.

TV cameras on Dragon as well as the space station provided stunning views of one another throughout the rendezvous.

If the six-day demo goes well, SpaceX could launch two astronauts this summer under NASA's commercial crew program. Both astronauts — Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken — were at SpaceX Mission Control in Southern California, observing all the action. They rushed there from Florida after watching the Dragon rocket into orbit early Saturday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

"Just super excited to see it," Behnken said minutes after the link-up. "Just one more milestone that gets us ready for our flight coming up here."

While SpaceX has sent plenty of cargo Dragons to the space station, crew Dragon is a different beast. It docked autonomously under the station astronauts' watchful eyes, instead of relying on the station's robot arm for berthing. Behnken said that's the way it should work when he and Hurley are on board; they may push a button or two and will have the ability to intervene, if necessary.

As part of Sunday's shakedown, the station astronauts sent commands for the Dragon to retreat and then move forward again, before the capsule closed in for good.

SpaceX employees at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered and applauded as crew Dragon pulled up and docked at the orbiting lab, nearly 260 miles (400 kilometers) above the Pacific, north of New Zealand. They burst into applause again, several minutes later, when the Dragon's latches were tightly secured.

The station astronauts offered congratulations to SpaceX, as they got ready to open the hatches and collect the supplies stashed aboard Dragon. The capsule's lone passenger — a mannequin wearing a white SpaceX spacesuit — also was going to be welcomed aboard. The test dummy — or Smarty as SpaceX likes to call it, given all the instrumentation — is named Ripley after the lead character in the science-fiction "Alien" films.

Dragon will remain at the space station until Friday, when it undocks and aims for a splashdown in the Atlantic, a couple hundred miles off the Florida coast.

Like Ripley, the capsule is rigged with sensors to measure noise, vibration and stresses, and to monitor the life-support, propulsion and other critical systems throughout the flight.

SpaceX aims to launch Behnken and Hurley as early as July.

Next up, though, should be Boeing, NASA's other commercial crew provider. Boeing is looking to launch its Starliner capsule without a crew as early as April and with a crew possibly in August.

NASA is paying the two private companies $8 billion to build and operate the capsules for ferrying astronauts to and from the space station. Astronauts have been stuck riding Russian rockets ever since NASA's space shuttle program ended in 2011. Russian Soyuz seats go for up to $82 million apiece.