🇺🇸It's fair to say there is some paranoia at the Pentagon about America's current predicament.
The US is now pouring money into hypersonic development in a bid to keep up…
❓But just how much?
💸It's $1 billion a year
The US expects to have its own hypersonic weapons in the 2020s, and hypersonic drones in the 2030s
🛰️In addition, the US is prioritising a huge defensive measure, with a plan to put a a "mega-constellation" of potentially hundreds of satellites into space to monitor hypersonic missiles
Scientists are venturing inside otherworldly ice caves growing beneath Austria's doomed glaciers to study why they are melting even faster than expected
📸Lisi Niesner/Reuters
They are also trying to understand the fate that will befall glaciers elsewhere if climate change is not halted
🚀While the missile reportedly missed its target by about two dozen miles, the test shows China has made rapid progress on the lightning-fast weapons and is far more advanced than US intelligence officials had realised.
“We have no idea how they did this,” one official said
Drew Thompson, a former American defence department official with responsibility for China, said the test “really should change US calculations”.
“I think it is a game changer in a way that little else has really shifted the balance”
➡️There have been eight attacks in Mumbai's northwestern suburbs over the past month alone, sparking a debate on the future of the city's historic leopard population…
A 2018 Indian government report found there are only 12,852 of the cats left nationwide, a reduction of 90 percent since the 1990s, due to poaching and habitat destruction.
An Indian leopard in its natural habitat, Getty Images
🛰️The first analysis of images from Nasa’s Perseverance rover show the Jezero crater was once a huge 21-mile wide lake, which was fed by a river, and which suffered flash flooding
🦠However, researchers are most excited by the discovery of layers of fine-grained clay and mudstones at the site, because they could preserve traces of ancient life telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/0…