All posts tagged: Mission

Simon Pegg talks return of popular thriller after 4 years, Mission: Impossible future, and plans with Slow Horses favourite

Simon Pegg talks return of popular thriller after 4 years, Mission: Impossible future, and plans with Slow Horses favourite

Published by Daniella Wilson

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Simon Pegg, 56, graduated from the cult sitcom Spaced to the “Cornetto trilogy” movies he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) before finding Hollywood fame in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and as Scotty in JJ Abrams’s big-screen Star Trek reboot. In the Channel 4 thriller The Undeclared War – back for a second series after a four-year break – he plays Danny Patrick, the GCHQ head of operations tasked with keeping Britain safe from cyber attacks. The Undeclared War is a scarily topical glimpse into the world of cyber espionage. Do you sleep a bit less easy since making it? It is kind of terrifying. We’ve basically been fighting the Third World War since the internet happened. There’s this whole other front line that’s in constant movement. The fact is, we’ve become so reliant on the internet that if someone flipped a switch and it went down, millions of people would die. Want to see this content? This …

A man on a mission

A man on a mission

Published by Daniella Wilson

Church Going with Giles Fraser is on Monday at 11am on Radio 4 If anyone should have the title of Radio 4 vicar, it’s the Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser. Host of Beyond Belief, panellist on The Moral Maze, contributor to Thought for the Day, Fraser is now adding another arrow to his ecclesiastical broadcasting quiver: Church Going, a three-part series in which he sets out to discover whether or not Christian denominations, especially his own, the Church of England, are in decline. He clearly has skin in the game because when he’s not on the radio, he’s vicar of St Anne’s Church, Kew, in west London. In 2025, the Bible Society published their Quiet Revival report, saying church attendance had gone up by 56 per cent, with a big spike among 18–24-year-olds. Polling experts challenged the findings, and earlier this year the Society announced that the report’s methodology was flawed. Yet Fraser has noticed that at the grassroots there are definite signs of more interest. “Something is going on,” he says, and plenty of …

NASA is looking for four volunteers willing to spend a year inside a simulated Mars mission

NASA is looking for four volunteers willing to spend a year inside a simulated Mars mission

Published by Jenni Sidey

Not everyone who wants to go to Mars needs to leave Earth to help get humanity there. NASA is recruiting volunteers to spend a full year sealed inside a pair of connected habitats at Johnson Space Center in Houston, living out a simulated trip to the Moon or Mars without the rocket. The agency wants four people willing to eat, sleep, work, and conduct fake spacewalks in isolation for twelve months, beginning no earlier than August 2027, all in the name of understanding what extended deep-space travel does to the human body and mind. The mission, called the Moon and Mars Exploration Analog, is the first ground-based simulation to combine two phases of an actual interplanetary mission into one continuous campaign. Previous analog programs tackled transit and surface operations separately. This one runs them back to back. Two Habitats, One Very Long Year The first phase puts crew members inside a modified version of the HERA habitat, a two-story structure that NASA has used for years to study how small groups function in confined quarters. …

Biohacker Bryan Johnson reveals he has incurable disease amid mission to ‘defeat death’

Biohacker Bryan Johnson reveals he has incurable disease amid mission to ‘defeat death’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson has hit a major obstacle in his yearslong quest to “defeat death.” The 48-year-old tech entrepreneur, who rose to fame for chronicling his extreme health routine curated to reduce his biological age, announced on social media last week that he has been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease. “My stomach is eating itself,” Johnson wrote in a June 30 post on X. He explained that he has autoimmune gastritis, in which his immune system mistakenly attacks the healthy cells in his stomach lining. He wrote that for years, he had been unaware he was dealing with the disease, but said that it was likely caused by his diet of fast food and sugary beverages in the years before he started …

Novak Djokovic mission to win eighth Wimbledon still alive

Novak Djokovic mission to win eighth Wimbledon still alive

Published by Sam Flores

Hello and welcome to coverage from Wimbledon as Novak Djokovic takes on Arthur Rinderknech. The seven-time champion was in imperious form on Wednesday as he eased past Stefanos Tsitsipas in straight-sets under the roof. Today he opens the schedule on Centre Court against Frenchman Rinderknech.  “Obviously you feel very happy, satisfied and joyful on the court when you are playing this way,” Djokovic said after beating Tsitsipas. “I’m feeling great. I try not to take these moments for granted when ​playing on the Centre Court of Wimbledon. I feel ‌very privileged to be walking out on this court at age 30-plus. I don’t think it’s a cliche because I actually believe it’s true, but age is just a number.” The Serbian is expected to step out again sporting a ‌cream ​blazer and if he wins today, he will be one victory shy of ​matching Roger Federer’s men’s record of 105 match-wins at Wimbledon. Djokovic suffered a couple of slips on Wednesday but he is not overly concerned. “It’s grass,” he said. “You’re going to fall …

Audacious mission to rescue NASA’s falling telescope has launched

Audacious mission to rescue NASA’s falling telescope has launched

Published by skeptic

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory NASA Goddard Space Flight Center One of NASA’s premier space telescopes is falling, and an audacious mission to rescue it has just begun. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is months from dropping back to Earth, but if the rescue works, it could continue watching the sky for years to come. All satellites’ orbits eventually decay, and Swift is no exception. The outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere have been dragging it down since it launched in 2004: its initial orbit was at an altitude of about 600 kilometres from the ground, and now it’s only about 375 kilometres up. Its descent in recent years was faster than expected because of powerful solar flares depositing energy into the atmosphere, puffing it outwards and increasing drag on satellites. So if NASA wanted to keep Swift operating, the agency had few options. The one that won out was a proposal by Katalyst Space Technologies, a small start-up based in Arizona, to give the orbiting observatory a boost. The plan rests on a satellite called …

Rescue Mission Launches to Save NASA Telescope That’s Falling Back to Earth

Rescue Mission Launches to Save NASA Telescope That’s Falling Back to Earth

Published by Sam Flores

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A three-armed spacecraft rocketed into orbit Friday to rescue a NASA telescope that’s in danger of crashing back to Earth. Northrop Grumman launched Katalyst Space Technologies’ Link spacecraft from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The Pegasus rocket blasted off from the belly of a modified airplane, putting Link on course to reach and capture NASA’s Swift Observatory in about a month. Launched in 2004, Swift is sinking faster than ever because of recent solar storms. NASA is paying $30 million for Katalyst to capture the telescope and boost its orbit so it can continue tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe, like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. If all goes well, Swift could be back scanning the cosmos by September. Observations are currently on hold to preserve the telescope’s orbit as long as possible. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could be a candidate for a similar salvage operation in a few years. It’s also slipping in altitude because of increased atmospheric drag caused by the sun’s outbursts. …

DfE searching for school leaders to support ‘mission’ areas

DfE searching for school leaders to support ‘mission’ areas

Published by skeptic

Ministers are searching for “exceptional” senior leaders to head school improvement work as part of the government’s new northeast and coastal “missions”. The flagship scheme, announced in the schools white paper, aims to turn around outcomes in left-behind areas from September. Three school leaders are being offered the chance of a part-time, two-year secondment to become “place missions lead educationalists”, paid £600 a day. Source link

Eraser Director Explains How Mission: Impossible Triggered a Rewrite

Eraser Director Explains How Mission: Impossible Triggered a Rewrite

Published by Daniella Wilson

Eraser director Chuck Russell had a major problem on the 1995 set of his Arnold Schwarzenegger-led actioner. He and his team caught wind of the fact that their third-act set piece had just been pulled off by Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma on the recently wrapped Mission: Impossible. With Eraser scheduled to release a month after the first installment in Cruise’s now-signature action franchise, Russell and co. pivoted on the fly.  “The heist scene where Tom Cruise drops in on wires, I had Arnold doing almost exactly the same thing to get a disc out of the CIA, and we had to rewrite it to instead have Arnold get into the enemy company, Cyrez, another way,” Russell tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Eraser’s 30th anniversary 4K release. “I at least changed that much. I didn’t want to have exactly the same scene.” Written by Tony Puryear and Walon Green, Eraser chronicles Schwarzenegger’s U.S. Marshal character, John “Eraser” Kruger, who serves as the last line of defense for witnesses who’ve been compromised while in …

France confirms first Ebola case in doctor returning from DR Congo mission

France confirms first Ebola case in doctor returning from DR Congo mission

Published by Sam Flores

A positive case of Ebola virus has been identified in France in a doctor returning from a humanitarian mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the French Ministry of Health said Wednesday. The patient had travelled on an Air France flight, and the airline provided the passenger list to health authorities, the company said. The case is the first of the deadly haemorrhagic fever identified outside the African continent during the current outbreak, which has also affected Uganda. Watch moreEbola: Health workers in DR Congo fear for their lives It’s also the first time Ebola has been detected in France. In 2014, during a major outbreak in West Africa, two patients were transported to France, but they had been diagnosed abroad. The health ministry “confirms today the identification of a first positive case of Ebola virus disease on national territory”, said a statement. Contacted by AFP, the ministry specified that the case had been identified in mainland France. The doctor was isolated on arrival in France, even before the disease was officially identified, the ministry …