Carphone Warehouse closes Irish operations
Dixons Carphone announced its decision to close the Irish Carphone Warehouse business last week.
The closure is expected to lead to nearly 500 job losses.
All 69 of its stores will close, as well as its 12 outlets within stores.
Dixons Carphone confirmed that the move won’t affect Currys PC World Ireland.
It said that Carphone Warehouse Ireland had seen a decrease in footfall in excess of 40% over the last year.
This was coupled with the fact that customers are increasingly choosing to shop through the retailer’s online business or through Currys PC World stores.
“Although these changes in behaviour were anticipated, they were expected to occur over a longer period of time,” it said.
“However, the change in shopping behaviours has been accelerated by the pandemic.”
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar took to Twitter to say that the news will come as a “major blow” to Carphone Warehouse employees and their families.
NASA celebrates first controlled flight on another planet
The American space agency, Nasa, has successfully flown a small helicopter on Mars.
The drone, which is called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute, but represents a huge leap forward in terms of technological capability.
Nasa has been celebrating what represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet.
Confirmation arrived at Earth of the mission’s success via a satellite at Mars which relayed the miniature helicopter’s data.
Nasa is promising more adventurous flights in the coming days, with the drone expected to be commanded to fly higher and further as engineers seek to test the limits of their technology.
The small helicopter was carried to Mars along with Nasa’s Perseverance Rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February.
“We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” the BBC reported MiMi Aung as saying, project manager for Ingenuity at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Scientists unearth new species of dinosaur in Chile
The BBC reported that a new species of dinosaur has been unearthed in Chile’s Atacama desert.
The scientists identified the new species from parts of a skeleton which were found in the world’s driest desert near the city of Copiapó.
Experts say that the herbivore ‘titanosaur’ had a small head, long neck and unusually flat back.
Studies suggest the creature lived in what would then have been a lush landscape of flowering plants, ferns and palm trees.
A team led by Chilean geologist Carlos Arévalo unearthed the remains in the 1990s and carried out research in the 2000s. The findings were made public last Monday for the first time.
The remains included parts of a humerus, a femur and the ischium, and vertebral elements of the neck and back. They represent a small sub-adult individual, with an estimated length of 6.3m (20ft).