The issue was that the Y chromosome contains very long sequences of repeating junk DNA and the old sequencing methods were producing very small pieces.

Here is an analogy with all letters instead of just the four ATCG found in DNA.

Let's imagine that sequencing gives you a lot of small pieces of no more than 10 characters such as
(1) eThatIsT
(2) ToBeThatI
(3) eOrNotToB
(4) ToBeOr
(5) hatIsThe
(6) OrNotToBe
(7) BeThatIs
(8) Question
(9) IsTheQuest ...

Overlapping of (7), (1) , (5), (9) and (8) produces the longer sequence BeThatIsTheQuestion
Similarly, (4), (3) and (6) produces ToBeOrNoToBe
And finally (2) connects those 2 sequences to form the full genome ToBeOrNotToBeThatIsTheQuestion

That this technique does not work well if you have a lot of repeating sequences in the genome.

Imagine that the genome contains ToBeOrNoToBe repeated a few hundred times.

Sequencing would produce a lot of fragments such as ToBeOr, eOrNotT, ToBeOrNo, rNotToBeToB, ToBeToBe, eOrNotToB, oBeToBeOr, eToBeXrNotT, oBeOrN, oBeOr, BeOrNotT , ...

It would be easy to figure out that ToBeOrNoToBe is repeating itself but not how many times.

Also, some fragments may contain single mutations like the X in one of the fragments above there would be no way to figure out where that X occurs in the repetition.

The new sequencing methods produce longer fragments and so make decoding a lot easier.

Indeed. There are probably billions or trillions of rogue planets in our galaxy (i.e. planets that were ejected from their original system because of gravitational slingshot). The number of smaller objects is probably several orders of magnitude higher.
   

I can do math too and 3.6km corresponds to an altitude of 400km (=3.6/sin(0.5)) ; the same as the ISS so LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Unfortunately, LEO has is a huge problem called Earth's shadow. Look at one the various websites that give the time and date when the ISS is visible from any point on Earth. The time is always a few hours before or after sunrise and sunset but never in the middle of the night. This is because the ISS is entirely in Earth shadows and so is not visible from Earth. The duration of each ISS sighting is usually a few minutes (7m is a long one) and they typically occur once or twice each day. In the best case, about one hundred space mirrors would be required provide a 2 or 3 more hours of power to a given ground station.
The time spend in Earth's shadow could be reduced by increasing the orbit to let's say 5000km or 10000km but the surface of the mirror and of the illuminated area would increase as the distance SQUARED. This is unrealistic.

... by sending them their used tampons.

The news report was removed because they were finally able to translate the message and it says "Greetings to the Republic of China".

NASA does not necessarily think that this is going to be useful on Earth. On the Moon, the escape velocity is only 1/5 of Earth and the vacuum comes for free. Consequently, even if it is not practical on Earth, it makes sense to develop the technology on Earth so that it could be deployed on a future Moon base. Mars with its thin atmosphere (1% of Earth) and its 45% escape velocity could also be a good candidate.

There are two major problems in your argument.
First, you assume that the current conditions on Earth are suitable for the appearance of life. This is far from certain. Life appeared 4 billions years ago in a very different environment : Temperature, salinity of the oceans, oxygen levels, ...
Second, the fact that we can trace all current life forms to a common ancestor does not necessarily imply that life appeared only once on the planet. Darwin described evolution as the survival of the fittest. Any new kind of life would have a hard time surviving in an environment where all the ecological niches are already occupied by DNA and RNA life forms. Today, even the most basic cell is a complex "machine" that is the result of billions of generations. 4 billions years ago, the first proto-cells were very basic (probably some amino-acids floating inside a lipid membrane) and they only survived because they had no competition.
 

Pareidolia is weird. Chinese scientists see a rabbit holding carrots where I see a dead baby mammoth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But the same caltech document states that the intracluster gas in the Coma cluster has an "atomic density of approx 1/1000 per cm3" which is incredibly small. For comparison, the density at 1atm is 2.50x10^19 per cm while it is 4x10^5 on the Moon.
An object placed in such a vacuum at 100 MK would not become hot because it would lose more energy by its own black body radiations than it would gain from collisions with the surrounding (and almost non existent) gas molecules.
The article does not specify the density of the plasma in the Chinese reactor but it is obviously not comparable to the density of the intracluster gas in the Coma cluster.

The scientific paper is not freely available (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf5787) but the abstract indicates that the skull is 2m. A round number like that is likely to be an approximation. Accurate sizes can be found in the Supplementary Material that is freely provided with the scientific paper (see the table, page 18).
The skull length is given at 1890 mm (6.2 feet).
The lower jaw length is given at 1970 mm (6.46 feet).
One could wonder how the skull can be smaller than one of its parts. This is probably because anatomically speaking, the skull probably refers to the bone that compose the upper part of the head. The lower jaw is a separate bone.
So a 2-meter-long skull (or 6.6 feet) is a good approximation for the abstract.
How a journalist ended up using 8 feet is more surprising (or not).

Look at this graph https://ourworldindata.org/gra...
The origin of the data is given in the "Sources" tab.

Be aware that the vertical axis starts at 50,000.This is a normal practice in scientific papers to make the data more readable (because nobody cares about the empty bottom of the graph).

The peaks of the 3 main waves are clearly visible:
- 12 Apr 2020 : 79k vs expected 56k so +40%
- 30 Aug 2020 : 71k vs expected 52k so +36%
- 12 Jan 2021 : 87k vs expected 63k so +38%

Similar graphs for Europe can be found in https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs...

I wrote a small program to find all solutions. If I did not make any mistake in my program the problem in the newspaper one has exactly 46 solutions.

However, after changing the first diagonal sum from 27 to 29 and the second diagonal from 26 to 30, my program gives a unique answer. See below

  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v
  v

  5 4 1 8
  8 9 4 5
  6 9 8 9
  8 3 6 8

Not necessarily. There is also the constraint that the numbers are between 1 and 9.

What the Finnish researchers actually said is that their first quantum computer is either up, running or both.

There are not 4 strains of COVID but hundreds or even thousands. The virus mutates quickly especially when millions of peoples are infected (most hosts = more viruses = more mutations). Look at the graphs at https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gi...
The fact is that almost all mutations are detrimental or neutral to the virus. Nobody cares about those strains except for the few scientists in charge of studying the virus genome (e.g. see the nexstrain link above). In some rare cases, a mutation or a combination of mutations will produce a more powerful virus that propagates more quickly than the older strains. Those are the only strains that we care about and that make the news.