On Oct 11, a Russian Soyuz rocket capsule made an emergency landing just after launch due to a faulty sensor, according to investigators.

Russian officials believe the sensor was damaged during assembly.

The officials cautioned that two other Soyuz rockets could be defective, and said additional verifications are underway.

The rocket was transporting two personnel, one Russian and one American, to the International Space Station (ISS) at the time of launch failure.

The incident marked the first serious launch problem by a human-crewed Soyuz space mission since 1983.

This past Thursday, the findings of an official investigation into the incident were announced at a press conference.

Moreover, the corpse of a galaxy that fell into the Milky Way approximately 10 billion years ago in what was most likely the last major overhaul to our home galaxy during its development, has now been identified by scientists.

At least that's what new research published in the journal Nature has concluded, based on 2 billion measurements of how stars within the Milky Way are moving. Those measurements allow scientists to detect around 33,000 stars that live in our galaxy but were born elsewhere and brought here during a massive galactic collision.

Kathryn Johnston, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York who wasn't involved in the new research, explained to Space.com that the Milky Way is a cannibal. It has eaten many dwarf galaxies in the past, and now scientists have just discovered a major one that it ate in the past. 

In other news, Crunchbase’s aggregated venture funding data which is, current as of this morning, shows that Chinese startups raised more venture capital than American startups so far in 2018. This is a slightly different, more precise follow-up to previous work by Crunchbase and others that documents China’s ascendant position in the global venture market.

At roughly $2.2 billion, the gap in funding is quite notable.

Much of that difference can be linked to just a few supergiant venture rounds of $100 million or more. It’s a phenomenon Crunchbase News has covered in depth, and it’s a trend that’s still very much happening in recent months. 

This includes hypergiant $1 billion venture rounds raised by Sensetime (based in Beijing) and Singapore-based Grab, in addition to rounds raised by Letgo (U.S.), Souche (China), Peloton (U.S.), and many others that were at or above $500 million.

Why do you think Chinese startups are outdoing American startups in terms of funding? Let's discuss in the comments below!