There’s no doubt an extremely bright fireball careened through the atmosphere north of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. It’s also true that divers recovered materials at the bottom of the ocean last year near where many experts believed the object landed—and that prominent Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb theorized…
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TSA is testing a self-screening security checkpoint in Vegas
The Transportation Security Administration is launching the pilot phase of an autonomous self-screening checkpoint system. Unveiled earlier this week and scheduled to officially open on March 11 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, the station resembles grocery store self-checkout kiosks—but instead of scanning milk and eggs, you’re expected…
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OpenAI wants to devour a huge chunk of the internet. Who’s going to stop them?
You probably don’t know about Automattic, but they know you. As the parent company of WordPress, its content management systems host around 43 percent of the internet’s 10 million most popular websites. Meanwhile, it also owns a vast suite of mega-platforms including Tumblr, where a massive amount of embarrassing personal…
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The Apple Car is dead
It turns out that last month’s report on Apple kicking its tortured, multibillion dollar electric vehicle project down the road another few years was a bit conservative. During an internal meeting on Tuesday, company representatives informed employees that all EV plans are officially scrapped. After at least a decade of…
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Jellyfish-inspired glowing dye can glom onto fingerprints at crime scenes
Imagine a crime scene. Chances are, you’re also imagining someone dusting for fingerprints. Despite recent debates of whether fingerprint evidence is accurate and reliable, it can still prove extremely useful in certain situations, such as narrowing down potential suspect lists. Unfortunately, this technique often employs toxic powders, including environmentally harmful…
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NASA and Google Earth Engine team up with researchers to help save tigers
Less than 4,500 tigers remain in the world, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Habitat loss continues to pose an immense existential threat to the planet’s largest cat species—a problem compounded due to the animals residing in some of Earth’s most ecologically at-risk regions and…
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SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Monday that its historic Smart Lander for Investigating Moon has defied the odds—after surviving a brutal, two-week lunar night while upside down, SLIM’s solar cells subsequently gathered enough energy to restart the spacecraft over the weekend. In an early morning post to X,…
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Google pauses Gemini image tools after AI generates ‘inaccuracies’ in race
Facing bias accusations, Google this week was forced to pause the image generation portion of Gemini, its generative AI model. The temporary suspension follows backlash from users who criticized it for allegedly placing too much emphasis on ethnic diversity, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. Prior to Google pausing services,…
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Delta’s solar eclipse flight sold out, but your best bet to see it is still down here
Earlier this week, Delta Air Lines announced an extra flight for its April 8 schedule, timed specifically to provide passengers an aerial view of the total solar eclipse. But if you were still hoping to snag a ticket for the afternoon jaunt alongside the path of totality, you’re already out…
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This DVD-sized disk can store a massive 125,000 gigabytes of data
Even in a digital-first world, optical disks like DVDs and Blu-rays still have their many uses. But despite being cheap, sturdy, and small, they can’t keep up with today’s storage needs. This is because, spatially speaking, optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer–that reflective, silver underside–for data…
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