President Trump hasn’t succeeded in repealing Obamacare yet. But his administration is doing its best to force the law to fail. The most critical time of the year for the health care law is open enrollment, when millions of people log on to online marketplaces, check whether they qualify for federal subsidies to help them […]
This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of northern Meridiani Planum shows faults that have disrupted layered deposits.
When Charles Konsitzke and Dhanu Shanmuganayagam first met, they were both just trying to get some peace and quiet. It was early 2014, and they were representing the University of Wisconsin-Madison at a fancy event to promote the university’s research to local politicians. After hours of talking to senators, Shanmuganayagam was fried, and went for […]
“The probability of such an event has increased by roughly a factor of three,” he said. While the likelihood of a Harvey-like storm was perhaps once in every 3,000 years in the past, he said, now it’s once every 1,000 years or so — which means that in any given year, there is 0.1 percent […]
Just eight months after its last round of funding, events management platform Bizzabo has raised another $15 million. The new round, which brings Bizzabo’s total funding so far to $30 million, was led by Pilot Growth Equity, with participation from Maor Investments and returning investors. Co-founder and chief executive officer Eran Ben-Shushan told TechCrunch that […]
NEW YORK (Reuters) – AT&T Inc has started trials in Georgia state and a non-U.S. location to deliver high-speed internet over power lines, the No. 2 wireless carrier said on Wednesday, marking its latest push to offer faster broadband service to more customers. AT&T aims to eventually deliver speeds faster than the 1 gigabit per […]
Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits cinemas around the world this week, but it’ll also be showing in one extremely appropriate venue off-planet: the International Space Station. Astronauts will be able to watch the new Star Wars in orbit a few hundred miles above the surface of the Earth using one of the laptops or […]
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea said on Wednesday it may tax capital gains from cryptocurrency trading as global regulators worried about a bubble, with Australia’s central bank chief warning of a ‘speculative mania” that has seen the digital asset making rip-roaring gains. As bitcoin futures made their world debut on a U.S. stock exchange this […]
Blue Origin returns to flight with New Shepard launch Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ up-and-coming space launch company Blue Origin sent the latest version of the company’s New Shepard sub-orbital rocket today (December 12). Liftoff occurred around midday EST from the firm’s launch facility outside of Van Horn, Texas. The liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fueled booster […]
SYDNEY (Reuters) – The fascination with virtual currencies feels more like a “speculative mania”, the head of Australia’s central bank said on Wednesday, just days after the launch of the world’s first bitcoin futures. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, surged past $17,000 on Tuesday to an all-time high, an almost 20-fold increase in […]
Ex-Facebook VP: Social media destroying society with ‘dopamine-driven feedback loops’ A former Facebook executive is making waves after he spoke out about his “tremendous guilt” over growing the social network, which he feels has eroded “the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.” Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 […]
The San Francisco branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) has been ordered by the city to stop using a robot to patrol the sidewalks outside its office, the San Francisco Business Times reported Dec. 8. The robot, produced by Silicon Valley startup Knightscope, was used to ensure that homeless […]
The most famous storm in the solar system is also one of the largest: *******’s Great Red Spot. The storm is just a blemish on *******, but if you compare it to the size of Earth — this storm could swallow our entire planet whole. In July, NASA Juno spacecraft flew over the spot and […]
Astronomers Want To Know: Does This Interstellar Visitor Have A Message For Us? It’s time to find out what, if anything, our “mysterious interloper” has to say. That, at any rate, is the guiding idea for a team of astronomers, who announced Monday they plan to check out an interstellar object for signs of life. […]
The gender gap in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is a known and stubborn quandary: While women make up roughly half of the college-educated U.S. workforce, they account for less than 30% of STEM jobs. To fix that, the Girl Scouts hopes to prepare at least 2.5 million girls for potential STEM-related jobs […]
Google’s Earth Engine lets you view two decades of environmental and population changes on Earth. Following is a transcript of the video. Watch 28 years of change with Google’s coolest mapping technology yet. Google’s time-lapse tool captures how much our world has changed. It’s called Google Earth Engine. The technology collects from the US Geological Survey’s […]
Paleontologists have found entombed in amber a 99-million-year-old tick grasping the feather of a dinosaur, providing the first direct evidence that the tiny pests drank dinosaur blood. Immortalized in the golden gemstone, the bloodsucker’s last supper is remarkable because it is rare to find parasites with their hosts in the fossil record. The finding, which […]
Facebook is trying to close the augmented reality gap with Snapchat with the help of an army of third-party developers. Today, eight months after debuting its Augmented Reality Camera Effects platform and AR Studio tool at F8, Facebook is allowing all developers to start building AR experiences for its Facebook Camera. That includes “World Effects” […]
One month ago, a chart from Convoy Investments went viral for showing that among all of the world’s most famous asset bubbles, bitcoin was only lagging the infamous 17th century “Tulip Mania.” One month later, the price of bitcoin has exploded even higher, and so it is time to refresh where in the global bubble […]
(Adds CAAM official’s comments) By Lusha Zhang and Norihiko Shirouzu BEIJING, Dec 11 (Reuters) – China’s vehicle sales grew a slow 0.7 percent in November, prompting an industry association official to strike a grim note for auto sales in the world’s biggest auto market this year and beyond. Sales last month totalled 2.96 million vehicles, […]
There are a lot of questions that should yield very straightforward yes or no answers, no matter what conspiracy theorists say. Is the world flat? No. Is the Moon made of cheese? No. Is climate change real? Yes. Unfortunately, just like people, robots sometimes don’t like to give yes or no answers, even if the […]
PARIS (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a bleak assessment on the global fight against climate change to dozens of world leaders and company executives on Tuesday, telling them: “We are losing the battle”. “We’re not moving quickly enough. We all need to act,” Macron said, seeking to breathe new life into a collective […]
“Whether it is ‘Brexit’ or the American election, Russian propaganda still infects U.S. social media networks,” Dr. Jacobson said. “And we see the same sort of divisive propaganda that we saw during the Cold War.” Called Operation Infektion by the East German foreign intelligence service, the 1980s disinformation campaign seeded a conspiracy theory that the […]
One by one, Frances Moore has watched friends and neighbors move into cars, tents and encampments. Many in crisis often turn to the 62-year-old Oakland woman, who provides free meals to the homeless, but she has found it increasingly difficult to hear their stories of displacement. That’s because she knows she could soon be next. […]
After an eventful (and sometimes challenging) year for Soylent, co-founder Rob Rhinehart announced today that he will resign as the meal replacement shake company’s chief executive officer. That position will be taken over by Bryan Crowley, the president of Soylent’s parent company Rosa Foods. In a blog post, Rhinehart said that since Soylent is no […]
SEOUL/BEIJING (Reuters) – Curbing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions will top South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s agenda in Beijing during a visit this week aimed at breaking the ice after a furious row over Seoul’s deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system. While both South Korea and China share the goal of getting North Korea to give […]
President Trump announced on Monday that the moon would be the next destination for American astronauts, putting the Oval Office’s imprimatur on what other administration officials have said for months. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use,” Mr. Trump […]
President Trump Is Sending NASA Back To The Moon President Trump has formally told NASA to send U.S. astronauts back to the moon. “The directive I’m signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” he said. Standing at the president’s side as he signed “Space Policy Directive 1” on Monday was […]
A U.S. Air Force F-16C fighter jet lands during a military exercise at the Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on April 2, 2013. An F-16C, along with other military aircraft, will take part in NORAD exercises over the D.C. region early Tuesday. (Yonhap/AFP/Getty Images) A training exercise involving several military aircraft will take […]
The virtual currency bitcoin continues surging to new highs as a frenzy of investors get in on the action. WSJ’s Paul Vigna explains what you need to know, and how to invest should you want to join the mania. Photo: Alexander Hotz/The Wall Street Journal. Bitcoin is taking over the world. Its rapidly rising value […]
How will we live elsewhere in the galaxy? On Earth, natural resources for creating structures are abundant, but sending these materials up with us to the Moon or Mars is clunky and cost-prohibitive. Enter architect Xavier De Kestelier, who has a radical plan to use robots and space dust to 3D print our interplanetary homes. […]
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The generally smooth launch of bitcoin futures on Cboe Global Markets (CBOE.O) could pave the way for other cryptocurrency-related products like options and ETFs, the head of the exchange operator said in an interview on Monday. It may take U.S. regulators a bit longer to warm to the idea of a […]
It seems hard to fathom that scientific progress has advanced to a point where it’s suddenly possible for people to undertake something as complicated as gene therapy outside the safety and confines of a well-funded lab, but it has. In just the past few months we’ve seen not one, but two examples of people pursuing […]
Advocacy marketing — the idea of getting existing customers to talk about your company and its products — is nothing new, but as marketing spend has shifted online, a number of startups have tried to figure out ways of making it more scalable. One such company is Zyper, founded by Amber Atherton, who previously featured […]
