The universe is more connected than you might think: In recent years, scientists have used new tools and techniques to map the “cosmic web,” which is made up of intertwined strands of gas structures known as filaments that link galaxies. Now, a team of researchers have identified a new “large-scale structure” in the universe that they call the “Cosmic Vine.”
The researchers hail from numerous universities and institutions across Denmark, Chile, the U.K., and the Netherlands. They published a preprint of their work to the arXiv server on November 8. According to the study, the Cosmic Vine was spotted after poring over data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), humanity’s most powerful tool for peering into the far reaches of space and time. READ MORE...
Competition, miscalculations, and regulatory scrutiny have all but killed the advertising giant's dreams of diversifying its business and rolling up the digital world into its platform.
For years, the definition of success for many tech employees has been getting a job at a FAANG company (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, meanwhile, are often the five major companies people think of when they think of "big tech."
But there is evidence that Facebook—once a dominant monopoly rightly blamed for all sorts of societal ills—is on the precipice of dropping out of this group through years of sheer mismanagement, a failure to innovate, setting money on fire in pursuit of a metaverse that seemingly no one wants, a vulnerable business model that Apple is squarely taking aim at, and upstart competitors like TikTok that the company seemingly has no answer for.
What seemed impossible just a year or two ago—that Facebook will become just another tech company, more or less—now seems like a very real possibility. READ MORE...
In an effort to make electric vehicle (EV) charging less confusing, leading EV charging company Electrify America has introduced a new charger labeling system that makes it even more confusing.
It requires drivers to intuit whether “hyper” or “ultra” chargers are faster. This is, apparently, better than the previous system, which was to determine whether 350 or 150 is a bigger number.
Electrify America announced all this in a recent press release along with an accompanying white paper. In the announcement, EA states 350 kilowatt chargers will now be known as “Hyper-Fast” while 150 kilowatt chargers will be called “Ultra-Fast” as part of “an effort to simplify the charging experience for both new and existing electric vehicle (EV) customers.”
They are doing this, according to the white paper, after extensive focus group and survey research which “revealed that one of the most significant pain points expressed by EV drivers is confusion over the differences between charging speeds and the charging capacity of their vehicles” because there is no industry-wide definition of fast charging. READ MORE...
China has discovered a crystal from the Moon made of a previously unknown mineral, while also confirming that the lunar surface contains a key ingredient for nuclear fusion, a potential form of effectively limitless power that harnesses the same forces that fuel the Sun and other stars.
The crystal is part of a batch of lunar samples collected by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, which landed on the Moon in 2020, loaded up with about four pounds of rocks, and delivered them to Earth days later. After carefully sifting through the samples—which are the first Moon rocks returned to Earth since 1976—scientists at the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology spotted a single crystal particle, with a diameter smaller than the width of a human hair.
The crystal is made of the novel mineral Changesite—(Y), named after the Chinese Moon goddess, Chang’e, that also inspired China’s series of lunar missions.
It was confirmed as a new mineral on Friday by the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA), according to the Chinese state-run publication Global Times.
Changesite—(Y) is the sixth new mineral to be identified in Moon samples, and the first to be discovered by China. Before China, only the U.S. and Russia could claim to have discovered a new Moon mineral.
It is a transparent crystal that formed in a region of the northern lunar near-face that was volcanically active about 1.2 billion years ago. READ MORE...
The rich are now paying attention to prices and their income, lament high-end agents in hotspots like Miami and San Francisco. "It's pretty sudden," one said.
After a decade of feeling invincible, the tech industry is suddenly facing something new: financial insecurity. Valuations are down, layoffs are up, startup funding no longer feels limitless, and an air of fear has started to permeate the sector, as bosses and workers alike adjust to a harsher version of reality.
In cities like San Francisco, New York, and Miami, luxury real estate agents are starting to notice the effects of the tech downturn on their business, they tell Motherboard, as wealthy tech clients grapple with the fact that raises, bonuses, and job offers no longer seem as inevitable as they did a few months ago.
“The elephant in the room these days is that there's a recession coming,” said Karley Chynces, a blockchain-focused real estate agent at Sotheby's International Realty in Miami.
Nationally, rising interest rates for home loans have combined with record home costs to price out potential homebuyers. But within the pockets of the country where tech workers tend to throw money down on housing, interest rates are less of a concern than the decline of tech stocks and the constant barrage of layoff announcements, according to conversations agents have had with their clients. READ MORE...
