Despite bad weather and early technical difficulties, employee-owned bluShift Aerospace “made history Sunday afternoon when it launched its prototype rocket, Stardust 1.0,” reports Maine’s Portland Press Herald:
The company became the first in Maine to launch a commercial rocket and the first in the world to launch a rocket using bio-derived fuel… It carried three payloads, two commercial and one, free of…
Tag: Amsterdam
How Europe’s Night Trains Came Back From the Dead
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: [O]ver the past decade, much of Europe’s night train network has been cut. 2013 and 2014 saw the culling of lines from Paris to Madrid, Rome and Barcelona; Amsterdam to Prague and Warsaw; and Berlin to Paris and Kiev. For many, it seemed the end of the line was nigh. But recently there…
Electric Bike Motors Will Be Shut Down When Entering Residential Areas of Amsterdam
In an effort to cut road deaths, the Dutch government will be using a new digital system to automatically reduce electric bicycles’ power in residential or built-up areas of Amsterdam. The Guardian reports: The digital technology, which has been successfully trialled on a 4km stretch of bike lanes at Schiphol airport, was funded by the Dutch ministry of infrastructure and water…
Amsterdam and Helsinki Launch Algorithm Registries To Bring Transparency To Public Deployments of AI
Amsterdam and Helsinki this week launched AI registries to detail how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services, some of the first major cities in the world to do so. From a report: An AI Register for each city was introduced in beta today as part of the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, organized in part by the European Commission…
Security Researchers Detail New ‘BlindSide’ Speculative Execution Attack
“Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed ‘BlindSide’ as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors,” reports Phoronix:
BlindSide is self-described as being able to “mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of…
Atlassian Tells Employees They Can Work From Home Forever
Software company Atlassian is telling employees that they don’t have to return to its offices, unless they want to use them. CNBC reports: “We will seek out amazing, diverse talent unbounded by the physical footprint of our offices,” the company said in an internal blog post published on Wednesday. “We will continue to compete for talent in the global hubs, and…
Statistical evidence for temperature inversions in ultra-hot Jupiters
The thermal structure of hot gas giant exoplanet atmospheres is likely to be inverted for the hottest planets, a class of planets known as ultra-hot Jupiters. This is the conclusion from astrophysicists based at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in collaboration with an international team from the United States and the United Kingdom. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-statistical-evidence-temperature-inversions-ultra-hot.html…
Uber Drivers To Launch Legal Bid To Uncover App’s Algorithm
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Minicab drivers will launch a legal bid to uncover secret computer algorithms used by Uber to manage their work in a test case that could increase transparency for millions of gig economy workers across Europe. Two UK drivers are demanding to see the huge amounts of data the ride-sharing company collects on them and…
The Pandemic Brings a New Surge in Popularity For Electric Bikes
Battery-powered bikes “have become a compelling alternative for commuters who are being discouraged from taking public transportation and Ubers,” according to the New York Times’ lead consumer tech writer. In March, sales of e-bikes jumped 85% from a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. Amazon, Walmart and Specialized are sold out of most models. Even smaller brands…
How are zoo animals handling the coronavirus shutdown?
How captive animals are coping with the sudden emptiness of the world’s zoos and aquariums Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/zoo-aquarium-animals-coronavirus-shutdown…