The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life

Siobhan Roberts, writing for The New York Times: In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed hunt-and-peck style. Page 9 began with the heading “The game of life.” It described…

America Creates a 770-Mile Corridor for Testing Supersonic Aircraft Up to Mach 3

America’s Federal Aviation Agency signed an agreement with the state of Kansas’s department of transportation to establish a 770-nautical mile Kansas Supersonic Transportation Corridor for testing aircraft up to Mach 3, reports Aviation International News:
The agreement would provide a critical testing site for the emerging group of supersonic aircraft as civil supersonic flight remains banned over land. Flight testing for models…

Searching for stardust: How to find micrometeorites in your gutters

Space dust is constantly falling to Earth, sprinkling rooftops with beautiful particles unchanged since the birth of the solar system. To find some, start with a sieve – and be patient Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833132-500-searching-for-stardust-how-to-find-micrometeorites-in-your-gutters/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Spotify Resets Passwords After a Security Bug Exposed Users’ Private Account Information

Jerry Rivers shares a report from TechCrunch, adding: “…and it took the music service seven months to notice.” From the report: In a data breach notification filed with the California attorney general’s office, the music streaming giant said the data exposed “may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners…

Galaxy survives black hole’s feast—for now

Black holes are thought to gobble up so much surrounding material that they put an end to the life of their host galaxy. In that process they create a highly energetic object called a quasar which was previously thought to halt star birth. Now researchers have found a galaxy that is surviving the ravenous forces of a quasar by continuing to…

Data Breach Exposes 27 Million Texas Driver’s License Records

“A software company that provides services for insurance groups disclosed this week that about 27.7 million Texas driver’s license records were exposed in a data breach earlier this year,” reports The Hill: The company, Vertafore, said in a statement posted on a website set up to address the breach that the data was exposed between March and August and affected licenses…