The Sickle in Leo is an easy-to-spot backward question mark shape made of stars that marks the head and shoulders of the constellation of the lion. The moon sometimes passes in front of the Sickle’s brightest star, Regulus. Source: https://earthsky.org/favorite-star-patterns/the-sickle-backward-question-mark-pattern-in-leo…
Tag: hammer
The Ethical Source Movement Launches a New Kind of Open-Source Organization
ZDNet takes a look at a new nonprofit group called the Organization for Ethical Source (OES): The OES is devoted to the idea that the free software and open-source concept of “Freedom Zero” are outdated. Freedom Zero is “the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.” It’s fundamental to how open-source software is made and used… They…
NASA “mole’s” attempts to dig into Mars failed. What’s next?
The mission team for NASA’s InSight lander called off its attempts to try to dig deeper into Mars with the heat probe known as “the mole.” Meanwhile, the rest of the mission gained an extension to December 2022. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nasa-calls-halt-to-attempts-by-insight-mole-to-dig-into-mars…
After 2 Years on Mars, NASA’s Digger Declared Dead
“NASA declared the Mars digger dead Thursday after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature,” reports the Associated Press: Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t gain enough friction…
Journalists Scrutinize QAnon’s Role in Capitol Hill Mob — And Its Hosting Infrastructure
On Thursday Axios tried to assess QAnon’s role in the mob that stormed America’s Capitol building:
Adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who imagine a vast deep-state cabal of pedophiles arrayed against Trump, have for years insisted that a moment of reckoning for their enemies is imminent. QAnon believers have largely accepted that Trump is waiting for the right time to bring…
From Thailand To Indonesia, Taxes Tighten for Digital Businesses
Governments across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are moving to impose more taxes on digital companies, stirring unease among multinational internet businesses that have boomed amid the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: From Thailand to Indonesia, new levies have kicked in or are being introduced. They threaten to chip away at the earnings of technology companies that are reaping benefits…
Google Says it Mitigated a 2.54 Tbps DDoS Attack in 2017, Largest Known To Date
The Google Cloud team revealed today a previously undisclosed DDoS attack that targeted Google service back in September 2017 and which clocked at 2.54 Tbps, making it the largest DDoS attack recorded to date. From a report: In a separate report published at the same time, the Google Threat Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the Google security team that analyzes high-end threat…
‘5G Just Got Weird’
SuperKendall (Slashdot reader #25,149) shared this review of the recent 5G standards codified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in Release 16 (finalized on July 3). “5G just got weird,” writes IEEE Spectrum: 4G and other earlier generations of cellular focused on just that: cellular. But when 3GPP members started gathering to hammer out what 5G could be, there was…
Hammer-on technique for atomic vibrations in a crystal
Vibrations of atoms in a crystal of the semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) are impulsively shifted to a higher frequency by an optically excited electric current. The related change in the spatial distribution of charge between gallium and arsenic atoms acts back on their motions via electric interactions. …
Dance of 3 stars confirms Einstein’s ‘most fortunate thought’
Researchers in Europe have now confirmed the universality of free fall – which Einstein called his most fortunate thought – with extremely high precision. To do it, they spent 8 years tracking a triple star system containing a millisecond pulsar. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/pulsar-psr-j03371715-einstein-universality-of-free-fall…