Did you find the message hidden in Perseverance’s parachute?

The striped pattern on the parachute used by the Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a hidden message. Internet sleuths were able to figure it out within a few hours. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/perseverance-secret-message-dare-mighty-things…

Linux Is Now on Mars, Thanks to NASA’s Perseverance Rover

“When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet,” reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. “This…

What’s next for the Mars Perseverance rover? Your questions answered

Now that NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed safely on Mars, it will start taking samples and release the Ingenuity helicopter to test flying drones on other planets Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268691-whats-next-for-the-mars-perseverance-rover-your-questions-answered/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Get ready for Perseverance’s landing on Mars February 18

Some call attempts to land on Mars “7 minutes of terror.” The Perseverance mission will provide the most detailed video and photos of a landing yet. We’ll watch ourselves land on another planet, for the first time ever. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/get-ready-nasa-perseverance-landing-feb2021…

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

“Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020.” So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. He’d made the bet with a “Luddite-loving doomsayer,” according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. “Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote…

How Bill Gates Would Fight Climate Change

“There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Thursday: “climate change.” As I have tried to make clear on this blog over the past two years, we have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean…

HP Replaces ‘Free Ink for Life’ Plan With ’99 Cents a Month Or Your Printer Stops Working’

In a new essay at EFF.org, Cory Doctorow re-visits HP’s anti-consumer “security updates” that disabled third-party ink cartridges (while missing real vulnerabilities that could actually bypass network firewalls). Doctorow writes that it was just the beginning: HP’s latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their…

Life-hunting Perseverance rover is halfway to Mars

NASA announced that its Perseverance rover mission – which will search for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars – has now passed the halfway mark in its journey to the planet. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/perservance-rover-halfway-to-mars-nasa-astrobiology…

Microsoft Gets Exclusive License For OpenAI’s GPT-3 Language Model

Microsoft today announced that it will exclusively license GPT-3, one of the most powerful language understanding models in the world, from AI startup OpenAI. From a report:> In a blog post, Microsoft EVP Kevin Scott said that the new deal will allow Microsoft to leverage OpenAI’s technical innovations to develop and deliver AI solutions for customers, as well as create new…