NASA’s first mission to the Trojan asteroids integrates its second scientific instrument

NASA’s Lucy mission is one step closer to launch as L’TES, the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer, has been successfully integrated on to the spacecraft. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-nasa-mission-trojan-asteroids-scientific.html…

Aaron Swartz’s Memory Honored with Virtual Hackathon

Saturday saw 2020’s virtual observation of the annual Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, which the EFF describes as “a day dedicated to celebrating the continuing legacy of activist, programmer, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz.” Its official web site notes the wide-ranging event includes “projects and ideas that are still bearing fruit to this day, such as SecureDrop, Open Library, and the…

Qualcomm Wins US Antitrust Lawsuit Appeal Over Chip Licensing

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling against chip supplier Qualcomm in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission. From a report: The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also vacated an injunction that would have required Qualcomm to change its intellectual property licensing practices. The decision amounted to a near complete victory for…

Lucy mission one step closer to the Trojan asteroids

NASA’s Lucy mission, led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), has achieved an important milestone by passing its System Integration Review and clearing the way for spacecraft assembly. This NASA Discovery Program class mission will be the first to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, ancient small bodies that share an orbit with Jupiter and hold important insights to understanding the early solar system….

All you need to know: June solstice 2020

The June solstice is June 20. Longest day for the Northern Hemisphere. Shortest day for the Southern Hemisphere. Details here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-june-solstice…

‘Virtual Fistfight’ Created With Historic Collaboration of 40 Film Stars

DevNull127 writes: You probably remember Zoe Bell strapped to the hood of a speeding 1970 Dodge Challenger in the Death Proof half of Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. (She also had parts in The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.) Today Zoe pulled together what may become a historic video — a massive online collaboration with 40 different film celebrities…

Our ancestors may have run a million years earlier than we thought

We thought hominins evolved to run around 2 million years ago – but a study of the famous Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, suggests she could run too Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237361-our-ancestors-may-have-run-a-million-years-earlier-than-we-thought/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

edX Insider: Data Analysis in Marketing

Even if you don’t work in the data science field, data analysis skills and tools are still very likely to come in handy. We chatted with a few members of the edX marketing team to find out the ways these skills arise in their day-to-day work, how they were able to pick up on tools in this field despite not having…