Tag: magazine

Celebrate the 91st anniversary of Pluto’s discovery

The I Heart Pluto Festival 2021 is a free event running from February 13 – 18 hosted by Lowell Observatory. Join in with nightly virtual events! Source: https://earthsky.org/space/i-heart-pluto-festival-2021-virtual-events-91st-anniversary…

Anniversary of mysterious parade of meteors

On February 9, 1913, lucky observers witnessed the Great Meteor Procession, when bright meteors soared horizontally across the sky in a stately marching rank for minutes at a time. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-great-meteor-procession-of-february-9-1913…

Pakistan Forced Down Apps Made By a Persecuted Religious Minority

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Over the last two years, the government of Pakistan has forced Google and Apple to take down apps in the country created by developers based in other nations who are part of a repressed religious minority. The move is part of a crackdown led by the country’s telecommunications regulator targeting the Ahmadiyya…

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…

With New User-Defined Functions, Microsoft Excel is Now Turing Complete

Visual Studio Magazine reports: Microsoft, which calls its Excel spreadsheet a programming language, reports that an effort called LAMBDA to make it even more of a programming language is paying off, recently being deemed Turing complete. Being Turing complete is the litmus test of a full-fledged programming language, marking the ability to imitate a Turing machine. According to one definition, that…

The Problems of Touchscreens In the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes a recent blog post from BoingBoing: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most crammed-with-digital-tech fighter jet in history, the product of a multi-decade, trillion-dollar design process that has been famously messy. But the jet is out there, and pilots are flying it. One big design shift with the F-35 is that it removes many of…

Biden Orders Sweeping Review of Government Science Integrity Policies

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: President Joe Biden today created a task force that will conduct a 120-day review of scientific integrity policies across the U.S. government, including documenting instances in which “improper political interference” interfered with research or led to the suppression or distortion of data. The review is part of a lengthy memorandum from Biden on his…

The Highest Resolution Photos Ever Taken of Snowflakes

Photographer and scientist Nathan Myhrvold has developed a camera that captures snowflakes at a microscopic level never seen before. Smithsonian Magazine reports: Myhrvold, who holds a PhD in theoretical mathematics and physics from Princeton University and served as the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 14 years, leaned on his background as a scientist to create the camera. He also tapped…

Substance Found In Antarctic Ice May Solve a Martian Mystery

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Researchers have discovered a common martian mineral deep within an ice core from Antarctica. The find suggests the mineral — a brittle, yellow-brown substance known as jarosite — was forged the same way on both Earth and Mars: from dust trapped within ancient ice deposits. It also reveals how important these glaciers were on…