An anonymous reader shares a PopularMechanics report: An American Airlines flight crew encountered an unidentified flying object over New Mexico on February 21. American Airlines has confirmed the strange incident, during which a “long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile” zipped over the Airbus A320, according to a pilot’s transmission obtained by The War Zone. American Airlines Flight…
Tag: phoenix
Dark streaks on Mars may be caused by salts and melting ice
Researchers at the SETI Institute say that unusual dark streaks on sun-facing slopes on Mars, debated about for years, may be small landslides caused by a combination of salts and melting ice just below the surface. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-dark-streaks-melting-ice-recurring-slope-lineae…
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…
Qualcomm To Acquire NUVIA: A CPU Magnitude Shift
Today, Qualcomm has announced they will be acquiring NUVIA for $1.4 billion — acquiring the start-up company consisting of industry veterans which originally were behind the creation of Apple’s high-performance CPU cores. AnandTech reports: NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019 and coming out of stealth-mode in November of that year. The start-up was founded by industry veterans Gerard Williams III,…
A Phoenix Aurora over Iceland
All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. Source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html…
Waymo Pulls Back the Curtain On 6.1 Million Miles of Self-Driving Car Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions during 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an…
Waymo Starts To Open Driverless Ride-Hailing Service To the Public
Waymo, the Google self-driving-project-turned-Alphabet unit, is beginning to open up its driverless ride-hailing service to the public. From a report: The company said that starting today members of its Waymo One service will be able to take family and friends along on their fully driverless rides in the Phoenix area. Existing Waymo One members will have the first access to the…
Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.
America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed. From a report: This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires…
US Teens Are Being Paid to Spread Disinformation on Social Media
The Washington Post covered “a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia” during America’s last presidential campaign in 2016. According to four people with knowledge of the effort, “Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages…”…
Amazon Will Add 3,500 Tech and Corporate Jobs Across Six US Cities
Amazon today announced an upcoming hiring spree set to bring 3,500 jobs to a half-dozen U.S. cities. The news is, of course, particularly notable amid a pandemic that has cause many industries to freeze hiring, while unemployment claims have soared across the country. It also finds the company doing that hiring in cities — many of which have seen citizens looking…