On March 3, 2021, the red planet Mars and Pleiades star cluster in Taurus will appear close together on the sky’s dome. The two won’t get this close again until 2038! See photos of the big event. Source: https://earthsky.org/todays-image/mars-pleiades-march-3-2021-conjunction-photographs…
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The First Black Hole Ever Discovered is More Massive Than We Thought
Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review: Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn’t spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region…
NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards
Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. From a report: The company has revealed that it’s cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners….
Twitter Considers Subscription Fee for Tweetdeck, Unique Content
Twitter is building a subscription product as a way to ease its dependence on advertising — a plan the social network has considered for years, and one that has taken on a heightened priority given the pandemic and pressure from activist investors to accelerate growth. From a report: The majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from targeted advertising, which serves up promoted…
Stripe ‘Will No Longer Process Payments’ For Trump’s Campaign Site
“It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use,” jokes TechCrunch. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Stripe Inc. will no longer process payments for President Trump’s campaign website following last week’s riot at the Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter. The financial-technology company handles card payments for millions of online businesses…
Capella Space Defends High-Resolution Satellite Photos Described as ‘Eerily Observant’
“A new satellite from Capella Space was described as “pretty creepy” by Bustle’s technology site Input: Like other hunks of metal currently orbiting Earth, the Capella-2 satellite’s onboard radar system makes it capable of producing ludicrously high-resolution visuals from its data. More unconventional is the service Capella has launched to match: the government or private customers can, at any time, request…
What are coronal mass ejections?
Coronal mass ejections – CMEs for short – are powerful eruptions near the surface of the sun that can ripple through our solar system and can interrupt satellites and power grids on Earth. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/what-are-coronal-mass-ejections…
Tired of Mockery, Austrian Village Changes Name
Residents of an Austrian village will ring in the new year under a new name — Fugging — after ridicule of their signposts, especially on social media, became too much to bear. From a report:
They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century. Minutes from a municipal council meeting published on…
Linux Mint Introduces Its Own Take On the Chromium Web Browser
Mint’s programmers, led by lead developer, Clement “Clem” Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google’s open-source Chromium web browser. ZDNet reports: Some of you may be saying, “Wait, haven’t they offered Chromium for years? Well, yes, and no. For years, Mint used Ubuntu’s Chromium build. But then Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, moved from releasing Chromium as an APT-compatible DEB package…
SiFive Unveils Plan For Linux PCs With RISC-V Processors
SiFive today announced it is creating a platform for Linux-based personal computers based on RISC-V processors. VentureBeat reports: Assuming customers adopt the processors and use them in PCs, the move might be part of a plan to create Linux-based PCs that use royalty-free processors. This could be seen as a challenge to computers based on designs from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices,…