Star-hop: Pegasus to Andromeda galaxy

The 4 stars of the Great Square of Pegasus are easy to find. Ready? Let’s star-hop! Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/star-hop-from-great-square-of-pegasus-to-andromeda-galaxy…

Nvidia’s GeForce Now Is Losing All Activision Blizzard Games

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games stored on dedicated GeForce graphics-enabled PCs across a wide array of devices. While it lets you play PC games you already own, the game publisher must allow it on the service. “Today, Nvidia is revealing that Activision Blizzard is no longer playing ball, pulling down its catalog of…

Pine Island Glacier spawns PIGlets

Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier – known as ‘PIG’ for short – has just spawned a huge iceberg. At over 115 square miles (300 square km), this huge berg quickly broke into many ‘PIGlet’ pieces Source: https://earthsky.org/todays-image/pine-island-glacier-piglet-icebergs…

Facebook To IRS: Refund Me, I’m Irish!

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Among the techniques featured in a 2012 City Pages story on The 10 Most Corrupt Tax Loopholes was pretending to be Irish. Chris Parker wrote, “Most people associate such exhaustive money-laundering with drug cartels. But it’s now standard practice at firms like Eli Lilly, Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Facebook. The only difference is that when drug…

Massive Building Fire Threatens Worldwide Vinyl Record Production

Apollo Masters, one of two plants in the world that manufacture lacquers that are imperative to the process of making vinyl records, sustained a major fire yesterday and burned down. Loudwire reports: The Desert Sun confirmed that the fire began in the 15,000-square-foot building at 8am Feb. 6. There were multiple explosions reported, and 82 firefighters responded to the scene. The…

Brexit Happens

“The UK has officially left the European Union after 47 years of membership,” reports the BBC. The historic moment, which happened at 23:00 GMT, was marked by both celebrations and anti-Brexit protests. Candlelit vigils were held in Scotland, which voted to stay in the EU, while Brexiteers partied in London’s Parliament Square… Brexit parties were held in pubs and social clubs…

AI could deceive us as much as the human eye does in the search for extraterrestrials

An artificial neural network has identified a square structure within a triangular one in a crater on the dwarf planet Ceres, with several people agreeing on this perception. The result of this intriguing visual experiment, carried out by a Spanish neuropsychologist, calls into question the application of artificial intelligence to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-ai-human-eye-extraterrestrials.html…

What is astrophysics?

Observational astronomy and astrophysics work together to further our understanding of the cosmos. Astrophysicists apply the laws of physics and physical theories to interpret the light gathered by observational astronomers. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/definition-what-is-astrophysics…

Albatrosses Outfitted With GPS Trackers Detect Illegal Fishing Vessels

schwit1 shares a report from the Smithsonian: Capable of following fishing boats into remote regions out of reach of monitoring machines like ships, aircraft and even certain satellites, these feathered crimefighters could offer a convenient and cost-effective way to keep tabs on foul play at sea — and may even help gather crucial conservation data along the way. […] On top…

Air-Traffic Control Is in the Midst of a Major Change

Shift from radar to GPS should make tracking faster and more accurate, allowing more planes in the air. From a report: Since World War II, air-traffic controllers have used radar to keep track of aircraft. But as of Jan. 1, most planes and helicopters flying in the U.S. must be equipped with transponders that allow their movements to be traced with…