Doctor Who’s Sonic Pioneers Will Turn the Internet Into a Giant Musical Instrument

“The Radiophonic Workshop has always broken new sonic ground, from the Doctor Who theme to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now they’re at it again — this time using the internet as a musical instrument,” reports the Guardian. “The band includes composers from the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which created soundtracks for most BBC shows from the 60s to the…

What is a supernova?

A supernova is a star’s colossal explosion at the end of its life, potentially outshining its entire galaxy. Read about the causes and types of supernovae here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-a-supernova…

SSDs Are Primed To Get Bigger and Faster With Micron’s New NAND Memory Tech

Micron has announced it’s shipping 176-layer TLC NAND flash memory to customers, a move that portends larger, faster and even cheaper SSD drives for all. From a report: The company said its 5th-gen 3D NAND memory should put its density about 40 percent higher than its nearest competitors, which are using 128-layer NAND. Micron said read and write latencies are reduced…

A Few Trick-or-Treaters in Canada Receive a Surprising Treat: Bitcoin

Cointelegraph reports: While many children dressed as ghosts, goblins, and witches last night may have been disappointed to find an inedible thin piece of cardboard left out in a goodie bag, a lucky few recognized the treat as a Bitcoin prize. According to an October 31 tweet from Brad Mills, the crypto user filled a Halloween candy box with more than…

Top 10 things to know about asteroid Bennu

Take a video tour of asteroid Bennu’s remarkable terrain and read a list of 10 cool things scientists know about this pristine remnant from the early days of our solar system. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/top-10-things-to-know-about-asteroid-bennu-video-tour…

Black holes could become massive particle accelerators

Physicists suggest harnessing the gravitational pull of black holes to create ferocious particle accelerators. The trick? Carefully set everything up so the particles don’t get lost forever. Source: https://www.livescience.com/black-holes-transformed-into-particle-accelerators.html

Winning Bid: How Auction Theory Took the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

Tim Harford, writing for Financial Times: A well-designed auction forces bidders to reveal the truth about their own estimate of the prize’s value. At the same time, the auction shares that information with the other bidders. And it sets the price accordingly. It is quite a trick. But, in practice, it is a difficult trick to get right. In the 1990s,…

Split-Second ‘Phantom’ Images Can Fool Tesla’s Autopilot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev have spent the last two years experimenting with “phantom” images to trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla’s driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images…

Researchers Finally Measured Radiation Levels On the Moon. They’re High.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Scientists were able to, for the first time, measure radiation levels on the lunar surface, reports UPI, and nine days ago they published their results: that the radiation levels on the moon are 200 times stronger than on earth — and 2.6 times higher than those on space station. One of the scientists behind the study calls…