NASA’s team has finally managed to pry off the last two stuck fasteners on the container that holds some incredibly valuable stuff: materials the agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft sampled from asteroid Bennu, over 100 million miles away. The samples, tucked inside a special landing capsule, were dropped off in the Utah desert in September. The treasure was quickly delivered to a special…
Low power longevity FTW… thou this whiffs on unintended consequences HARD. Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan. The Betavolt BV100 will be the first product to launch using the firm’s new atomic battery technology, constructed using a nickel-63 isotope and diamond semiconductor material. Betavolt says its nuclear battery will…
“The A.I.-generated image doesn’t appear to be faithful to Haring’s style, which often included images of human figures,” writes Julia Binswanger at Smithsonian.com. “These kinds of figures are visible in Haring’s original piece, but the image generator wasn’t able to replicate them.” The algorithmically filled-in Unfinished Painting may be without aesthetic or intellectual interest in itself, but consider…
Archaeologists have known for some time that ancient pre-Hispanic settlements likely lay hidden deep within the Amazon. However, the dense rainforest has made the discovery of these ancient cultures and their artifacts particularly difficult. In fact, the release announcing this latest discovery openly concedes that although an expanding body of research has begun to shed light on…
A new Chinese rocket just blasted its way into the record books. The Gravity-1 vehicle, built by Chinese company Orienspace, lifted off for the first time ever Thursday (Jan. 11). The squat, burly rocket rose off the deck of a ship stationed in the Yellow Sea at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT), sending two big plumes of…
Welcome to Edition 6.26 of the Rocket Report! We’re just 11 days into the new year, and we’ve already had two stunning rocket debuts. Vulcan soared into space on Monday morning, and then a medium-lift rocket from China, Gravity-1, made a picture-perfect launch from a mobile pad in the Yellow Sea. It feels like this…
Oh! can also work interactively with The Handy. Both devices can also be controlled remotely to help long-distance couples stay connected, or help someone with limited dexterity or mobility use the devices. But all of this raises the eternal question with the Internet of Dongs: privacy. “We don’t gather any personal data and we’re bound…
I’ve seen a couple of these projects… just bonkers. Decoding the contents of a ROM by looking at the physical structure. The TMS0801, from 1972, was one of the first chips to completely contain everything to need to run a calculator. It was used to power the Sinclair Cambridge. It contained the CPU, RAM, and ROM,…
“Tab is not an assistant, period. I’m not building something that’s going to connect to Notion or your emails any time soon. I’m solely building . . . a friend that morphs into your creative partner, life coach, [or] therapist as needed,” he says. “What I’m trying to do is create a new relationship in your life;…