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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
7 Top Creator Partnerships of 2024 That...
This article was originally published Dec. 17 In 2024, creators took center stage for marketers. Brands began to view them as more than just attention-grabbers. Creators helped develop products, drum up social media buzz, and drive sales. Companies realized that the key to success with influencers is to genuinely trust the creator, allowing them to steer the collaboration in a way that reflects their own content and style. ADWEEK picked seven creator campaigns that stood out this year. Thousands...

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Outrage Fatigue Is Real. Here's Why We...
You’re probably feeling it: the onslaught of depressing news and commentary about political actions, wars, climate disasters and more. The first few times you’re exposed to a perceived injustice, you feel fired up and ready to fight against it. But after being repeatedly facing this moral assault, you start to feel fatigued, even withdrawn. Resistance feels futile. This phenomenon is informally referred to as “outrage fatigue.” While it hasn’t been well studied, researchers have studied outrage itself—what purpose it...

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Here’s How to Watch New Year’s Eve...
New Year’s Eve festivities are typically the climax of the holiday season, and after an eventful 2024, the major news networks have big plans for ushering in 2025. Here’s your guide to all the New Year’s programming on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. (All times Eastern) ABC News ABC will broadcast Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest from Times Square beginning at 8 p.m. ET. On Jan. 1, Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts hosts The Year:...

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20 Media Executives Offer Their Predictions for...
.article-native-ad { border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; margin: 0 45px; padding-bottom: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; } .article-native-ad svg { color: #ddd; font-size: 34px; margin-top: 10px; } .article-native-ad p { line-height:1.5; padding:0!important; padding-left: 10px!important; } .article-native-ad strong { font-weight:500; color:rgb(46,179,178); } The stage is set! Advertisers, don’t miss this cultural moment. ADWEEK House The Big Game is headed to New Orleans on February 7. RSVP. The great thing about predictions is that they are never wrong, which is why ADWEEK gathered responses...

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To Fight AI Search Spam, Prioritize Real...
At some point in the future, AIs may create works of art, music, and writing that rival human-created ones. For now, what’s most impressive about most generative AIs is their capacity to produce lots of mediocre work very quickly. This ability is transforming many industries: In the world of higher education, where I work, we are discovering that it’s very hard to tell AI-produced mediocrity from something that indicates that a student is learning to produce good work. But...

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Jimmy Carter, Who Died at Age 100,...
December 29, 2024 5 min read Former president Jimmy Carter’s charity has helped transform Guinea worm from a disease that used to infect millions to one that infects fewer than a dozen By Charles Schmidt edited by Tanya Lewis Photo by John Angelillo/UPI/Alamy Stock Photo Former president Jimmy Carter was touring villages in Ghana during the late 1980s when he first encountered people with Guinea worm disease. This tropical disease involves an infection with parasitic worms that eventually emerge...

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“Brain Rot” Is Poisoning Our Minds
Image by Getty/Futurism It turns out that the slang “brain rot” may not be an inaccurate description of what’s actually going on in our domes while we endlessly scroll TikTok. As Spanish newspaper El País reports, a growing body of scientific evidence over the past decade suggests that consuming mind-numbing content, from sources ranging from algorithmically driven social media junk to sensationalist news, can literally reduce the physical gray matter in our brains. That’s along with wreaking other pernicious...

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Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered...
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.” Bot Net Were you hoping that bots on social media would be a thing of the past? Well, don’t hold your breath. Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI...

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77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in...
Over the past year, the writers on The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health desk have investigated academic fraud, tracked infectious-disease outbreaks, studied the evolution of artificial intelligence, and chronicled extreme weather events. We’ve reported on the quirks of animal behavior and the latest in psychedelics research. Along the way, we stumbled across facts that surprised, sobered, and humbled us, and we wanted to share them with you. We hope they blow your mind too. Onions were used to treat...

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MAGA Figures Turn on Elon Musk for...
We may be seeing some of the first major fissures forming in the dalliance between Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk. Over the holiday week, Musk entered into a heated online conflict with notable pro-Trump figure and culture warrior Laura Loomer over the president-elect’s immigration policy, the Washington Post reports. The debacle saw Musk receive rare pushback from his far-right supporters for advocating laxer immigration policy to court skilled foreign workers, and culminated with Loomer, who has...

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Hawk Tuah Wasn’t What It Seemed
A memecoin is a cryptocurrency that, like most cryptocurrencies, has no inherent value. It is created to represent an internet meme, and its value is tied very loosely to that meme’s popularity; you could think of it as like owning stock in, say, a knock-knock joke. The most famous memecoin is Dogecoin, which was boosted by Elon Musk and refers to an internet-famous dog. More recently, people have fixated on a coin called Hawk, as in “Hawk Tuah,” the...

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Temu’s Takeover Is Now Complete
Love it or hate it, you have to admit Temu had a banger year. Launched in late 2022, the Chinese-owned ecommerce site, known for selling a vast array of astonishingly affordable goods, took only two years to become a household name in the US. Over the past 12 months, it has topped download charts, surpassing other viral apps like ChatGPT and Threads, and now operates in dozens of countries around the world. Even its biggest rival, Amazon, recently introduced...

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The Most Distant Known Galaxy
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Olmsted, S. Carniani, JADES Collaboration Day 25 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: the most distant known galaxy. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have found a record-breaking distant galaxy observed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program, obtaining a spectrum of the record-breaking...

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Collaboration Is Key to A Strong Materials...
NASA has a strong need for advanced materials and processes (M&P) across the realms of robotic- and crewed-spaceflight, as well as aeronautics, particularly when one acknowledges that all craft must be made of something. To meet that need, the materials discipline relies on collaboration—both between centers and across disciplines. Reaching the Agency’s Moon-to-Mars objectives will require leveraging each center’s specific M&P expertise, cross-training among the centers, and routinely interacting with the 20-plus Agency disciplines like structures, space environments, and...

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Characterizing the Visual Experience of Astronauts at...
Humans are returning to the Moon—this time, to stay. Because our presence will be more permanent, NASA has selected a location that maximizes line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice: the Lunar South Pole (LSP). While the Sun is in the lunar sky more consistently at the poles, it never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon; in the target landing regions, the highest possible elevation is 7°. This presents a harsh lighting...

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