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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.

 
Donald Trump Names Fox News’ Pete Hegseth...
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth is his pick to run the Department of Defense. As a result of this nomination, Hegseth will depart his Fox News role immediately. “Pete Hegseth has been an exceptional host on Fox & Friends and Fox Nation and a best-selling author for Fox News Books for nearly a decade,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement to TVNewser. “His insights and analysis, especially about the...

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From Dora to Bluey: What Marketers Need...
.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); } ADWEEK House is headed to Las Vegas on January 8! Our house is your house to unwind, recharge and network during the industry’s largest consumer tech moment. RSVP. As a Latina mother and marketer, raising bilingual children in today’s media landscape...

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The First Entirely AI-Generated Video Game Is...
Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building possibilities. A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the original game’s flavor with a remarkable and weird twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that dreams up each frame. Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart...

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Resume Rewind: Linqia VP Keith Bendes on...
.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); } ADWEEK House is headed to Las Vegas on January 8! Our house is your house to unwind, recharge and network during the industry’s largest consumer tech moment. RSVP. “I did have a very nontraditional career,” Keith Bendes, vice president of strategy...

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AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As...
“The economics are likely to be grim.” Crash and Burn The scales are falling from the eyes of the tech industry right now, as generative AI models are reportedly hitting a technological brick wall. As some experts have long predicted would happen, improvements that once came easily by simply scaling up large language models — in other words, by adding more parameters, training data, and processing power — are now slowing down, and that’s if they’re yielding any significant...

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Wind Blowing Out of Uranus Makes It...
A “rare intense wind event” may have messed up our opportunity to probe Uranus. Wind Tunnel Scientists have found that a “rare intense wind event” during NASA’s Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 may have seriously messed with our understanding of the planet. And yes, we admit, the jokes practically write themselves. But the research is very real. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Jamie Jasinski and...

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America Cringes as Trump Puts Elon Musk...
President-elect Donald Trump has announced that the “Great Elon Musk,” who has zero experience running anything in the government, and “anti-woke” Big Pharma shill Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE. It doesn’t take much to realize that the entire debacle is meant to poke fun at government bureaucracy. The acronym of the project, DOGE, is a reference to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which literally started out as a joke. Musk has been obsessed with...

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Are Alternate Timelines Real? Quantum Physics Explains
As memes go, it wasn’t particularly viral. But for a couple of hours on the morning of November 6, the term “darkest timeline” trended in Google searches, and several physicists posted musings on social media about whether we were actually in it. All the probabilities expressed in opinion polls and prediction markets had collapsed into a single definite outcome, and history went from “what might be” to “that just happened.” The two sides in this hyperpolarized U.S. presidential election...

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Character.AI Is Hosting Pedophile Chatbots That Groom...
Content warning: this story discusses child sexual abuse and grooming. Character.AI is an explosively popular startup — with $2.7 billion in financial backing from Google — that allows its tens of millions of users to interact with chatbots that have been outfitted with various personalities. With that type of funding and scale, not to mention its popularity with young users, you might assume the service is carefully moderated. Instead, many of the bots on Character.AI are profoundly disturbing —...

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How to Overcome Solastalgia, the Feeling of...
As I sit in my backyard in Abuja, Nigeria, looking out at the open landscape around me, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of loss. The rolling hills that were once vibrant with a rich carpet of wild ferns, daisies, lupines and goldenrods are now dotted with invasive species that have choked out the native flora. The river that once flowed crystal clear, reflecting the azure sky and teeming with darting fish and dragonflies gliding gracefully by,...

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Developing Expertise Improves the Brain’s Ability to...
Think of the last time you concentrated deeply to solve a challenging problem. To solve a math puzzle or determine a chess move, for example, you might have had to screen through multiple strategies and approaches. But little by little, the conundrum would have come into focus. Numbers and symbols may have fallen into place. It might have even felt, at some point, like your problem effortlessly resolved itself on the blackboard of your mind. In recent research, my...

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Insects Played Pivotal Roles in the Evolution...
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Plenty of us only think about insects when we’re trying to keep them out of our homes. But the truth is that our fates and fortunes are totally intertwined with all sorts of bugs. Here to tell us more is Barrett Klein, entomologist and animal behaviorist at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Thanks so much for joining us today. On supporting science journalism If you’re enjoying...

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Four Passengers Die in Burning Tesla After...
“You couldn’t open the doors.” Horrific End Four people were killed in Toronto after the Tesla they were riding in crashed into a pillar and burst into flames. A fifth rider, an unidentified woman in her twenties, narrowly survived the crash after a bystander smashed open a window, allowing her to escape the burning vehicle. According to the heroic bystander’s account, the Tesla Model Y’s electronic doors may have been at fault for why the passengers were trapped inside the...

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Graph-based AI model maps the future of...
Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations — biological tissue and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering at MIT, bridges this gap, uncovering shared patterns of complexity and order. “By blending generative AI with graph-based computational tools,...

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Genetic Discrimination Is Coming for Us All
The news came four years ago, at the end of a casual phone call. Bill’s family had always thought it was a freak coincidence that his father and grandfather both had ALS. But at the end of a catch-up, Bill’s brother revealed that he had a diagnosis too. The familial trend, it turned out, was linked to a genetic mutation. That meant Bill might also be at risk for the disease. An ALS specialist ordered Bill a DNA test....

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