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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.

 
Final Four Showdowns: March Brandness Narrows the...
.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); } This post was created in partnership with Nativo. Eight brands entered Round Two, but only four earned their spot in the Final Round of the Brand Madness competition, powered by Nativo’s Brand Rank. Over 1,000 U.S. shoppers weighed in to determine...

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Oracle’s TikTok Bid Is Complicated by Culture...
.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); } Oracle is considered the frontrunner to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations in a high-stakes race to take control of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms before the government’s deadline to sell or ban the app by April 5. According...

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Inside Maye Musk’s Cozy Relationship With China
In January, with a nationwide ban on TikTok looming, hundreds of thousands of people in the US began flocking to another Chinese social media app called RedNote—only to find that Maye Musk, Elon Musk’s mother, had already established a relatively large audience on the platform. Maye, who has become a celebrity in her own right in China over the past few years, had over 600,000 followers on RedNote when the flood of Americans arrived. “I need to find the...

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Nielsen and Acxiom Team Up to Bring Increased...
.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); } Today, Nielsen and Acxiom announced a new partnership that will sync Acxiom Real ID with the Nielsen ID system, enabling agencies and marketers to seamlessly leverage their Real ID audiences in Nielsen One for cross-platform and data-driven linear media. Through the collaboration,...

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Who Will Build the Next Giant Particle...
On the Swiss–French border, at the headquarters of the European laboratory CERN, a battle is under way for the future of particle physics. CERN’s leaders want to build the biggest machine on the planet here: an enormous particle accelerator that would open in 2070 and would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the lab’s current flagship facility. Everything about the plan is unprecedented. The Future Circular Collider (FCC), as it’s called, would sit in a tunnel 91 kilometres in...

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Rising Acceptance of Political Violence Promises Nothing...
March 27, 2025 4 min read Left-leaning Americans at peaceful demonstrations are becoming more likely to believe that political violence will be necessary to save America By Dana R. Fisher A participant holds a “We are not ok” sign during the “Shut Down the Coup” protest on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol on March 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images Since Donald Trump took office on January 20, his second administration has declared war on...

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Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All...
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” With a sly grin that I’d soon come to recognize, Paul Ginsparg quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather. Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell University and a certified MacArthur genius, may have little in common with Al Pacino’s mafia don, but both are united by the feeling that they were denied a graceful exit from what they’ve built. Nearly 35 years ago, Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital...

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Professor Emeritus Earle Lomon, nuclear theorist, dies...
Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.   A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement. His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were...

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How Extropic Plans to Unseat Nvidia
Extropic is not a normal startup. But then, these are hardly normal times. The company is developing a radical new kind of computer chip that harnesses the thermodynamic fluctuations that naturally occur within electronic circuits—and which are normally a headache for engineers—using them to perform highly efficient calculations with probabilities. This chip might well find some takers as AI giants search for ever more computer power to build AI models that perform artificial reasoning, and as we all worry...

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MIT Maritime Consortium sets sail
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming...

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I Went Undercover in Crypto’s Answer to...
I’m crouching in a seedy alleyway off Trafalgar Square, London, with my MacBook teetering on one knee. The heady reek of piss fills my nostrils. I’m hurriedly punching emoji into a dialog box in my web browser, which is prompting me for the answer to a puzzle. It’s day nine of Crypto: The Game. CTG is an elimination game that takes place over 10 days, almost exclusively online. It’s a sort of mutant conglomeration of ideas from Survivor, Squid...

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The Best Programming Language for the End...
Once I started thinking about the apocalypse, it was hard to stop. An unsettling encounter with the doomsday clock that hangs over New York City’s Union Square got me frantically searching WikiHow for survival tips. I soon found my way to the doomsday writings of a Canadian programmer named Virgil Dupras. He believes the collapse of civilization is imminent and that it will come in two waves. First, global supply chains will crumble. Modern technology relies on a delicate web...

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NASA Invites Media to Learn About Artemis...
NASA and the Department of Defense will host a media event on the recovery operations that will bring the Artemis II astronauts and the agency’s Orion spacecraft home at the conclusion of next year’s mission around the Moon. The in-person event will take place at 3 p.m. PDT on Monday, March 31, at Naval Base San Diego in California. A team of NASA and Department of Defense personnel are at sea in the Pacific Ocean where splashdown will take...

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Databricks Has a Trick That Lets AI...
Databricks, a company that helps big businesses build custom artificial intelligence models, has developed a machine-learning trick that can boost the performance of an AI model without the need for clean labeled data. Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, spent the past year talking to customers about the key challenges they face in getting AI to work reliably. The problem, Frankle says, is dirty data. ”Everybody has some data, and has an idea of what they want to...

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Women’s swimming and diving wins first NCAA...
The MIT women’s swimming and diving team won the program’s first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.    MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and...

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