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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.

 
Do We Live in a Special Part...
Ever since humans started gazing at the heavens through telescopes, we have discovered, bit by bit, that in celestial terms we’re apparently not so special. Earth was not the center of the universe, it turned out. It wasn’t even the center of the solar system! The solar system, unfortunately, wasn’t the center of the universe either. In fact, there were many star systems fundamentally like it, together making up a galaxy. And, wouldn’t you know, the galaxy wasn’t special...

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January’s Night Sky Notes: The Red Planet
3 min read by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Have you looked up at the night sky this season and noticed a bright object sporting a reddish hue to the left of Orion? This is none other than the planet Mars! January will be an excellent opportunity to spot this planet and some of its details with a medium-sized telescope. Be sure to catch these three events this month. Martian Retrograde Mars entered retrograde (or...

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Mother of OpenAI Whistleblower Alleges He Was...
“Private autopsy doesn’t confirm cause of death stated by police.” Probe the Probe The family of Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old OpenAI whistleblower who was found dead just a month after his New York Times exposé was published, is claiming that the young man was murdered. An account that appears to belong to Balaji’s mother Poornima Ramarao — shortened to “Rao” online — said in a post on X-formerly-Twitter that a private investigator’s probe has led the family to believe...

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Experts Alarmed by Huge Wall at Airport...
“Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall.” Localizer Tragedy In South Korea, a jet quite literally crashed and burned when it hit a wall that was placed at the end of an airport runway, killing 179 passengers. As the BBC reports, the pilot of the Jeju Air plane reported to the control tower at Muan International Airport that the Boeing 787-800 jet had struck a bird and needed to make an emergency...

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OpenAI Admits It Needs Vastly More Money...
Of course it does. Fund and Games The former entirely-nonprofit-company known as OpenAI says it needs a boatload of more cash as it plans to transform its corporate structure to prioritize making money. In an announcement Friday, the ChatGPT maker argued that by creating a for-profit corporation to control its commercial enterprises, it can make the dough it needs to keep up with other leading AI developers. “The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing...

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OpenAI's Latest AI Can Cost More Than...
Brainpower, at an extreme premium. Money to Burn OpenAI’s recently unveiled o3 model is purportedly its most powerful AI yet, but with one big drawback: it costs ungodly sums of money to run, TechCrunch reports. Announced just over a week ago, o3 “reasons” through problems using a technique known as test-time compute — as in, it takes more time to “think” and explore multiple possibilities before spitting out an answer. As such, OpenAI engineers hope that the AI model...

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The MAGA Honeymoon Is Over
Elon Musk spent Christmas Day online, in the thick of a particularly venomous culture war, one that would lead him to later make the un-Christmas-like demand of his critics to “take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face.” Donald Trump had ignited this war by appointing the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan to be his senior AI-policy adviser. Encouraged by the MAGA acolyte and expert troll Laura Loomer, parts of the far-right internet melted down, arguing that...

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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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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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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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An Energetic Stellar Nursery
ESA / Webb, NASA and CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani Day 24 of the 2024 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: an energetic stellar nursery. This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope features the young star cluster NGC 602, surrounded by the varied clouds of a nebula, near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is...

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