Icarus is a blue supergiant, a rare type of star that is larger than the Sun and far more luminous.
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Hubble space telescope
Posted in space
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.
With so much fake news slithering around the web all year, is it still possible to enjoy April Fools’ Day?
Or was April 1 ever that enjoyable?
The day does, though, underline how everyone now has to nourish their skepticism at all times.
A Blockchain For Mars
Posted in bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, finance, space travel
Outside John Snow Pub, arguably one of the best pubs to visit on a rainy November day in Soho, London, I was having a beer with my dear friend Alex, discussing tech and cryptocurrency like we always do. The thing that struck me the most from the conversation that Alex brought up was the technical challenges of Mars to have its own blockchain due to speed of light delays between Earth and Mars. It took me on a little journey of determining what might a blockchain on Mars look like, what are the challenges brought upon by speed of light and other factors, and how to push forward the efforts of colonizing the Red Planet.
The past few years and especially 2017 have brought cryptocurrency to the mainstream. Everyone and their grandmother can be seen at one point asking around “How can one buy bitcoin?” and “Would you buy Ripple?” among other questions. Every day, someone armed with a badly-edited whitepaper (a paper outlining how the technology works) will raise millions of dollars in Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs (the cryptocurrency version of a stock market IPO). By now, one can see that, while 99% of the coins will probably fail due to bad planning, overpromised marketing, or because of their scammy nature, there is no doubt that the future of the cryptocurrency market is bright and it has a lot of room for growth.
The race to Mars is on going. SpaceX still is leading the efforts to allow humans for colonization of the Red Planet, most recently with their two simultaneous Falcon Heavy rocket landings.
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Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone. High-tech systems like the one used by Amazon Go completely automate the checkout process. China, which has its own ambitious e-commerce companies, is emerging as an especially fertile place for these retail experiments.
But the opening of Amazon Go in January was alarming for many retailers, who saw a sudden willingness by Amazon to wield its technology power in new ways. Hundreds of cameras near the ceiling and sensors in the shelves help automatically tally the cookies, chips and soda that shoppers remove and put into their bags. Shoppers’ accounts are charged as they walk out the doors.
Amazon is now looking to expand Go to new areas. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on its expansion plans, but the company has a job posting for a senior real estate manager who will be responsible for “site selection and acquisition” and field tours of “potential locations” for new Go stores.
“Unanimously, there was an element of embarrassment because here is an online retailer showing us how to do brick and mortar, and frankly doing it amazingly well,” said Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, a company that makes inventory management robots that Walmart and others are testing.
“China’s Tiangong-1 space station re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and burnt up over the middle of the South Pacific on Monday, the Chinese space authority said.
The craft re-entered the atmosphere around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time (0015GMT) and the ”vast majority” of it had burnt up upon re-entry, the authority said in a brief statement on its website.
It had said shortly before that it was expected to re-enter off the Brazilian coast in the South Atlantic near the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
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Three years in, what I find most incredible about e-Residency is that it actually works.
Estonia’s quest to become a “digital nation”
To better understand how e-Residency came about, let’s go back almost 30 years, to 1991. Estonia had just won independence from the Soviet Union and was in the early stages of building a market-oriented economy from scratch. At the time, leaders were quick to identify the potential of the internet and open source collaboration tools (interestingly this was less out of principle, and more for the simple reason that they had no money to pay for Microsoft Office). They decided to become the world’s premier “digital nation.” A favorite quote I’ve heard in Estonia: “What do you think of when you hear the word Slovenia? Nothing. Precisely! We don’t want to be Slovenia.”
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High-income Cape Town families have cut their average water use by 80%, according to Martine Visser, director of the Environmental Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, while low-income families cut back by 40%. After city residents were restricted to just over 13 gallons per person a day, any household that blew the limit had a water restriction device attached to its pipes by authorities.
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A swarm of robotic bees, nimble enough to fly across the surface of Mars and explore the Red Planet’s nooks and crannies, is being funded by NASA.
The cyber-insects, dubbed Marsbees, are the size of bumblebees but have giant wings to generate sufficient lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than Earth’s.
Developed by US and Japanese scientists, the bees would be fitted with sensors and wireless communication devices so they could map terrain, take samples, or even look for signs of life, such as methane emissions.
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