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Astronomers find star with three super-Earths

Astronomers said Thursday they had found a planetary system with three super-Earths orbiting a bright, dwarf star — one of them likely a volcanic world of molten rock. The four-planet system had been hiding out in the M-shaped, northern hemisphere constellation Cassiopeia, “just” 21 light years from Earth, a team reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Super-Earths have a mass higher than Earth’s but are lighter than gas giants like Neptune, Saturn or Jupiter. They can be made of gas, rock, or both.

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The unintended consequences of rationality — By Leah Burrows | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

“The idea of rationality is a shared construct between AI and economics. When we frame questions in AI, we say: what are the objectives, what should be optimized and what do we know about the world we’re in? The AI/economics interface has become quite fertile because there is a shared language of utility, probability, and reasoning about others.”

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Google’s Internet balloons will soon connect all of Sri Lanka with Wi-Fi

It will be the first country in the world to have universal Internet coverage.


Google has teamed up with the Sri Lankan government to deliver broadband Internet to every region of the island nation, making it the first country in the world to have universal Internet coverage. The initiative is part of Google’s Project Loon, which aims to provide cheap or free Wi-Fi to people in remote rural areas around the world via a fleet of huge helium-filled balloons floating way up in the stratosphere.

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