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According to Russian media reports, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko is set to make history on Sunday as he will surpass the world record for the longest cumulative time spent in space.

Kononenko, who is currently on his fifth space mission, will clock a total of 878 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes, and 49 seconds in orbit by 11:30:08 Moscow time (0830:08 GMT), breaking the previous record held by his fellow countryman Gennady Padalka, who retired in 2017.

The 59-year-old Kononenko, also the commander of the Roscosmos cosmonaut corps, will extend his record until September 23, when he is scheduled to return to Earth after completing his current expedition. By then, he will have spent 1,110 days in space, equivalent to nearly 2 1/2 years.

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Facebook turns 20 years old today, and if you don’t like it, I’m sure you have your reasons.

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on February 4, 2004, in his Harvard dorm room. Thomas Lake says there are valid reasons today to dislike Facebook, but for him and many others it’s a living journal of 21st-century life — a virtual museum that otherwise would not exist.

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Recent technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated drones and cameras, have opened exciting new possibilities for cinematography. Most notably, film directors can now shoot scenes from a wide range of angles that were previously inaccessible and in far higher resolution.

Researchers at University of Zaragoza and Stanford University recently developed CineMPC, a new cinematographic system that relies on a fully autonomous drone that carries a cinematographic to film multiple targets autonomously, while following a director’s instructions. The platform modulates various drone and camera parameters to satisfy these instructions. The team’s innovative system, outlined in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, could bring a wave of innovation to the and other sectors that can benefit from high-quality video footage.

“Existing solutions for autonomous drone cinematography revealed a common oversight, namely, none provided over camera intrinsic parameters (i.e., , aperture, focus distance),” Pablo Pueyo Ramon, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

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A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

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Scientists have discovered a super-Earth, named TOI-715 b, located within the “conservative” habitable zone of a nearby red dwarf star.

This revelation has ignited the astronomical community with the potential of uncovering conditions that are suitable for life a mere 137 light-years from Earth.

The research, led by Georgina Dransfield at the University of Birmingham, represents a significant step forward in our quest to understand the conditions under which life might arise.

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The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said successful tests would allow the drones to undertake research such as surveying marine ecosystems and studying glaciers, while reducing CO2 emissions by approximately 90%.

The Windracers Ultra UAV (uncrewed aerial vehicle) is a twin-engine, 10-metre aircraft that can carry up to 100kg of cargo or sensors for distances of 1,000km and does not require a human pilot to take off, fly or land as it is equipped with a sophisticated autopilot system.

Unlike piloted Twin Otter aircraft, which are costly to operate and face logistical challenges in the extreme environment, the BAS said the “groundbreaking” unmanned drones are safer and “could enable dramatic increases in flight time”

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