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May 11, 2023

Amazon offers US shoppers $10 to pick up purchases as it targets delivery costs

Posted by in category: habitats

LOS ANGELES, May 8 (Reuters) — Amazon.com (AMZN.O) is offering U.S. customers $10 to pick up a purchase rather than have it shipped to a home address, as the e-commerce giant joins other retailers in racing to slash costs for home delivery and returns amid slack consumer demand.

Amazon said the promotion is not a cost-cutting measure and that it applies to customers who have never used Amazon Pickup or have not used that service in the last 12 months.

“We offer customers a variety of ways to get their packages, inclusive of delivery and pickup options. The $10 Amazon Pickup promotion isn’t new,” the company said in a statement. Amazon did not say for how long this or similar pickup promotions have been in use.

May 11, 2023

SpaceX and Vast’s private space station could launch in 2025

Posted by in category: space travel

As the International Space Station nears the end of its life, SpaceX and Los Angeles-based startup Vast have unveiled a plan to launch the first commercial space station.

SpaceX will use a Falcon 9 rocket to send the station’s main module, Haven-1, into low-Earth orbit as early as August 2025.

May 11, 2023

How Apple catches leakers

Posted by in category: futurism

Yesterday saw @analyst941 delete his Twitter account, claiming that he had been forced to do so after Apple carried out a “multi-step sting” operation. Whether this is true, or just a face-saving story for getting things wrong, it is broadly consistent with what we know about how Apple catches leakers.

Apple has so many methods of identifying leakers – some of them incredibly subtle – that we and others have to be extremely careful in order to protect our sources …

With most tech companies, secrecy is a way to stop competitors beating them to the punch. If they know or suspect other companies are working on the same idea, they want to be first to market, so don’t want anyone else to find out their plans, or how close they are to launching.

May 11, 2023

Gmail’s new AI feature will soon write entire emails for you, Google announces

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Google announced a new Gmail feature that will write entire emails for you. Say goodbye to busywork and pointless messages.

May 11, 2023

Researchers find new approach to explore earliest universe dynamics with gravitational waves

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Researchers have discovered a new generic production mechanism of gravitational waves generated by a phenomenon known as oscillons, which can originate in many cosmological theories from the fragmentation into solitonic “lumps” of the inflaton field that drove the early universe’s rapid expansion, reports a new study published in Physical Review Letters on May 2.

The results have set the stage for revealing exciting novel insights about the ’s earliest moments.

The inflationary period, which occurred just after the Big Bang, is believed to have caused the universe to expand exponentially. In many cosmological theories, the rapid expansion period is followed by the formation of oscillons.

May 11, 2023

Elon Musk Pitches Twitter Show To Don Lemon—After Tucker Carlson Launches Own Show On Platform

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Lemon, who was fired from CNN the same day Carlson was axed by Fox, hadn’t responded to the offer as of Wednesday afternoon.

May 11, 2023

These Creatures Have Superpower That Allows Them to Survive Fire

Posted by in category: genetics

Year 2022 These animals have fire resistance which could allow humans to essentially be more fire resistant. I still believe the best gene hack would be a tardigrade essentially because they gave so many survival genes.


Echidnas are among the last mammals on Earth to lay eggs, but that’s not what makes them so miraculous.

May 11, 2023

Portable imaging system targets eye diseases, pondering the mysteries of dark matter

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features interviews with the chief executive of a.

May 11, 2023

James Webb gets stunning view of a far-off planetary system

Posted by in category: space

As well as helping us learn about the earliest galaxies in the universe and taking stunning images of parts of our solar system, the James Webb Space Telescope is also letting astronomers learn more about how planets form. Although we know that planets form from disks of dust and gas around stars called protoplanetary disks, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this process, particularly about how forming planets affect the rest of the system around them.

So it was an exciting moment when astronomers recently used Webb to study an asteroid belt in another planetary system and were able to peer into the rings of dust around the star to see where planets were forming.

Webb was used to study to study the Fomalhaut star, located in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, which is forming planets in a manner that is similar to what happened in our solar system around 4 billion years ago. The forming planets themselves aren’t visible, but the researchers could infer their presence based on the gaps in the dusty disk. They saw three concentric disks stretching a total of 14 billion miles from the star.

May 11, 2023

Google is giving its dominant search engine an artificial-intelligence makeover

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to infuse its dominant search engine with more advanced artificial-intelligence technology, a drive that’s in response to one of the biggest threats to its long-established position as the internet’s main gateway.

The gradual shift in how Google’s search engine runs is rolling out three months after Microsoft’s Bing search engine started to tap into technology similar to that which powers the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, which has created one of Silicon Valley’s biggest buzzes since Apple released the first iPhone 16 years ago.

Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., already has been testing its own conversational chatbot called Bard. That product, powered by technology called generative AI that also fuels ChatGPT, has only been available to people accepted from a waitlist. But Google announced Wednesday that Bard will be available to all comers in more than 180 countries and more languages beyond English.