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Feb 16, 2022

Virgin Galactic stock jumps 32% as spaceflight ticket sales open with $150,000 deposit

Posted by in category: space travel

Space tourism company Virgin Galactic announced Tuesday that it will open ticket sales to the public for the first time on Wednesday, requiring a $150,000 deposit.

Virgin Galactic ticket prices start at $450,000 each, as the company revealed last year, with three different sales offerings: a single seat purchase, packaged seats for couples, friends or family, or opportunities to book entire flights. The company has said previously that — of the $150,000 deposit — $25,000 is not refundable.

Shares of Virgin Galactic jumped 32% in trading to close at $10.74. The stock has been battered over the past 12 months, dropping 80%, with the company having delayed the beginning of commercial spaceflights to late this year.

Feb 16, 2022

Woman is cured of HIV in huge breakthrough for virus treatment

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, innovation

‘The fact that she’s mixed race, and that she’s a woman, that is really important scientifically and really important in terms of the community impact,’ doctor says.


The new findings were presented on Tuesday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, Colorado.

University of California, San Francisco AIDS expert Dr Steven Deeks said that “the fact that she’s mixed race, and that she’s a woman, that is really important scientifically and really important in terms of the community impact,” The New York Times reported.

Continue reading “Woman is cured of HIV in huge breakthrough for virus treatment” »

Feb 16, 2022

Texas sues Meta for collecting facial recognition data

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Texas is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta (FB (FBK) ), over allegations the social media giant illegally harvested the facial recognition data of tens of millions of state residents for a decade.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Texas’s Harrison County District Court, argues that a now-shuttered Facebook (FB) photo-tagging feature failed to get Texans’ informed consent before gathering their facial recognition data. The feature worked by analyzing faces in photos, including those of non-Facebook users, and recommending that Facebook users tag the people that the tool identified.

Feb 16, 2022

Flytrex releases stats on expanding US drone delivery activity

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI

On-demand drone delivery specialist Flytrex releases booming activity growth for 2021 in three North Carolina communities it serves.


While the development of all kinds of next-generation aviation and UAV activity merits the attention it attracts, the reality is a lot of what’s afoot is still in early-phase operation or testing. That work-in-progress status makes seeing quantified metrics in advanced applications like those released today by drone delivery specialist Flytrex particularly useful in measuring rates of progress.

Continue reading “Flytrex releases stats on expanding US drone delivery activity” »

Feb 16, 2022

The Biggest Galaxy Ever Found Has Just Been Discovered, And It Will Break Your Brain

Posted by in category: space

Astronomers have just found an absolute monster of a galaxy.

Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That’s 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin.

The discovery highlights our poor understanding of these colossi, and what drives their incredible growth. But it could provide a pathway to better understanding, not just of giant radio galaxies, but the intergalactic medium that drifts in the yawning voids of space.

Feb 16, 2022

Dr. Giada Nichole Arney

Posted by in category: space travel

Tue, Feb 15


Dr. Giada Nichole Arney – Co-deputy PI for the DaVinci mission to Venus.

Feb 16, 2022

Mark Zuckerberg wants his employees to be ‘Metamates,’ putting their ‘ship’ and crew before themselves

Posted by in category: futurism

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that a new value is “Meta, Metamates, Me,” a play on words of the naval saying, “ship, shipmates, self.”

Feb 15, 2022

Marvel At The Size Of Giga Texas As Drone Takes 360-Degree Flight

Posted by in categories: drones, sustainability

Located near Austin, Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas is expected to start producing Model Ys for customers before the end of this quarter.

Feb 15, 2022

A new way to shape a material’s atomic structure with ultrafast laser light

Posted by in category: materials

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

Now researchers have discovered how to change the atomic structure of a highly efficient thermoelectric material, tin selenide, with intense pulses of . This result opens a new way to improve thermoelectrics and a host of other materials by controlling their structure, creating materials with dramatic new properties that may not exist in nature.

“For this class of materials that’s extremely important, because their functional properties are associated with their structure,” said Yijing Huang, a Stanford University graduate student who played an important role in the experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “By changing the nature of the light you put in, you can tailor the nature of the material you create.”

Feb 15, 2022

Oakland Tech Company Works to Bridge the Digital Divide Through Virtual Reality

Posted by in category: virtual reality

Former teacher turned tech entrepreneur, Kai Fraizer, creates virtual field trips for children through the use of virtual reality.