Lifeboat Foundation

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.

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” »

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.

Tue, Feb 15

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

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.”

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

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 laser light. 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.”

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

With marine debris a growing concern, innovators are getting creative — designing autonomous boats that act as on-the-water trash-eating machines.

The latest development comes from the Danish company RanMarine Technology. They’ve created an aquadrone called WasteShark that sucks up waste from the water much like a Roomba — consuming up to 200 liters of garbage in a single ride.