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Apr 27, 2019
FCC approves SpaceX’s plans to fly internet-beaming satellites in a lower orbit
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: internet, satellites
Apr 27, 2019
China Plans to Build a Base near the Moon’s South Pole
Posted by Genevieve Klien in category: space travel
China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in “about 10 years,” according to the state news agency Xinhua.
The China National Space Administration (CSNA) intends to build the research station in the region of the moon’s south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of CSNA, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That’s a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon’s equator between 1969 and 1972.
Details of China’s long-term lunar plans are still sketchy, but CSNA has made significant steps toward lunar exploration. Earlier this year, the Chinese successfully landed the uncrewed Chang’e-4 on the far side of the moon, and have also placed astronauts aboard two temporary space stations, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2. Their space agency also plans to put a larger, more permanent station into orbit in the coming years.
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This super yacht rents for $280,000 per week. Here’s what’s on board… (via Secret Lives of the Super Rich)
Apr 27, 2019
This is Mark Zuckerberg’s first CNBC interview
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: business, futurism
It’s been 15 years since “The Facebook” was launched, and we first had Mark Zuckerberg on-air to discuss the future of the social media business. In 2004, his social networking site had 100,000 users. Today, Facebook has more than 2,000,000,000 users.
Apr 27, 2019
Couples are paying thousands for gender selection
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: futurism
Apr 27, 2019
11 Things People Think Are Awful For Your Diet That Actually Aren’t
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: food
I’m used to the shaming look I get from my peers when I crack open a can of sugar-free Red Bull. The questions – and judgement – never end. “That stuff’ll kill you,” someone said to me the other day, shaking his head. “So many chemicals!” was what I heard last week.
Truth be told, Red Bull (at least the sugar-free kind) isn’t all that terrible for you. Besides having only 10 calories and no sugar, it has only 80 milligrams of caffeine, about a third of the amount in a tall Starbucks drip coffee.
As far as its other ingredients – namely B vitamins and taurine – go, scientific studies have found both to be safe.
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Apr 27, 2019
This live stream plays endless death metal produced by an AI
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: information science, media & arts, robotics/AI
This particular version of Dadabots has been trained on real death metal band Archspire, and Carr and Zukowski have previously trained the neural network on other real bands like Room For A Ghost, Meshuggah, and Krallice. In the past, they’ve released albums made by these algorithms for free on Dadabots’ Bandcamp — but having a 24/7 algorithmic death metal livestream is something new.
Carr and Zukowski published an abstract about their work in 2017, explaining that “most style-specific generative music experiments have explored artists commonly found in harmony textbooks,” meaning mostly classical music, and have largely ignored smaller genres like black metal. In the paper, the duo said the goal was to have the AI “achieve a realistic recreation” of the audio fed into it, but it ultimately gave them something perfectly imperfect. “Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices,” they write. “Rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimera of sound.”
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Apr 27, 2019
Say Hello To Neutron Stars, Your Worst Nightmare
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: cosmology, physics
Yes, black holes get all of the attention. They’re mysterious, they lurk in the shows of interstellar space, they break the laws of known physics, they can trap you forever, they have a cool-sounding and easy-to-understand name. They’ve got great branding.
But some things are even weirder and scarier than black holes. And what makes them weirder and scarier is that they’re weird and scary within the known laws of physics. Which means we understand them. Which means we can explain, in great and gruesome detail, just how awful they are.
Take, for example, the neutron star.
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