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Ground control to major Jeff (Bezos).


Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, just announced a new offering aimed at satellite operators.

The news: At its annual re: Invent conference in Seattle this week, the web giant unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon’s well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud.

Ground control … According to an AWS blog post, big businesses with a large number of satellites typically build and operate their own ground stations at a cost of a million dollars or more for each one. Smaller companies that can’t afford their own often end up signing inflexible, long-term contracts with third parties that own and run such stations.

Cryoablation — the destruction of cancer cells through freezing — shows early indications of effectiveness in treating women with low-risk breast cancers, according to research being presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said that over the four years of the study, there has only been one case of cancer recurrence out of 180 patients.

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Unicorns are real (though not as colorful as we like to imagine), and they lived at the same time as modern humans.

Ancient rhino species Elasmotherium sibiricum, known as the Siberian unicorn, was long thought to have died some 200,000 to 100,000 years ago.

Improved fossil dating, however, now suggests it survived until at least 39,000 years ago, likely sharing Eurasia with modern humans and Neanderthals.

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