Day: January 16, 2021

Watch NASA Test-Fire Its SLS Mega-Rocket Engines

“The date is set,” NASA tweeted yesterday, thanking its partners Boeing Space and Aerojet Rocketdyne for Saturday’s “hot fire” test of the SLS’s core stage. “One of NASA’s main goals for 2021 is to launch Artemis I, an uncrewed moon mission meant to show the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket can safely send…


Nissan’s NV350 Office Pod lets you work anywhere — seriously – Roadshow

Want to work in the forest away from a cubicle? No problem. …read more Source:: CNet


Interference Patterns Harnessed for Optical Logic Gates

The basics of digital logic are pretty easy to master, and figuring out how the ones and zeroes flow through various kinds of gates is often an interesting exercise. Taking things down a level and breaking the component AND, OR, and NOR gates down to their underlying analog circuits adds some complexity, but the flow…


Thousands of Users Unknowingly Joined Signal Because of a 12-Year-Old’s App

“At least 10,000 Signal users can be attributed to a 12-year-old kid in India who created a somewhat popular clone of the encrypted chat app,” reports Motherboard: Dev Sharma, a Signal user from Melbourne, Australia, found the Signal clone when he encountered an unusual thing: Signal displayed a pop-up showing that their friend had just…


Martin Luther King Jr. Day: Movies, TV shows and books on systemic racism – CNET

Ahead of the federal holiday Monday celebrating the birthday of the civil rights leader, here are materials to help educate all ages about the fight for racial justice. …read more Source:: CNet


Google Employees Try Baking Recipes Created by AI

“Behold the cakie: It has the crispiness of a cookie and the, well, ‘cakiness’ of a cake.” So says a triumphant blog post by Google Cloud’s developer advocate and an applied AI Engineer for Google’s Cloud AI. “We also made breakies, which were more like fluffy cookies, almost the consistency of a muffin” (or bread)….


DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time

DuckDuckGo reaches historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram saw a huge influx of new users. …read more Source:: ZDNet


Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They’re Ultra-Efficient

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes IEEE Spectrum: Computers use a staggering amount of energy today. According to one recent estimate, data centers alone consume two percent of the world’s electricity, a figure that’s expected to climb to eight percent by the end of the decade. To buck that trend, though, perhaps the microprocessor, at the…


USB-C Programmable Power Supply For Any Project

USB-C Power Delivery 3.0 (PD3.0) introduces a new Programmable Power Supply (PPS) mode, which allows a device to negotiate any supply of 3.3-21 V in 20 mV steps, and up to 5 A of current in 50 mA steps. To make use of this new standard, [Ryan Ma] create the PD Micro, an Arduino-compatible development…


Those WandaVision retro commercials hint at dark things to come – CNET

That Stark Industries toaster and Hydra-labeled watch suggest a dark side beneath the suburban sunshine for Marvel’s Wanda and Vision. …read more Source:: CNet