Citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have made a groundbreaking discovery, finding an object moving at such high speed that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object has a mass similar to or less than that of a small star. The discovery was … Read more
In the 1950s, Kutol’s wallpaper cleaner business was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the rise of natural gas as a primary heating source, resulting in cleaner walls and lower sales. However, Kay Zufall, Joseph McVicker’s sister-in-law, suggested rebranding the product as a kids’ toy, which became Play-Doh. This pivot not only saved the … Read more
Researchers at the University of Basel have discovered that memories are stored in multiple parallel copies, which are preserved for varying durations, modified to certain degrees, and sometimes deleted over time. This finding sheds light on how the brain regulates memory dynamics and adaptability. The study, published in Science, reveals that a single event is … Read more
Google has made its latest AI text-to-image generator, Imagen 3, available to users in the US. The tool can generate high-quality images with detailed features, rich lighting, and fewer artifacts compared to previous models. Users can access Imagen 3 on Google’s AI Test Kitchen and edit the generated images by describing specific changes. The tool … Read more
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) has sent its final image, marking the end of a 10-year mission searching for and monitoring potential threats to Earth. The mission began as WISE in December 2009, scanning the entire sky in infrared with unprecedented sensitivity. Although the coolant ran out after seven months, NEOWISE was … Read more
SolarWinds is urging its customers to patch a critical vulnerability in its Web Help Desk platform, tracked as CVE-2024-28986. The vulnerability, a Java deserialization remote code execution (RCE) flaw, has a high-severity CVSS score of 9.8 and could allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine if exploited. Left unpatched, the vulnerability will … Read more
Lenovo, one of the world’s largest PC manufacturers, has joined the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) initiative established by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). While this may seem ordinary, it has raised concerns over Lenovo’s Chinese origins and potential ties to the Chinese government. As a publicly-listed company with dual headquarters in … Read more
The European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has captured stunning images of a salty, purple wave on Mars’ surface, dubbed the “purple mermaid.” This natural anomaly is located in Terra Sirenum, a region known for its dried-up riverbeds. The “mermaid” is actually chloride salt deposits, detected by TGO’s Color and Stereo Surface Imaging … Read more
A Russian court has sentenced a Russian-american woman, Ksenia Karelina, to 12 years in prison for treason after she made a donation of over $50 to a US-based charity supporting Ukraine. The verdict was announced Thursday following a closed-door trial at the Sverdlovsk regional court. Karelina had pleaded guilty to the charges and was detained … Read more
Anthropic has introduced prompt caching on its API, allowing developers to avoid repeating prompts by remembering context between API calls. The feature is available in public beta on Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku, with support for the largest model, Opus, coming soon. Prompt caching lets users keep frequently used contexts in their sessions, … Read more