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The Cassini spacecraft has snapped one brilliant picture: Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Tethys in alignment above their parent planet’s rings. The picture was snapped on September 24th, as Enceladus drifted in front of Tethys. At the time of the moon transit, Cassini was 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Enceladus and 1.6 million miles…
Welcome to this week’s Reading List, where you’ll find the best science and technology stories on the internet assembled in one delightful package. This week: Housing in Silicon Valley, Mistletoe, restaurant hype, chocolate and shirts. As housing prices in Silicon Valley have risen, poorer residents have been forced out, with nowhere to go. [New Republic]…
A database for the Hello Kitty community sanriotown.com containing 3.3 million accounts has been discovered online in an apparent breach. According to CSO Online, researcher Chris Vickery discovered the breach: The records exposed include first and last names, birthday (encoded, but easily reversible Vickery said), gender, country of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes,…
If you have’t taken a moment to appreciate the fact that hundreds of Earth-orbiting satellites are photographing our planet right now, and that this is a goddamn technological wonder, here’s your opportunity. Meet Open California: a new project unveiled this month by Planet Labs, a team of ex-NASA scientists dedicated to imaging the entire world…
This is really cool: the New York Times has put together a really astounding interactive feature that lets you explore Saturn and its moons through NASA’s probes. You can click and drag the surfaces of a bunch of the moons, including Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus, which shows off their features. [NY…
Hillary Clinton suggested that tech companies work together with the government to create a “a Manhattan-like project” at tonight’s Democratic national debate. The Manhattan Project, if you a need a refresher, was a research and development collaboration between the US, UK, and Canada to develop weapons during World War II, culminating in the development of…
It didn’t take long for the moderators at tonight’s Democratic primary debate to get into the data breach that occurred earlier this week—Bernie Sanders received the first question of the night about it. “Our staff did the wrong thing,” Sanders said. https://gizmodo.com/a-quick-guide-to-the-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-cam-1748890290 Before apologizing, Sanders emphasized that his campaign had also discovered Clinton campaign data…
The informally-named Holuhraun volcano in Iceland now formally bears the same name, making fans of naming it after dragons, witches, or internet service providers sob furiously. Holuhraun is part of the Bárðarbunga volcanic field. A swarm of earthquakes in August 2014 triggered an increase in monitoring. The gentle fissure eruption was overall quite low-key, with…
A data security glitch led to a Democratic party squabble this week, complete with a lawsuit, and accusations of spying and sabotage hurled between campaigns. I didn’t know it was possible to make Bernie Sanders more ornery, but here we are! Here’s what you need to know about the conflict, and why voter data played…
In factories, many simple, repetitive tasks have already been taken over by machines. But as we bring industrial robots into unpredictable, interactive environments, we’re going to need better ways to communicate with them. That’s why engineer and designer Madeline Gannon developed Quipt, a gesture-based control software that helps industrial robots interact more fluidly with their…
From Rosetta’s ongoing love affair with a comet and the discovery of a pentaquark, to controversial breakthroughs like gene-editing of human embryos and a possible new species of homo sapiens, these were the science stories everyone was talking about in 2015. Rosetta and Its Potato-Shaped Comet The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to explore Comet…
The science of rainbows: it’s something we’re all taught in grade school. Airborne water droplets act like little prisms, bending and splitting light. Mix enough water and sunshine, and you get a brilliant bow of color. The reality is quite a bit more complicated. Some rainbows have a second, inverted bow, caused by the reflection…
After a successful static fire engine test yesterday, SpaceX is now planning to launch its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday. The launch from Cape Canaveral is timed for 8:29 p.m. EST. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!
You’ve probably watched enough Animal Planet to know that humpback whales communicate using clicks and whistles. But put on a pair of headphones and listen to the video above. Beneath the shrill chatter we’ve all heard before, there’s a much lower-pitched tone, eerily reminiscent of a human heartbeat. A touch above the limit of human…
If you thought the US government’s ability to spy on its citizens had languished of late, think again. Yesterday, Congress and President Obama approved the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a measure that lets private companies turn over consumers’ personal data to Homeland Security, as long as that data meets some broad and vague criteria…
It’s always a good day when you get your stolen, $230,000 Tyrannosaurus skull back. That was Mongolia’s lucky break this week, after US attorney Preet Bharara filed a civil forfeiture complaint regarding a certain Tyrannosaurus bataar skull that entered the United States unlawfully in 2006 and was sold for $230,000 (plus a buyer’s premium of…
The clever engineers at Google have littered the Internet with Star Wars Easter Eggs this week. My personal favorite? Googling “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” brings up a text crawl page of results. Let us know what other Star Wars goodies you’ve discovered!
Earlier this year, the parent company of Anheuser-Busch, AB InBev, started snatching up small craft breweries all across the country. In fact, InBev bought another one just yesterday, the same day the Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate announced the redesign of its own flagship light beer, Bud Light. Welcome to Happy Hour. Substance abuse for nerds. First, lest…
Particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti has become the first woman to head CERN, the organization based in Switzerland that is home to the Large Hadron Collider. She succeeds outgoing director-general Rolf Heuer, who oversaw the laboratory’s operations for the last seven years. Previously, Gianotti headed the ATLAS collaboration, one of two teams responsible for the discovery…
On Monday, the FAA will launch its online registry for drone operators with the aim of collecting personal information from the owners of these unmanned aircraft. But according to a report from Forbes, all those names and addresses will eventually be publicly available. Which seems… kinda scary? Over at Forbes, John Goglia says he’s been…
