What time is it on the moon? Well, right now, that’s somewhat a matter of interpretation. But humanity is going to need to get a lot more specific if it intends to permanently set up shop there. In preparation, NASA is aligning its clocks in preparation for the upcoming Artemis missions. On Tuesday, the White […]
Why chickens probably crossed the Silk Road
The mystery of what came first, the chicken or the egg has generally been solved–it was the egg. However, some questions remain about how well chickens were dispersed in the ancient world, as some wild bird bones have been misidentified as domesticated chicken bones. With the help of new technology, a recent analysis of eggshell […]
Gmail debuted on April Fool’s Day 20 years ago. The joke is still on us.
A completely free email service offering 1 GB of storage, integrated search capabilities, and automatic message threading? Too good to be true. At least, that’s what many people thought 20 years ago today, when Google announced Gmail’s debut. To be fair, it’s easy to see why some AP News readers wrote letters claiming the outlet’s […]
Drones offer a glimpse inside Fukushima nuclear reactor 13 years after disaster
A team of miniature drones recently entered the radioactive ruins of one of Fukushima’s nuclear reactors in an attempt to help Japanese officials continue planning their decades’ long cleanup effort. But if the images released earlier this week didn’t fully underscore just how much work is still needed, new footage from the tiny robots’ excursion […]
‘Cyberflasher’ sent to prison for the first time in England
England’s court system has sentenced a “cyberflasher” to over a year in prison—a first for the country after its Online Safety Act went into effect on January 31. The 39-year-old culprit—already a registered sex offender—recently admitted in court to sending explicit photos of himself in February to both an adult woman and teenage girl via […]
For nearly $500,000, you too can have dinner in the ‘SpaceBalloon’ above Earth
A luxury space tourism company called SpaceVIP is currently taking reservations for its Stratospheric Dining Experience. For $495,000, six participants will enjoy a Michelin Star restaurant-catered jaunt into suborbit, sans rockets or zero gravity. Scheduled to launch as early as 2025 from Florida’s Space Coast, the travelers will “gently lift” into the sky aboard the […]
Crypto scammers flooded YouTube with sham SpaceX Starship livestreams
YouTube is flooded with fake livestream accounts airing looped videos of “Elon Musk” supposedly promoting crypto schemes. Although not the first time to happen, the website’s layout, verification qualifications, and search results page continue to make it difficult to separate legitimate sources from the con artists attempting to leverage today’s Starship test launch—its most successful […]
ChatGPT’s accuracy has gotten worse, study shows
A pair of new studies presents a problematic dichotomy for OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model programs. Although its popular generative text responses are now all-but-indistinguishable from human answers according to multiple studies and sources, GPT appears to be getting less accurate over time. Perhaps more distressingly, no one has a good explanation for the troubling […]
‘Alien’ signal was likely a very big truck
There’s no doubt an extremely bright fireball careened through the atmosphere north of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014. It’s also true that divers recovered materials at the bottom of the ocean last year near where many experts believed the object landed—and that prominent Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb theorized some of these metallic spherules […]
Human have been eating hazelnuts for at least 6,000 years
Humans’ early ancestors in Europe may not have spent their days eating Nutella on toasted bread, but hazelnuts were a valuable resource thousands of years ago. The way this vital source of energy was cultivated and harvested evolved as the landscape changed as giant glaciers retreated. Isotope analysis of the carbon in archaeological traces of […]