NASA JPL announced a cosmic milestone with the confirmed discovery of over 5,000 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system). A new batch of 65 planets joined the NASA Exoplanet Archive on Monday, triggering a celebratory mood. “It’s not just a number,” Exoplanet Archive science lead Jessie Christiansen said in Read more…
According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. “is nearer to collapsing than it appears.” He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it’s clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn’t have the student debt crisis. Cancelling Read more…
The Washington Post looks at what happened after Starlink activated its satellite-based internet service to help Ukraine: Ukraine has already received thousands of antennas from Musk’s companies and European allies, which has proved “very effective,” Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with The Washington Post Read more…
There are already several startups focused on replacing long-haul freight trucks with self-driving trucks, reports Bloomberg — and the potential is huge. (Alternate URLs here and here.) The short trip from a factory or distribution center to an interstate is usually far more complicated than the next several hundred miles. Read more…
“The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal,” reports the Washington Post. “The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.” “This event is completely Read more…
“Researchers testing repurposed drugs against Covid-19 found that ivermectin didn’t reduce hospital admissions, in the largest trial yet of the effect of the antiparasitic on the disease driving the pandemic,” reports the Wall Street Journal: Public-health authorities and researchers have for months said the drug hasn’t shown any benefit in Read more…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turns up in Mike Melanson’s column “This Week in Programming”: While the Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) definition of open source software is quite clear on the matter — there must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor” — the Read more…