In the past five years, reports of staggering insect declines have stoked anxiety and debate concerning the fate of the “little things that run the world,” as the late biologist E. O. Wilson once called them. As for the how and why of these declines, the prime culprits are habitat Read more…
Texas has started requiring new large-scale cryptocurrency miners to seek permission to connect to the state’s power grid in anticipation of a flood of requests expected to drive up electricity demand. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is requiring utilities to submit studies on the impact of miners and other Read more…
Blocking access to internet resources requires lots of hardware but due to sanctions, there are fears in Russia that a breakdown in systems operations may be just months away. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than a month. It isn’t going to plan. In parallel with Read more…
A major Wyze Cam security flaw easily allowed hackers to access stored video, and it went unfixed for almost three years after the company was alerted to it, says a new report today. Additionally, it appears that Wyze Cam v1 — which went on sale back in 2017 — will Read more…
More than two decades after the draft human genome was celebrated as a scientific milestone, scientists have finally finished the job. The first complete, gap-free sequence of a human genome has been published in an advance expected to pave the way for new insights into health and what makes our Read more…
A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can’t help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes Read more…
Walgreens Boots Alliance is opening robot-powered micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S. to fill customers’ prescriptions as the role of stores and pharmacists change. Inside of a large facility in the Dallas area, they fill thousands of prescriptions for customers who take medications to manage or treat high blood pressure, diabetes Read more…