It was meant to be the first-ever orbital mission to take off from the United Kingdom — carried by a Virgin Orbit rocket launched from a private jumbo jet Monday over the Atlantic ocean, according to the BBC. But instead “at an altitude of approximately 180km (111 miles), the upper Read more…
“Say hello to ionocaloric cooling: a new way to lower the mercury that has the potential to replace existing methods with something that is safer and friendlier to the planet,” writes ScienceAlert. It’s all based on the idea that melting absorbs heats. “The landscape of refrigerants is an unsolved problem,” Read more…
According to CNN, the Federal Aviation Administration system outage on Wednesday has been traced to a corrupt file. In a statement late Wednesday, the FAA said it was continuing to investigate the outage and “take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.” “Our preliminary work Read more…
An investigation recently revealed how images of a minor and a tester on the toilet ended up on social media. iRobot said it had consent to collect this kind of data from inside homes — but participants say otherwise. When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December Read more…
On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything — and do it in a way that attempts to Read more…
Britain’s attempt to become the first European nation to launch satellites into space ended in bitter disappointment early on Tuesday when Virgin Orbit said its rocket had suffered an anomaly that prevented it from reaching orbit. The “horizontal launch” mission had left from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest Read more…
In a move that could change how more than a billion people write documents, presentations and emails, Microsoft has discussed incorporating OpenAI’s artificial intelligence in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps so customers can automatically generate text using simple prompts, The Information reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of Read more…