The Mars rover Perseverance was the subject of a new NASA briefing Thursday. CNET describes it as a celebration of this year’s discovery of organic matter — in June NASA for the first time measured the total amount of organic carbon in Martian rocks — and a celebration of rock Read more…
A half century after founding the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, the eccentric rock climber who became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given the company away. Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have Read more…
There’s a new text-to-image AI in town. With ERNIE-ViLG, a new AI developed by the Chinese tech company Baidu, you can generate images that capture the cultural specificity of China. It also makes better anime art than DALL-E 2 or other Western image-making AIs. But there are many things — Read more…
On Sept. 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will slam headfirst into a small asteroid in the name of planetary defense. “[S]cientists hope that should a dangerous asteroid threaten the planet in the future, a mission like DART could avert the disaster,” reports Space.com. From the report: The Read more…
“Scientists have uncovered how air pollution causes lung cancer,” reports the Guardian, “in groundbreaking research that promises to rewrite our understanding of the disease.” The BBC is calling it “a discovery that completely transforms our understanding of how tumours arise.” The team at the Francis Crick Institute in London showed Read more…
Climate change confronted African farmers with back-to-back seasons of drought. The director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation says that’s one reason they’ve fallen short of their goals of helping the continent achieve a “green revolution”. But while the foundation contributed much of $1 billion spent to date on Read more…
“A vital offsite electricity supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been destroyed by shelling,” the Guardian reported Friday, “and there is little likelihood a reliable supply will be re-established, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog chief has said.” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Read more…