Tonight is a fantastic night to hunt for Sirius in the evening sky. The night sky’s brightest star (at magnitude –1.5) appears due south and at its highest position around 9 p.m. local time tonight. It then lies about one-third of the way from the horizon to the zenith from mid-northern latitudes. (The farther south you live, the higher it appears.)

The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse. OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discu...

Google today announced that it will invest $13 billion in data centers and offices across the U.S. in 2019. That’s up from $9 billion in investments last year. Many of these investments will go to states like Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia, where Google plans new or expanded data centers. Though like most years, it’ll also continue to expand many of its existing offices in Seattle, Chicago and New York, as well as in its home state of California.

A huge student protest movement led almost exclusively by teenage girls and young women is sweeping Europe, and it's on the brink of breaking through in the US. So far this year, tens of thousands of high school–age students in Belgium, Germany, and Sweden have boycotted class and protested against climate change. The loose movement’s inspiration, a 16-year-old girl who began a solitary picket last year outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm, has compared the protests to the March ...

Every year, NASA recognizes astronauts who lost their lives in the pursuit of spaceflight with an official Day of Remembrance. This year, it’s celebrated February 7. And NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Another wreath-laying ceremony will also happen at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Mirror Memorial. Both ceremonies will also include observances for NASA’s lost explorers.

Opinion: Cryptocurrencies are useless. Blockchain solutions are frequently much worse than the systems they replace. Here's why. In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain t...

Magnetic north has never sat still. In the last hundred years or so, the direction in which our compasses steadfastly point has lumbered ever northward, driven by Earth's churning liquid outer core some 1,800 miles beneath the surface. Yet in recent years, scientists noticed something unusual: Magnetic north's routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why.

Four years have passed since the Islamic State group's fighters were run out of Kobani, a strategic city on the Syrian-Turkish border, but the militants' violent and extreme interpretation of Islam has left some questioning their faith. A new church is attracting converts. It is the first local Christian place of worship for decades.

A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access the the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it’s tied up in disputes with third parties. The dramatic misstep was reported in a sworn affidavit that was obtained by CoinDesk.

Snopes has pulled out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook. The storied myth-debunking site was one of dozens of groups the social network enlisted to help combat misinformation after the 2016 election. According to Snopes, Facebook paid it $100,000 in 2017 for this work. Snopes is not the only factchecking group to pull out, either. An AP spokesperson confirmed to The Atlantic that the “AP is not currently doing fact-checking work for Facebook,” although they remain in “ongoing ...

Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, explains why some old assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of our evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals persist today. But a body of evidence is increasingly forcing us to re-visit these old ideas. A paper out this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution reports the early arrival of modern humans to south-western Iberia around 44,000 years ago.

Facebook is making yet another attempt to win back teens to its platform — this time, with memes, TechCrunch reported Friday. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch it is privately testing a hub for memes on its platform, called LOL. Facebook said a small number of U.S. users are testing the app, which replaces its Watch section for videos in the app. Facebook told TechCrunch it does not have plans to roll out LOL in Watch and is still determining whether it will become a feature in Facebook's ...

When Freddie Mercury made his final on-camera appearance in the music video for “These Are the Days of Our Lives” in 1991, AIDS had left him gaunt and frail. The Queen frontman could barely walk because of open wounds on his foot, part of which would later be amputated. But as Austrian filmmaker Rudi Dolezal, who shot the video, recalls, he still insisted on doing his job.

An under-development drone powered by a hydrogen fuel cell beat its hour-long flying time target in recent testing, staying aloft for over 70 minutes with a 5 kg payload. Dubbed Project Rachel, the British drone is a collaboration between engineering firm Productiv, UAS videography company BATCAM and fuel cell provider Intelligent Energy, with support from Innovate U.K., a group set up with British government money to stimulate growth by providing grants to business ventures with new ideas.

Dahr Jamail, staff writer at Truthout, has been writing about the global emergency of climate change for nearly a decade. In his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Destruction, which is being released today, Jamail shares his firsthand accounts of returning to beloved spaces in the natural world. He observes the drastic ways in which they’ve been destroyed due to humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels, and mourns over how many of them ...

The couple is tying the knot after a whirlwind romance that began last June. After a whirlwind romance, Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger are engaged to be married. Pratt, 39, revealed that Schwarzenegger, 29, accepted his proposal on his Instagram. "Sweet Katherine, so happy you said yes! I’m thrilled to be marrying you. Proud to live boldly in faith with you. Here we go!," Pratt wrote, captioning a picture of the couple kissing.

A router that's also a speaker. A mirror that’s also a lamp. A picture frame that charges your smartphone. Welcome to the hybrid gadget revolution! It’s a little bit Swiss Army knife, a little bit Island of Doctor Moreau. Convergences have long been a staple of progress, from multitools to kitchen implements to every other As Seen on TV striver. Surely some medieval archer fashioned a backscratcher out of a bow. But over the past year or two, the combinations have come more quickly and ...

THESE are the remarkable photographs of the Victorian street sellers in Greenwich, London - who peddled everything from shrimp to the old clothes of smallpox victims. Taken between 1884 and 1887, the photographs reveal the working adults and children who took to the streets of London to sell their goods to middle class Victorians.