SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes that there may be a path for the company to ultimately build the massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster (formerly BFR) for less than Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy, a rocket 3-9 times smaller than BFR. While it certainly ranks high on the list of wild and wacky things the CEO has said over the years, there may be a few ways – albeit with healthy qualifications...

You know when there’s a show you really like, but then it dips in quality and eventually gets canceled, and the creators say they want to make a new season someday or maybe a remake, but it’s stuck in production hell for several years, then Netflix or whoever sinks a bunch of money into it, and it eventually gets released and it’s not quite as good as you remember the original, but it’s still pretty entertaining and hey, you’re paying for Netflix anyway so you’re not going to complai...

Dance me to the end of life.

You are in the most intense Crypto Winter ever felt. By the end of today, we will have survived more straight days (411) of falling Bitcoin $BTC▼0.15% value than at any other point in its 10-year history. The previous record for downward price movement in cryptocurrency was the stretch between November’s end 2013 and mid-January 2015, when Bitcoin‘s price fell from $1,100 to just $200.

In a scientific first, Columbia neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, su...

Would you like to rid the internet of false political news stories and misinformation? Then consider using — yes — crowdsourcing. That’s right. A new study co-authored by an MIT professor shows that crowdsourced judgments about the quality of news sources may effectively marginalize false news stories and other kinds of online misinformation.

ONE OF THE most shocking parts of the recently discovered spying network Equation Group is its mysterious module designed to reprogram or reflash a computer hard drive's firmware with malicious code. The Kaspersky researchers who uncovered this said its ability to subvert hard drive firmware—the guts of any computer—"surpasses anything else" they had ever seen.

I wish Facebook all the best for its 15th birthday! Once you've reached that age, your behavior begins to have serious consequences. Teenagers of this age must be held responsible for their own actions. I welcome the fact that in his ZEIT ONLINE op-ed, Mark Zuckerberg makes it clear that he is cognizant of Facebook's societal responsibility. But on decisive points, he has revealed a lack of awareness of the most pressing problems.

A mass feral horse death at the base of a dry waterhole in Central Australia has been blamed on an extreme heatwave in the region. Around two dozen brumbies in various stages of decomposition have been discovered strewn along a 100-metre stretch of a swimming spot called Deep Hole, 20 kilometres from the remote community of Santa Teresa. The region has hit a record 12-day run of temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius, and it is poised to hit 13 days in Alice Springs on Wednesday.

PSA: This is a security and privacy nightmare that will get your Facebook account banned.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired. They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase...

The Sikh community is known for its kind gesture and benevolence. In a recent incident that will restore our faith in humanity, the community has offered free meals to fellow American government employees after they were caught amid the shutdown that has left thousands without pay. The Gurdwara menu which includes lentils, vegetables, rice and tortillas helped the employees in San Antonio, Texas.

weekendhobo is now level 31 with 2,446,010 XP.

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" is such an anodyne way of describing weaponizing information to poison attitudes and democracies. That's the euphemism that Facebook is employing to talk about its latest purge of accounts and pages that may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. More than 500 pages and accounts have recently been removed, according to a report by Facebook's cybersecurity policy chief.

The next time you hop on a ferry, take a look at the captain’s bridge. There may not be a human at the helm much longer. Ships around the world are beginning a transformation into autonomous machines, leveraging the same advances in artificial intelligence that are shaking up the automotive world. In 2017, Ugo Vollmer and his friend Clement Renault were working on self-driving cars in Silicon Valley when an article on autonomous shipping caused them to make a sudden change in direction.

Crises are a time-tested means of subverting democracy. From Getúlio Vargas and other better-known dictators in the 1930s to Indira Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and on to Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan more recently, autocratic-minded leaders have long used national emergencies — some real, some fabricated — to claim extraordinary powers. One of our greatest concerns about Donald Trump’s presidency has always been that he would exploit (or invent) a crisis in order to...

The universe is far from homogenous. Rather, stars, and the galaxies that contain them, clump together in some places, brought together by their shared gravitational attraction. Astronomers have historically found clusters of galaxies in the sky to be relatively easy to spot, as they’re extremely large and bright. But one new study suggests that a third of all galaxy clusters have been hiding undiscovered out in the cosmos.

The U.S. government may be in partial shutdown mode, but operations to configure instruments critical to NASA’s InSight mission on Mars are right on schedule—and things are going swimmingly, as the latest mission update attests. Our last update from the InSight mission came on December 20 following the probe’s successful deployment of the SEIS instrument, or Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, onto the Martian surface. The configuration of this hexagonal-shaped device is still ongoi...