Policymakers debate if we even need deep ocean mining and if we can do it safely. More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock…
This week’s result is just the latest in a growing collection of discoveries. On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in…
“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.” Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary…
ULA’s Vulcan launch vehicle is grounded after a solid rocket booster anomaly last month. For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military’s GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the…
“Reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points” is one of Microsoft’s action items. If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring?…
Admins: Sorry to say, but it’s likely a rotate-your-secrets kind of weekend. Hackers have compromised virtually all versions of Aqua Security’s widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in an ongoing supply chain attack that could have wide-ranging consequences for developers and the organizations that use them. Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury…
There may be a river delta hidden under the obvious delta in a Martian crater. When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the…
“We put fuel in a rocket, blow it up in a remote location, and measure how big the boom is.” For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity,…
Amazon’s second smartphone could forego an app store. Amazon is developing a new smartphone over a decade after discontinuing the Fire Phone, Reuters reported today, citing four anonymous “people familiar with the matter.” Reuters said the phone is codenamed Transformer but couldn’t confirm what it might cost, how much…
Both AMD- and Intel-based hardware is getting better support in SteamOS 3.8. Valve’s Steam Machine desktop is currently in a state of involuntary limbo, driven by historically awful pricing and availability for memory and storage chips. AI data centers are absorbing much of what memory manufacturers can produce, leaving…
