NASA has announced two missions to the planet next door, CBC Radio reports. The first mission, VERITAS, is an orbiter that will help scientists such as Suzanne Smrekar, VERITAS's principal investigator and geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, get radar images that can penetrate Venus's clouds and look for chemical signatures. The second mission DAVINCI+ is a chemistry lab probe that will ingest gases on its way to the surface to help unravel the mystery of the key constituents of...
Researchers have observed that workers in a species of honeybee found in South Africa reproduce by making near-perfect clones of themselves, phys.org reports. A team from the University of Sydney, the ARC-Plant Protection Research Institute, and York University found that South African Cape honeybee queens reproduce sexually, but the workers reproduce asexually. They affixed tape to the reproductive organs of a queen, preventing males from mating with her, then allowed both her and the worker bees in the...
Astronomers have spotted a giant 'blinking' star toward the centre of the Milky Way, more than 25,000 light years away, phys.org reports. An international team observed star VVV-WIT-08 decreasing in brightness by a factor of 30, nearly disappearing from view. While many stars change in brightness because they pulsate or are eclipsed by another star in a binary system, it is very rare for a star to become fainter over a period of several...
England’s children’s commissioner says content-sharing platform OnlyFans needs to do more to stop underage use. BBC News found that under-18s have used fake identification to set up accounts on the site and police say a 14-year-old used her grandmother's passport. Dame Rachel de Souza has written to the social media site expressing her "shock" and "deepest concern" at the findings. OnlyFans said it plans to meet her and correct any misinformation. OnlyFans allows people to share videos, photos, and...
In what appears to be the largest data breach ever, attackers have leaked 3.2 billion passwords from multiple databases in a cyberattack dubbed RockYou2021. Users should immediately check to see if their passwords were affected by this leak, Tech Xplore says. Users can check for password compromise using the website Have I Been Pwned or the CyberNews personal data leak checker. Changing passwords might be an even better idea. Threat actors can take advantage of the RockYou2021 password...
China has denounced a US Senate bill worth about $250 billion as an example of the U.S. hyping up “the so-called China threat”, and accused Washington of attempting to hinder its development, The Guardian reports. In a rare show of unity, the Senate approved by a 68-32 margin the Innovation and Competition Act. In a statement on Wednesday, the foreign affairs committee of China’s ceremonial legislature, the National People’s Congress, expressed its “strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition.” It said: “This...
An internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug, the BBC reports. Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers changed its settings. The outage has raised questions about the potential perils of relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet. The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit popular websites...
Elon Musk's Boring Company opened its underground Loop beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center yesterday, CNET reports. The concept is simple: avoid gridlock by taking traffic underground. Simplify the transport experience by putting high-tech vehicles (read Teslas) on a one-way loop and delivering on-demand rides. The experience is also simple. Get in the car, drive through a tunnel, get out the other side. The 2.7-kilometre Vegas Loop consists of three passenger stations (two above ground, one below), connected...
A new study reveals that at the same time humans are unwilling to co-operate and compromise with machines, and that they will exploit them. Using methods from behavioral game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as co-operatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans. The study, published in the journal iScience, found that, upon first encounter, people...
A major outage today has affected a number of high-profile websites including Amazon, Reddit, and Twitch, reports the BBC. The U.K. government website - gov.uk - was also down, as were the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Cloud computing provider Fastly said it was behind the problems. In a statement, it said: "We identified a service configuration that triggered disruption across our POPs (points of presence) globally and have disabled that configuration." The issues...
