The Russian Mission Control Center on Sunday adjusted the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) by 600 meters in the run-up to manned Soyuz missions, a mission control official told TASS. “The maneuver was conducted with the help of Progress MS-08 thrusters that remained switched on for 172 seconds,” the source said. As a […]
Although LISA isn’t expected to launch until 2034, scientists are excited about the observatory’s potential discoveries, including the aforementioned binary systems. It won’t be another 15 years or so before the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) observatory is launched into outer space, but astronomers are already excited about the potential discoveries its launch could yield. […]
One of the most interesting tidbits of news to come out of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this week was the company’s upcoming Your Phone app, which attempts to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop messaging by letting you send and receive texts (along with some more advanced screen sharing and file transferring features) […]
In Google’s demonstration of its new AI assistant Duplex this week, the voice assistant calls a hair salon to book an appointment, carrying on a human-seeming conversation, with the receptionist at the other end seemingly unaware that she is speaking to an AI. Robots don’t literally have ears, and in order to “hear” and analyze […]
Two companies run by individual billionaires are taking the space tourism mission by storm. People are almost close enough to spend their vacation for the first time beyond our Earth in the latter part of this year. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are hitting significant achievements in this regard. In the […]
NASA will include a small, autonomous helicopter in the agency’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission, officials announced today (May 11). The craft will undergo a 30-day test campaign once it reaches the Red Planet to demonstrate the viability of travel above the Martian surface with a heavier-than-air craft. “NASA has a proud history of firsts,” […]
Samsung never reports how many smartphones it sells into channels or to end users each quarter, so we’ll never know exactly how many Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ handsets the South Korean company has sold. That said, every indication suggests that sales of Samsung’s latest flagship phones have been anything but impressive. A number of […]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stood on stage at the company’s yearly developer conference on Tuesday and rolled out some of its most advanced technology: an assistant that can schedule appointments for you over the phone, customized suggestions in Google Maps, and even a new feature that can help finish your sentences as you type an […]
Following widespread outcry over the ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s new Duplex system, which lets AI mimic a human voice to make appointments, Google now says the experimental system will have “disclosure built-in.” That seems to mean that whatever eventual shape Duplex takes as a consumer product will involve some type of verbal announcement to […]
Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts-based company that builds increasingly sophisticated robots that enjoy opening doors, has released two more videos of its robots doing very clever things that will definitely not come back to haunt humanity at a later date. In the first video, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas is out jogging, all the better to […]
It came as a total surprise: the most impressive demonstration at Google’s I/O conference yesterday was a phone call to book a haircut. Of course, this was a phone call with a difference. It wasn’t made by a human, but by the Google Assistant, which did an uncannily good job of asking the right questions, […]
For decades, astrophysicists have pondered the odd movements of galaxies across the cosmos. The visible matter of the universe appears to be tugged around by an invisible counterpart, material that does not interact with surrounding matter in any observable way save gravity: dark matter. Refined measurements have since led scientists to hypothesize that 85 percent […]
