Student-Built Rocket Breaks Multiple 20-Year Spaceflight Records

Aftershock II, a new rocket built by students at the University of Southern California, recently broke a number of 20-year-old amateur spaceflight records for altitude, power and speed. It reached more than 470,000 feet above Earth’s surface and went “hypersonic.”

== more on this incident
China Wiretaps Americans in ‘Worst Hack in Our Nation’s History’

America’s aging infrastructure seems to be the culprit.

Economist Makes the Case For Slow Level 1 EV Charging

He points out that we get 4-7 times more charging capability installed for the same cost by going with Level 1 charging instead of Level 2.

Russian Spies Jumped From One Network To Another Via Wi-Fi

In a first, Russia’s APT28 hacking group appears to have remotely breached the Wi-Fi of an espionage target by hijacking a laptop in another building across the street.

Baidu’s Supercheap Robotaxis Should Scare the Hell Out of the US

Apollo Go’s sixth-generation driverless car is here.

Sometimes mistaken for sea serpents, oarfish are known in Japanese mythology as harbingers of doom

Those who still love putting pen to paper say it can be deeply personal and reflective.

These rare and mysterious deepsea fish are washing up in California, and no one’s sure why

Sometimes mistaken for sea serpents, oarfish are known in Japanese mythology as harbingers of doom.

How the World’s Vital Undersea Data Cables Are Being Targeted

Carrying 99% of the world’s international telecommunications, the vulnerable lines are drawing nefarious interest.

== repeat?, too lazy to confirm
French Startup Aims to Make Fuel Out of Thin Air

Aerleum hopes to fuel ships and airplanes with captured carbon dioxide.

Chemists have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti

About 200 times thinner than a human hair.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Captures 360-Degree View of Mars

The 360 degree view reveals new mysteries from the floor of the Gediz Vallis.

Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

Expensive books and limited access to academic material play a key role among those surveyed.

== expect this is true throughout the world
Resentment is building as more workers feel stuck

65% of the 3,400 professionals surveyed by Glassdoor last month said they feel stuck in their current role.

Delhi Trudges Through Another Air Pollution Nightmare With No Answers

Living in Delhi smog is like watching a dystopian film again and again.

Five Firms in Plastic Pollution Alliance ‘Made 1,000 Times More Plastic Than They Cleaned Up’

Five oil and chemical companies which promised to divert plastic from environment produced 132m tonnes of it, analysis finds.

Atlas of cells transforms understanding of human body

An ambitious plan to map all 37 trillion cells in the human body is transforming understanding of how our bodies work.

Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World

Visual scans of the world from Pokémon Go have helped Niantic build what it calls a Large Geospatial Model.

== paywall?
Who’s to blame for climate change? It’s surprisingly complicated.

The world’s biggest polluters, by the numbers.

Your Junk Is Needed for the New Electric Era

In remote Quebec, mining giant Glencore is turning America’s electronic trash back into treasure.

== yjc
Abscission

Abscission (from Latin ab- ‘away’ and scindere ’to cut’) is the shedding of various parts of an organism.

Whoops, NASA might have killed life on Mars

A new paper suggests that adding water to Mars to see if it would attract organisms might have been the wrong idea.

== wonder about the sanity of this
Perplexity’s AI Search Engine Can Now Buy Products For You

It’s adding a ‘Buy with Pro’ button that offers free shipping.

India Plans To Build a Moon-Orbiting Space Station By 2040

It will support crewed missions to the moon and serve as a hub for scientific research.

China Activates World’s Most Advanced Hypergravity Facility

The facility will feature three hypergravity centrifuges and 18 units, creating extreme conditions to shift heavier materials.

Two Baltic Sea communications cables have been knocked offline

At least one was physically cut following US warnings of an increased risk of Russian sabotage.

McDonald’s Is Trying to Bring Back NFTs

NFTs became a punchline. But some people are taking another look.

ChatGPT-4 Beat Doctors at Diagnosing Illness, Study Finds

A Boston-based internal medicine expert helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses,

== different motive, expect there will be more like it
What Happened When a Washington County Tried a 32-Hour Workweek?

Their employer presented a unique offer: an extra paid day off every week, to use however they chose.

== I am mildly surprised it has taken this long
Google AI Gemini Threatens College Student

A Michigan grad student receives an alarming message from Google’s AI while researching data for a gerontology class.

New Model Calculates Chances of Intelligent Beings In Our Universe and Beyond

Astrophysicists have produced a model which focuses on the conditions created by the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion and the amount of stars formed.

Carbon Emissions Continued Increasing Last Year, Especially in China and India

Global carbon emissions are more than double what they were 50 years ago, and 50% more than they were in 1999.

Demolishing buildings is a waste

Taking apart and separating valuable materials allows them to be recycled, reused.

‘The sixth great extinction is happening’, conservation expert warns

Dr Goodall says taking action to slow down the warming of our planet is more urgent than ever.

Melting glaciers leave homes teetering in valley of jagged mountains

This is just part of an area referred to by some as the Third Pole; a place which has more ice than any other part of the world outside the polar regions.

Does Google Plan to Create Email Aliases for Apps to Fight Spam?

You could soon be keeping your contact details private with Shielded Email.

Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Partnership Announced between America and Ukraine

The partnership will build a roadmap and provide technical support to rebuild, modernize, and decarbonize Ukraine’s steel industry with SMRs.

ISS Astronauts are Safe. But NASA and Russia Disagree on How to Fix Leak

NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.

== a little something from Barbara and me
A Splendour of Fungi

A few photos of the various and numerous fungi we have had in the yard this fall.