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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

Investors race to win early-stage startup deals...

India may be grappling with the second wave of the coronavirus, rising unemployment, and a dwindling economy, but the South Asian nation’s burgeoning startup ecosystem has never had it better. High-profile investors in India have long aggressively chased growth-stage, and late-stage deals, pouring record amounts of capital into the country. But in a sign of the growing investor bullishness regarding Indian startups, even early-stage companies that have largely been bereft of much similar attention in recent years are now……

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Tuesday Capital, formerly Crunchfund, casts a wide...

Tuesday Capital, a 10-year-old seed-stage fund that was founded by longtime VC Patrick Gallagher and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, has changed considerably over the years. Arrington now leads a crypto hedge fund. Tuesday was formerly known as Crunchfund. Gallagher now runs the outfit with partner Prashant Fonseka, who joined the fund in 2015 as an associate. Tuesday has also formed a deep relationship over the years with the industrial design shop Frog Design, which is a limited partner in……

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Daily Crunch: Spotify’s new ‘Only You’ feature...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 2, 2021. It’s a good day in the tech world because former unicorn Spotify is out with new features about you. Yes, the company is taking its yearly listening review to a midyear format and packing its app with even more personalized mixes. My playlists are why I……

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'Dwellings' at the Breuer Building in New...

The Breuer Building has been home to three different museums since its construction in 1966: first the Whitney, which still owns the property, then it was a branch of the Met for four years, and now it’s the temporary home of the Frick Collection while that organization’s own building undergoes renovations. But even as exhibits have rotated in and out, ranging from European masters to American sculpture to ephemeral performance art, one piece of sculpture has remained with the……

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Susuz Caravanserai in Bucak, Turkey

Susuz Yolu is an unassuming rural village along the Antalya-Burdur highway. Surrounded by farmland and pleasant hills, this village is a collection of private farmhouses clustered around its center, whose area is about 500 by 500 meters. Just before reaching the town center, a discolored sign points to Susuz Kervansarayı. A short drive through the village leads to the caravanserai, a type of roadside inn for caravaners to rest and recover from their journeys. The first thing that stands……

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The Fiddly Business of Tracking Australia's Most...

After about four or five minutes of breathing carbon dioxide gas, Caitlin Creak’s eight-legged subject is fully unconscious. Working quickly—she has less than a minute before the spider, named Harold, starts to wake up—Creak pins the creature’s legs under a foam doughnut, leaving the shiny black body exposed. Using an especially strong super glue, she attaches a tracking device, barely larger than a grain of rice, to his back. The next day, she’ll release Harold near where she found……

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The Viking Unst Project and Skidbladner in...

Norse (or Viking) heritage in Shetland is a source of cultural pride and uniqueness. While the entirety of the British Isles and a large part of Northern Europe saw repeated Norse invasions and settlements, the Scottish archipelagos of Shetland and Orkney had a particularly long period of Norse habitation, starting in the 8th-century and being part of the Kingdom of Norway until the 15th-century. The abundance of longhouse remains in Shetland (around 60 explored so far, most of them……

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Q&A: Meditation for Chinese language learners

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, student well-being has become a pressing issue for many instructors. In this interview, Panpan Gao and Kang Zhou, lecturers in Chinese at MIT Global Languages, discuss their project to produce original meditation videos tailored for Chinese language learners. Working with a team of collaborators, they launched their website Meditation for Chinese Learners. The team has just received funding from MIT’s MindHandHeart Community Innovation Fund to further expand the project for the coming……

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How data science gives new insight into...

“To do really important research in environmental policy,” said Francesca Dominici, “the first thing we need is data.” Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, recently presented the Henry W. Kendall Memorial Lecture at MIT. She described how, by leveraging massive amounts of data, Dominici and a consortium of her colleagues across the nation are revealing, on a grand scale, the effects air pollution……

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Przhevalskiy Museum in Przhevalsk, Kyrgyzstan

Nikolay Przhevalskiy was a 19th-century Russian explorer who traveled to China, Tibet, and Central Asia collecting an enormous amount of botanical samples and zoological information. He even discovered a horse species that still bears his name and mapped the Tibetan mountains Przhevalskiy died of typhus during an exploration of the Issyk Kul lake near Karakol. This museum was created in his honor and first opened in 1957. The museum showcases dozens of photos, designs, documents, objects, awards, and some……

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Mount Air Historic Site in Lorton, Virginia

This land was originally a plantation inhabited by Dennis McCarty, who was the sheriff, Justice of the Peace, and a representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses. His wife Sarah Ball was George Washington’s cousin. The massive parcel was claimed from Lord Fairfax by McCarty, whose first house on the property was built in the 1730s. Following Mccarty’s death in 1742, the plantation was willed to his wife and deeded to his eldest son, Daniel. The land would remain……

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What $10M in daily thefts tells us...

Andrew Shikiar Contributor Andrew Shikiar is the executive director and CMO of FIDO Alliance. If you’re among the growing number of people interested in cryptocurrencies, you may be interested to know that nearly 7,000 people lost more than $80 million between October 2020 and March 2021 — a 1,000% increase from a year ago, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The scams include fake currency exchanges and phony “investment” websites selling the currency. More recently, more than $10 million……

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Conowingo Dam in Darlington, Maryland

On the lower Susquehanna River, only 10 miles upstream from the Chesapeake Bay, stands the Conowingo Hydroelectric Generating Station. The Exelon Power Company owns the masonry gravity dam, which has been operating since 1928. At the time of its opening, the dam was second in size only to the hydroelectric dam at New York’s Niagara Falls.  At 94-feet tall and 4,648-feet wide, the Conowingo Dam is four times wider than the Hoover Dam. It spans the Susquehanna connecting Cecil……

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What the Heck Is a Pneumonia Front?

It’s a late spring afternoon along the southwestern coast of Lake Michigan, and people from Chicago to Milwaukee are out enjoying the sun after another long Upper Midwest winter. The temperature creeps up to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and continues to climb, unseasonably. The promise of an early summer lures out gardeners, cyclists, and beachcombers. Then, it happens. A wall of cold lake air slams into the coast and moves rapidly inland. People scramble for shelter, or at least a……

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Stanley Institute in Cambridge, Maryland

Once known as Rock Elementary or Rock School, the Stanley Institute as it is now remembered is a historic one-room schoolhouse located in Cambridge, Maryland. It was initially erected near Church Creek in 1865 but was relocated to its current location two years later in 1867. It presently sits at the intersection of Church Creek Road (MD Rte. 16) and Bayly Road. The school also served as a church until Christ Rock Methodist Episcopal Church was constructed across the……

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