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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.

 
NYT Strands: answers for Saturday, April 27
Strands is a brand new daily puzzle from the New York Times. A trickier take on the classic word search, you’ll need a keen eye to solve this puzzle. Like Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword, Strands can be a bit difficult to solve some days. There’s no shame in needing a little help from time to time. If you’re stuck and need to know the answers to today’s Strands puzzle, check out the solved puzzle below. How to...

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Wholesale laptop deals: How to buy cheap...
If you need to furnished an entire office or classroom with laptops, monitors, or workstations, regular laptop deals from the major retailers just aren’t going to cut it. You need extensive discounts on hardworking machines. Thankfully all of the major laptop brands have outlet sites focused specifically on major price cuts and refurbished products. Here are the best online options for wholesale laptop deals. Wholesale laptops deals from Lenovo Outlet Mark Coppock / Digital Trends Lenovo Outlet is a...

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Best Apple deals: Save on AirPods, Apple...
Apple has been a big player in the tech space for a long time, and it has pioneered some of the technology we use today, such as best wireless earbuds and the best smartwatches. If that wasn’t enough, it even makes some of the best best laptops and best tablets on the market, so pretty much whatever tech you’re looking for, Apple has an excellent version of it. Not only that, but Apple’s ecosystem is also easily one of...

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The best 17-inch laptop deals from HP,...
Long ago, 17-inch laptops were quite rare, and the only times you’d find them was on the best gaming laptops, and that usually meant you were buying a very expensive Alienware laptop. Luckily, a lot has changed since then, and there are a plethora of pretty solid 17-inch laptops for you to pick from, whether you want something budget-friendly or one of the best laptops on the market. Not only that, but pretty much all the best laptop brands...

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Here’s the defense tech at the center...
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95.3 billion aid package into law on Wednesday. The bill will send a significant quantity of supplies to Ukraine and Israel, while also supporting Taiwan with submarine technology to...

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The Download: how to tell when a...
Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust. The news: Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at MIT, is designed to give...

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Is India an Autocracy?
Last October, Indian authorities revived legal proceedings against the novelist and activist Arundhati Roy. In a case first registered against her in 2010, Roy stood accused of “provocative speech” that aroused “enmity between different groups” for having said that Kashmir was not an “integral” part of India. The charge carries a maximum sentence of seven years and kept her from traveling to Germany to deliver the opening address at the 2023 Munich Literature Festival. The assault on expression, and...

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Chatbot answers are all made up. This...
Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at MIT, is designed to give high-stakes users a clearer sense of how trustworthy these models really are. Called the Trustworthy Language Model, it gives...

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The Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and clean energy’s...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. For the past several years, AI video startup Synthesia has produced these kinds of AI-generated avatars. But...

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Want less mining? Switch to clean energy.
Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies.  But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute released today. The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change...

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Hydrogen could be used for nearly everything....
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal.  In the climate world, hydrogen is perhaps the ultimate multi-tool. It can be used in fuel cells or combustion engines and is sometimes called the Swiss Army knife for...

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Chile’s Amazing National Parks
Across the length of Chile, stretching 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometers) from north to south, more than 40 national parks have been established in the past century, protecting many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders. Collected below are images of several of these parks, from Lauca National Park, in the altiplano of Chile’s far north, to the dramatic mountains of Torres del Paine National Park, in the southern Patagonia region.

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Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a...
Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.  The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto. These apps...

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'ArcaneDoor' Cyberspies Hacked Cisco Firewalls to Access...
Network security appliances like firewalls are meant to keep hackers out. Instead, digital intruders are increasingly targeting them as the weak link that lets them pillage the very systems those devices are meant to protect. In the case of one hacking campaign over recent months, Cisco is now revealing that its firewalls served as beachheads for sophisticated hackers penetrating multiple government networks around the world. On Wednesday, Cisco warned that its so-called Adaptive Security Appliances—devices that integrate a firewall...

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