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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.

 
The way whales communicate is closer to...
Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. They’re highly social, capable of making decisions as a group, and they exhibit complex foraging behavior.   But there’s also a lot we don’t know about them, including what they may be trying to say to one another when they communicate using a system of short bursts of clicks, known...

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The Alleged LockBit Ransomware Mastermind Has Been...
Law enforcement in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia today jointly named Russian national Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the alleged operator of the LockBitSupp handle and the organizational mastermind behind the notorious LockBit ransomware group, which has been on a multiyear hacking rampage exporting an estimated $500 million from its victims. For years, the leader of LockBit has remained an enigma. Carefully hiding behind their online moniker, LockBitSupp has evaded identification and bragged that people wouldn’t be able...

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Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are...
Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn’t even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself—he’s her only child. But mostly, she just listens. That’s because Sun’s mother died five years ago. And the person he’s talking to isn’t actually a person, but a digital...

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The Download: synthetic cow embryos, and AI...
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. Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try to make an embryo. These structures, sometimes called “embryo models” or embryoids, have gradually become increasingly realistic. The University of Florida is trying to...

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Ukraine Has Changed Too Much to Compromise...
Here in Ukraine, we often react very emotionally when we hear people in the West calling for peace with Russia. According to some commentators, this would be achieved by means of a “compromise,” entailing Ukrainian “concessions” that would somehow satisfy the Kremlin and stop the war: major territorial giveaways, armed forces reduced to insignificance, no further integration with the West—you name it. Most of us see such views as extremely naive, given the totalitarian and militaristic nature of Vladimir...

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A Traditional Easter Rocket War in Greece
In the Greek village of Vrontados, each year during Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations, members of two rival churches hold a traditional “rocket war” by firing thousands of homemade fireworks toward each other while services are held. The goal for each side is to hit the bell in the tower of the opposing church. The festival, called Rouketopolemos, has been celebrated by the churches of Agios Markos and Panagia Erithiani for at least 135 years. Gathered here are images of...

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Apple’s iPhone Spyware Problem Is Getting Worse....
In April, Apple sent notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, warning them they’d been targeted with spyware. “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” the notification reads. Users quickly took to social media sites including X, trying to work out what the notification meant. Many of those targeted were based in India, but others in Europe also reported receiving Apple’s...

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The New Propaganda War
On June 4, 1989, the Polish Communist Party held partially free elections, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately removed the Communists from power. Not long afterward, street protests calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy brought about the end of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would no longer exist. Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the military to...

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For Xi Jinping, Religion Is Power
Shangri-la is best-known as a fictional place—an idyllic valley first imagined by a British novelist in the 1930s—but look at a map and you’ll find it. Sitting at the foot of the Himalayas in southwestern China, Shangri-la went by a more prosaic name until 2001, when the city was rebranded by Chinese officials eager to boost tourism. Their ploy worked. The star of Shangri-la is the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery. Since its destruction in 1966, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this...

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A New Surveillance Tool Invades Border Towns
This week, WIRED reported that a group of prolific scammers known as the Yahoo Boys are openly operating on major platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Telegram. Evading content moderation systems, the group organizes and engages in criminal activities that range from scams to sextortion schemes. On Wednesday, researchers published a paper detailing a new AI-based methodology to detect the “shape” of suspected money laundering activity on a blockchain. The researchers—composed of scientists from the cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic,...

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Everything Leaving Netflix in March
Netflix is a creature in constant flux, always adding content to hook in prospective subscribers. But to make room for the fresh stuff, some of the stuff you’ve always wanted to watch—and have had in your to-watch list for months or years—has to go to a farm upstate, never to be seen again. That’s because Netflix doesn’t own all the content it streams. The contracts it has with networks, production companies, and movie studios mean much of that content...

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Top Health News
A New and Better Way to Create Word Lists Mar. 13, 2023 — Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly better … Changing Landscapes Alter Disease-Scapes Mar. 13, 2023 — A new study has?highlighted?how and when?changes to the environment result in?animal-borne disease?thresholds?being breeched, allowing for?a?better understanding and?increased?capacity … Organosulfur Content of Vegetables Quantified Mar....

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