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Astra thinks it knows what went wrong during last month’s failed flight, which was the company’s first-ever mission with operational payloads onboard. Astra’s two-stage Launch Vehicle 0008 (LV0008) lifted off on Feb. 10 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying four tiny cubesats on a mission organized by NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites initiative, … Read more
Frustrated with the Australian government’s inaction on climate change, software king Mike Cannon-Brookes is trying to buy several big coal plants so he can shut them down in favour of renewables Environment | Analysis 22 February 2022 By Alice Klein Open-cast coal mining in Hunter Valley, Australia PETER HARRISON/Getty Images Mike Cannon-Brookes, the third-richest person … Read more
AI company DeepMind has built a tool that can create working code to solve complex software challenges Technology 2 February 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Artist’s impression of data Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images DeepMind, a UK-based AI company, has taught some of its machines to write computer software – and it performs almost as well as an … Read more
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) just upgraded the software it uses to assess potentially hazardous asteroids to account for sunlight’s affect on orbits, among other changes. While there are no immediate known space rock hazards to Earth despite decades of careful searching, astronomers continue to scan the skies, just in case. The new impact monitoring … Read more
A fresh approach to generating images based on text descriptions with AI, called a diffusion model, effectively un-destroys new images into existence Technology 18 January 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Images created from text descriptions by GLIDE, a new AI OpenAI Early last year, artificial intelligence company OpenAI unveiled software with the surprising ability to create … Read more
The software that allows smartphones to locate themselves is generally accurate only to within a few metres, but UK start-up Naurt claims its software can locate a device to within 20 centimetres Technology 4 January 2022 By David Hambling Satellite navigation software allows smartphones to determine their location Radoslav Zilinsky/Getty Images It is possible to … Read more
Rather than engineering robotic solutions from scratch, some of our most impressive advances have come from copying what nature has already come up with. New research shows how we can extend that approach to robot ‘minds’, in this case by getting a robot to learn the best route out of a maze all by itself – even … Read more
Researchers have just identified a security flaw in a software program called Log4J, widely used by a host of private, commercial and government entities to record details ranging from usernames and passwords to credit card transactions. Since the glitch was found last weekend, the cybersecurity community has been scrambling to protect applications, services, infrastructure and … Read more
A flaw in a commonly used piece of software has left millions of web servers vulnerable to exploitation by hackers Technology 13 December 2021 By Matthew Sparkes Hackers could use the Log4j bug to access secure data Shutterstock / Tammy54 A major security flaw has been discovered in a piece of software called Log4j, which … Read more
Humans and AI working together can reveal new areas of mathematics where data sets are too large to be comprehended by mathematicians Technology 1 December 2021 By Matthew Sparkes A simple knot DeepMind AI software has collaborated with mathematicians to successfully develop a theorem about the structure of knots, but the suggestions given by the … Read more